Getting Down With Good Trouble
The Maundy Monday Newsletter - This Week in History May 4 - 10.
Hello, Friends!
I’m back after two straight weekends full of friends and life events.
Two weekends ago, Anonymous and I attended a friend’s wedding, where I officiated the ceremony, and she served as matron of honor. The Bride was beautiful, and so was Anonymous. The opportunity to let the Groom and everyone know how well the two of us married above our station in life was too good to pass up. It was fun.
This past weekend I was in Cleveland, visiting one of my oldest friends from college. His wife passed away about a month ago after a battle with breast cancer, and a group of us got together and hung out with him. It was a good weekend, overall, just not under the best circumstances – but also a reminder I need to get back to The Land more often. But not during the winter.
In between, right before I left for Cleveland, Anonymous and I went to Mosaic Theater Company here in Washington, D.C., where we’ve had season tickets for the past two years. Mosaic is a fantastic small regional theater in a surprisingly vibrant theater city. Mosaic mostly produces activist and political theater, which means we usually leave having learned and felt something uncomfortable. But it makes the drinks afterwards much more enjoyable when unpacking everything.
The show we saw was a hip-hop musical premiere about the early life of John Lewis — Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest — written by their playwright-in-residence, a man named Psalmayene 24. The show follows Lewis from age 18 through the next decade of his life, through sit-ins and arrests and beatings, through his speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and finishing with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. It’s an ensemble cast of about 15 people, and right from the jump, they grab you by your shirt collar and take you along for the ride. It’s funny, we arrived just before the show began, and the theatre was packed, so the staff let us sit in reserved seats in the front row. This is a highly recommended move for the future, especially for a place that doesn’t provide seat-number tickets.
John Lewis famously described his approach to civil rights as making “good trouble” — the idea that there are moments when the disruptive thing and the right thing are the same thing, and the only question is whether you’re willing to act. He lived that for sixty years. It’s also this week’s theme, because the Freedom Rides began on May 4, 1961, where good trouble made its way down South to change the course of American history.
The Freedom Rides were led by a group of black and white civil rights activists who boarded buses in Washington, D.C. and headed south toward New Orleans. The goal was straightforward: ride together in unsegregated seats through states that had decided that federal law was more of a suggestion.
The Supreme Court had already ruled twice that segregated interstate bus travel was unconstitutional — once in 1946 (Morgan v. Virginia) and again in 1960 (Boynton v. Virginia). The southern states interpreted these directives as something optional, like a toddler told to eat his vegetables, and since we can’t always have a Civil War every 50 years, people like John Lewis and others took on the challenge to make change.
The rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality and involved activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where John Lewis was a central figure. The riders trained in nonviolent resistance, a stance the musical highlights as controversial. These young people knew they would confront violence. They knew they would respond with the exact opposite action.
They went anyway.
And the violence came. Just in Alabama, a bus was firebombed, and mobs worked through the terminals with clubs and chains on multiple occasions. And yet these young people kept going.
Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest is 90 minutes of John Lewis with all gas and no brakes – like there was no intermission. He faced challenges at home when he tried to get into Troy State University, with his peers who wanted to match the violence they faced, and with prominent Civil Rights leaders who wanted him to tone down his speeches. Throughout all of this, John Lewis was beaten and arrested more than 40 times over the course of his civil rights career.
All of it was “good trouble.” Lewis passed away in 2020 at the age of 80.
Okay, let’s get to what else happened this week. As a reminder, these events mark anniversaries ending in 5 or 0.
1. Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, 1961. One day after the Freedom Rides left Washington, Alan Shepard climbed into a capsule called Freedom 7 — perfect name – no notes — and was launched into space for fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. The United States was behind in the race to space - the Soviets had put Yuri Gagarin into full orbit just weeks earlier, so NASA was operating from a position of considerable pressure.
Speaking of considerable pressure, Shepard’s launch was delayed multiple times that morning while he sat in the capsule. During one of those delays, he reportedly told Mission Control he needed to use the bathroom, but there were no facilities on board. Mission Control’s reaction was to tell him to go ahead and do what you have to do. So Shepard did. No more pressure.
2. The New Revolution opened at Six Flags Magic Mountain on May 8, 1976. The New Revolution was recognized by the American Coaster Enthusiasts as the first modern roller coaster to include a vertical loop. Isn’t it great that we have an American Coaster Enthusiasts organization that grants formal recognition upon roller coasters, and that somewhere there is a plaque?
What I love about this moment in history is that someone at Six Flags looked at the existing state of roller coasters, asked what would happen if we went completely upside down, was told by every reasonable person around them that this seemed inadvisable, and did it anyway. I’m quite confident that many people pulled an Alan Shepard on this ride.
3. Dr. John Pemberton sold the first Coca-Cola on May 8, 1886. Dr. John Pemberton was a Confederate veteran and pharmacist from Atlanta who, after being wounded in one of the final engagements of the Civil War, developed a morphine addiction and set about trying to find something better. What he invented was a syrup he marketed as a nerve tonic and headache remedy, which he sold at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta on this day for five cents a glass.
The original formula included extracts from coca leaves — that’s right: COCAINE! — and caffeine from kola nuts. This was not considered unusual. Patented medicines of the 1880s operated on the working assumption that if something made you feel dramatically better immediately, we would sort out the consequences later.
Pemberton sold the rights to his formula for a modest sum and died in 1888, having seen none of what Coca-Cola would become. The cocaine was quietly removed from the formula by 1903. The sugar and the calories remained.
One last thing about Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest.
Psalmayene 24 (I cannot pronounce the name, but I love how his name presents the way he engages the world) spent seven years crafting this show. The book is sharp. The lyrics are sharper — tight, biting, and forceful in the way that good protest writing has to be, meeting the moment. The music was created by Kokayi – a Grammy-nominated artist – and you can see why. There are plenty of times where the Fourth Wall is broken, and the audience is pulled into the world – mostly for humor, but not for cheap laughs – but more so as a reminder you are an active participant in this experience. We were told a few times not to sit down. I did what I was told.
Michael Bahsil-Cook, who plays Young John, is inspiring. The talented actor delivers the fear, the faith, and the cost of choosing to stand up anyway, as Lewis did. It is a remarkable performance. If you get a chance to, go see this performance.
This week, Anonymous and I head to Nashville (coincidentally, where John Lewis began his Civil Rights journey) on Friday to visit her parents, who are driving up from Florida to join us for an Eagles concert. They have been rocking since 1971. And this tour has been going on since 2019. That’s just incredible. It’s the second time seeing the Eagles as a family – I can’t wait!
I hope everyone has a great week. Thank you, as always, for reading Okay History.
Okay, Chris
Both Coke and Pepsi were invented as quasi-medicinal liquids, and evolved into drinks without any sort of medicial benefit. (Just as Coke was named for a once prominent ingredient, Pepsi got its name because it was meant to "cure" dyspepsia.)