We Did It Together

Abstract

Set in mid-twentieth century Jonesborough, Tennessee, We Did It Together is a two-act play based on true-life stories of people who helped shape this small Appalachian town during a tumultuous era of change. These inter-related vignettes present ordinary people caught in extraordinary times and explores how their actions made a lasting impact on the community. Dozens of turning point moments make up this play, which revolves around a few central characters. Marion McKinney is a young African American girl who faces discrimination and decides to change the rules, eventually leading Jonesborough’s school integration movement in 1964. Her husband, Ernest McKinney, is the son of a sharecropper. Ernest’s father moves his family to Jonesborough to escape the cotton fields of South Carolina to find more rewarding work and the promise of a better future. Ernest excels in school, then in college where he earns several degrees. Ernest is elected to office as Jonesborough’s first African American alderman on the same day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated. Ernest and Marion work to hold their community together in peace. While the stories of Marion and Ernest make up the spine of the play, dozens of other thematically related vignettes explore the range of diversity that exists in this town in Northeast, Tennessee, and discovers again and again how ordinary people, creating relationships through their stories, find the courage to overcome obstacles and work together to change the small part of the world they live in for the better, even when Jim Crow laws and unwritten rules demand otherwise