DALLAS — This weekend, a voting rights history lesson is coming to the IM Terrell Performing Arts Center in Fort Worth. Supporters insist that the one-woman stage play will uplift the audience, even as they learn about Fannie Lou Hamer.
“Well, I saw her on a show in New York,” actress Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye said. “And Fannie Lou Hamer had already transitioned and she was talking about how she was beaten unmercifully and I said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know. I had never heard of her!’ And you know something? That day I said, ‘I’m going to write a story about her.'”
And so she did. In the decades since Aimbaye has performed the stage play she wrote about the life of Hamer in theaters around the country.
So what brings her to Fort Worth? Or should we ask ‘who’?
“You don’t say ‘no’ to her,” said Aimbaye of Fort Worth’s Ms. Opal Lee with a laugh. “I said, ‘Mother, we don’t have time.’ She said, ‘Yes, we do. We got two weeks.’ I said, okay. I heard a voice say, ‘move out the way.’ So here we are.”