Words That Made The Difference Brown vs. Board of Education

Words That Made the Difference was written by six time award winning playwright and director, Dr. Cindy Acker. The script is excerpted from the five cases that were compiled into the landmark case, known as Brown vs. Board of Education. The play was created using the memoirs of chief justice Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall's closing arguments from the first case, and the exact words from chosen court transcripts, building them around the characters whose testimonies were most historically meaningful. This required arduous research of all of the many court narratives leading to Brown v Board, and research of the women of Brown, often omitted from the background of this landmark case. Narrators are used to allow the courtroom words to remain intact, while providing the audience with historic details of courage during a time, like now, when democracy was being challenged. Several cities requested the production of WORDS, including the city of Sausalito, California, which kept its schools desegregated from the Brown ruling of 1954 to a court injunction in 2019.

The film is the May 18th 2024 performance at the Valley Center for Performing Arts in Oakland Ca. The film is the live performance taken from several cameras with as close to the reality of what and how a courtroom audience would see and hear. The play was sponsored by the Barbara Lee and Elihu Harris Lecture Series in cooperation with the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center.