This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 23, 2012 - Anne Frank and Emmett Till both died in their early teens but the legacies of their short lives have inspired millions.
They never met, of course. Till was born in Chicago just two years before Frank went into hiding in Nazi Germany, later dying in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
But in Janet Langhart Cohen’s play “Anne & Emmett,” to be presented by the Black Rep Oct. 25-Nov. 4, the pair visit in a place called Memory and talk about their lives and the hatred that killed them.
Frank’s early death was the result of simply being Jewish under the reign of Adolf Hitler. Since its publication, her diary has been read by almost every schoolchild in America. Till was attacked in a Mississippi Delta world that killed black boys who dared whistle at white women. His mother’s insistence that his face -- mangled by two white men found innocent of any crime -- be shown to the world, galvanized the Civil Rights movement.
Cohen bestows upon both her main characters the gift of seeing that their tragic endings changed the world. Ironically, another tragedy struck at the play’s premiere in 2009 at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., when a white supremacist and Holocaust denier shot and killed a security guard there. The shooter died in prison before his trial.
Cohen, 70, understands discrimination on a personal level. Growing up in Indianapolis as a poor child of African, European and Native American background with Christian and Jewish heritage, Cohen was told she was “pretty for a colored girl.” Eventually, her modeling and television careers and marriage to a powerful politician expanded her world far beyond the housing projects she knew as a child.
As an “Entertainment Tonight” reporter, she interviewed Rosa Parks as well as KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, and was fired after questioning Arnold Schwarzenegger about his father’s Nazi background. Later, as the wife of President Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, she rubbed elbows with more leaders and celebrities of all stripes. The diversity of her experiences is documented in her books, “From Rage to Reason: My Life in Two Americas” and “Love in Black and White,” co-written with her husband.
Cohen talked with the Beacon about “Anne & Emmett” and the impetus behind it.
Beacon: Where did you get the idea to write the play?
Cohen: At one of the embassy luncheons, where there were ambassador’s wives and Cabinet wives, maybe 10 political wives, one friend -- and she is a friend -- heard I was writing a book.
And she said,” What is your book, is it about fashion?” because she knew I had a fashion background. “Well is it about cooking?” she said. And I said, “No, it’s about my life growing up in two Americas. She said, “What two Americas?”
I said, “Well the America of my youth, apartheid America, and the America now, of promise.” And she said, “Apartheid, what are you talking about?” I said, “America’s segregation and Jim Crow.” And she said, “Oh, Janet, you’re married to the Secretary of Defense, you live well, you’ve been successful, why would you want to bring all that up? You don’t want to play the victim -- it would be so unbecoming of you.”
It hurt me because I knew of Anne Frank in my high school before I knew my own history as a black person, before I knew about slavery. We African Americans, when we bring up the tragedy of our history, are told to get over it.
Anne Frank was very real to me. I learned about her at the age of 15, the same age she was when she was writing her diary. I could relate to her on coming of age as a woman, I could relate to her being a minority afraid of the larger society, and how she felt about her mother because at the time, I was always mad at my mother, being a teenager. I even aspired to be like her, to be a writer; she wanted to be a writer.
If my friend had studied my history -- African-American history -- If she knew Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth like she knew her iconic figures, I know she wouldn’t have said that.
So I said to my husband Bill, “I wonder what Anne Frank would have said to Emmett Till? I bet she would have been more sensitive.” And that’s how the play came about.
What was your connection with Emmett Till?
Cohen: He and I were born the same year. He was born in July and I was born in December, the same year.
We were born in the same region, into the same culture, and our families probably migrated about the same time to the Midwest, looking for work and so-called freedom. I could really identify with him.
Who did you have in mind as an audience when you wrote it?
Cohen: My first thought was to have it in the schools. If we start early with historical figures who are the ages of kids in middle school, we can see how these seeds of genocide and oppression are put in us very, very early. It’s similar to the discussions about bullying that we’re all having among our children.
I want my play to be a call to action. I want people to feel something. It won’t be telling them something they don’t already know, but we have not had -- some of us -- a reason to think about it.
Is there a trend in marginalized groups finding common ground?
Cohen: What we’re recognizing is what we already know -- that we’re all just human. And in that complexity of being human, despite the fact that you may come form the North, I may come from the South, you may be straight, I may be gay, you may be light, I may be dark: we all want to live and love and be loved. We want to write our poetry, dance our dances and raise our children to have a better life.
Oppressed people can relate to each other and I think that’s always been the case. But I think you’re seeing more people act on it.
Can you give an example of something the two characters talk about in the play?
Cohen: One of the things you see that may be a departure form the commonality of struggle is when Emmett says to Anne, “You would have it made in the shade in America.”
And she asks, “How so, are you suggesting that I didn’t suffer in Nazi Germany? And he said, ‘No, I’m not saying that; I’m just saying that in America it’s not what religion you are, it’s what color you are. In America, Anne, you get to be white, and if you’re black, get back.”
