“O, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” a new play by writer Bille Jean Young, has recently been performed at the Eutaw Activity Center in Greene County, Alabama. Young, author of Fear Not the Fall from NewSouth Books, is a poet, author, and playwright who’s performed her one-act play “Fannie Lou Hamner: This Little Light” around the word for twenty-five years.
Young’s new play tells of Margaret Ann Knott, hit by a car during a civil rights rally in Choctaw County in 1971. No one was charged in Knott’s death. Speaking with the Tuscaloosa News, Young said that Knott’s death “was on Saturday morning, September 11–our own 9/11. And it was indeed an act of terrorism. She was conscious when she got to the hospital, but she knew how injured she was and her last words were, ‘Tell them I died for freedom.’ That from a girl who was only 19 years old.”
“O, Mary” has been performed in Choctaw County as well as Green County. Read more about the play from the Tuscaloosa News.
Fear Not the Fall is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.