Author Kendra James on How Systemic Racism Literally Played Out Onstage at Her Elite Boarding School
It’s not like there are that many Black people in To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, in the original stage adaptation of the book, there are only two Black characters with major speaking roles: Calpurnia, the cook and de facto nanny of the story’s young protagonist Scout; and Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused of raping a white woman and being defended by Atticus Finch. But much like a Republican presidential candidate or any large city’s police union, To Kill A Mockingbird kind of falls apart without a Black man to scapegoat. Which was why I knew we were going to have a problem.
It was the spring of 2006. I was in my sophomore year at Taft, an elite Connecticut boarding school, where students of color—as in everyone, Black, Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indigenous—made up 20-25 percent of the 450-ish person student body. But The Director—our white theater director—was determined to put this specific play on.
We cast our Scout, our Atticus Finch, and the neighborhood recluse Boo Radley. We even found our Calpurnia: a sophomore who quit the Varsity softball team for the spring semester a few days after I did (a small exodus of all the Black women who’d played the spring before). Auditions wrapped, rehearsals began, and the co-assistant director and I, Calister—one of six total Black girls in my year, and a close friend—kept coming back to the same question: How were we going to pull off To Kill A Mockingbird production without a Black actor to play Tom?
The Director’s response? “We’ll block around him until we figure it out.”
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but there was an obvious irony to a white drama teacher at a majority white institution that epitomizes elitism insisting on performing a play about racism in America, in the name of wowing at spring parents’ weekend. The Director’s “vision” superseded the reality of Blackness right in front of him.
This was, literally, an institutional problem. Insisting there is diversity where there is (definitely) not is a standard move in the prep school hand book that often results in blatant tokenism. But when I was a teen, we didn’t have widespread social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter. Or mass campaigns like the eye-opening “Black at” Instagram accounts that began sharing stories of institutional racism at schools like Taft. In 2006, all the ways we felt marginalized—or simply left out—wasn’t something we typically discussed with our white peers: It was just how it was. It felt like we were present among the ranks because we made the school look good as numbers, not individuals. Students these days are far more vocal about these kinds of things—an unfortunate but necessary skill they’ve had to cultivate.
So we blocked around Tom, which proved annoying enough that I eventually overheard The Director musing to our tech supervisor that he might have to bring in a kid from Hartford to play the role. It wasn’t until the top of our third week of rehearsals that he finally came back to us. “We are going to need a Tom,” he told the assembled crew. “And it would also be nice if we could fill the audience in the final courtroom scene with community members who have come out to support him.”
Translation: The Director wanted at least 20 people to be the “Negro section” of the viewing gallery—as in, close to half of Taft’s total Black student population. Turning to me and Calister, he clapped his hands. “So, you need to go up to track practice and get some of your friends to come down here and do this.” As though every Black student was friends with every other Black student; as though we all ran track and would immediately agree to do something another Black student asked us to do. A beat later, he picked up his leather messenger bag and went home, as if he hadn’t asked us anything out of the ordinary.
“Negro gallery,” one of my friends snickered at lunch the next day when I broached the topic of To Kill a Mockingbird yet again. “You mean this?” He waved his hand through the air, gesturing broadly to “our” section of the dining hall: two tables toward the front of the room, filled with Black faces from every grade.
He wasn’t wrong. The majority of us ate at least one meal a day at what was dubbed “the Black table,” though you’d also find most of the Latinx kids there. Occasionally an international student would sit with us, too. The division in Mockingbird were on display all around us. Our white peers wrote op-eds in the school paper with headlines like “Does Taft Take Advantage of it’s Diversity?” These hot takes accused students of color for perpetuating segregation, pointing to where we sat at meals; they were filled with anecdotes about how school assembly speeches on the history of Black students made white students uncomfortable. (Every Black prep school student has at least one incident stuck in their craw for decades—that is is mine.)
My friend shook his head and gave a louder laugh this time. “Nah. Y’all gotta switch shows.” We’d already tried that. At the beginning of our second week I’d suggested abandoning the play for 12 Angry Men, figuring at least we wouldn’t have to rebuild the courtroom set. The Director wouldn’t budge, and kept emphasizing that he was sure we would be able to find him a Tom. The insistence on pushing through To Kill A Mockingbird began to feel as though he was trying to prove something. Or that he’d been told there was something to prove following the Quite White production of Grease at Taft the previous semester.
So now he was looking for diversity that simply didn’t exist at our school—and putting the responsibility on Calister and I to figure it out. Frankly, during my time at Taft, it was always on the students of color to do more to integrate and ingratiate ourselves, never the other way around. I remember being told that we needed to do more to befriend our white peers, to make them feel more accepted and welcome in our limited campus spaces.
Whether The Director understood any of this context, his request added to the racial burdens I’d already absorbed and internalized; he was hardly the first adult who either explicitly placed his racial expectations on our shoulders, or reinforced them as a passive bystander. Still, his lack of acknowledgement about why this particular role wouldn’t appeal to a young Black man in the first place was glaring.
“I don’t want to play a guy accused of raping someone!” I remember a friend saying. And who could blame him? (You could also wonder: Why would a white teacher insist that his Black pupils take that burden on?)
Eventually, The Director did get his Tom, a little more than a week before the show opened. I don’t remember what we promised Darius, or how much we had to beg, but somehow he finagled his days so that he could be in To Kill a Mockingbird while still fulfilling his sports commitments. Filling the “Negro section” was easier after that too, because Darius was extremely popular among his classmates. Although we still had to slip some non-Black kids of color in there to get the job done.
People always want the stories I tell about Taft to end neatly, with retribution for the micro-aggressions or outright racism we all experienced, or at least some acknowledgement from the adults in the room. That never happened, though. If I had dwelled too long on any of the fucked up things I experienced or witnessed relating to race on campus, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate.
You couldn’t let yourself get mired in how white teachers and peers saw you or those feelings would take over everything. Better to keep your head down and push through, to lick your wounds quietly among the people who saw the problem for what it was. By the time we reached opening night the casting drama had been largely forgotten. The show went off without a hitch. I’d like to think there’s more accountability now. But sixteen years ago, the only way to move forward was just to move on.
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