In 1944, Book T. Spicely, a private in the U.S. Army on active duty, got off a bus at a stop on Durham’s Club Boulevard near what is now the North Carolina School of Science and Math. The bus driver, Herman Lee Council, followed him off the bus and shot him twice in the chest; after being refused treatment at the segregated Watts Hospital, Spicely was taken to Duke Hospital and pronounced dead upon arrival.
Eyewitnesses said that Spicely, who was unarmed and in uniform, had lightly protested when he was asked to move to the back of the bus when several white soldiers boarded. Despite acquiescing and moving seats, Council followed Spicely when he got off the bus and shot him. At a subsequent trial, the all-white jury accepted Council’s claim of self-defense and acquitted him after only 28 minutes of deliberation.
After being buried in Durham history for many years, Spicely’s murder—and other acts of racial violence in other towns like this—have prompted new commemorations and conversations. Last year, actor and playwright Mike Wiley premiered Changing Same, a one-man play he wrote with local poet and playwright Howard L. Craft about Spicely’s murder. It’s the ninth play in Wiley’s library of historical shows that he travels the country performing.
The show is directed by Joseph Megel and features music by Corbie Hill; ahead of the show’s February 28th performance at the Hayti Heritage Center, the INDY spoke with Wiley as he drove between performances in Georgia.
INDY: Changing Same premiered last year to mark the 80th anniversary of the murder of Booker T. Spicely. Why is it back now at the Hayti Heritage Center?
MIKE WILEY: The Booker T. Spicely Committee is partnering with the Legacy of Lynching Conference, which is happening at the Friday Center that weekend. That conference brings together representatives from across the state and from the various counties that have had lynchings in the past. And because the killing of Private Spicely can be categorized as a lynching, the performance of this on Friday night is kind of kicking off that weekend of the Legacies of Lynching Conference.
Tell me about first connecting with the Spicely committee and where you start in building a play about a historical person.
I knew very little about Booker T. Spicely a couple of years ago, and it’s a story that needed to be told. It’s in some ways, an open secret, in that not a lot of people were talking about or remembering it outside of those individuals on this committee, who came together to start working on, first and foremost, a marker where he was killed, in front of the School of Science and Math.
They also wanted other institutions in the area to acknowledge the killing of Private Spicely and wanted there to be some larger acknowledgment, more so than just a marker—something that was going to touch the hearts, minds, and souls of not just people in Durham, but maybe even folks across the state or the country to remember that this happened. The committee reached out to ask if I would be willing to write a play.
At the time, I was knee-deep in writing a holiday play with my writing partner, Howard Craft, for Playmakers Repertory Company at UNC Chapel Hill. And because Howard and I work so very well together, it was a no-brainer for him to come on board. That meant that the two of us were working on two plays at the same time and going back and forth on each piece.
I have a nephew, Jackson Leonard, who just graduated from Appalachian State—. he is a historian, and I asked if he would help us out with the research of this piece. Typically, I do all of the research myself but that can get to be fairly heavy because not only am I in the process of writing the piece, but also figuring out how to create characters, how to stage a piece, and so on and so forth. Jackson did a deep dive and started sending me large swaths of research, so Howard and I could then dive in and get a little bit more granular with that, and find specific moments, specific individuals to dramatize.
Once Howard came on board to co-write the piece with me, I asked Joseph Megel to eventually produce it on stage. I asked Corbie Hill to join us and play some live Piedmont blues music throughout the piece. We pulled together a draft that we wanted to present to the public as a staged reading, which we premiered on July 7 at the North Star Church of the Arts, one day before the 80th anniversary of Spicely’s death. We had a lovely packed crowd there for the reading and we had a fantastic response from that audience, including relatives of Spicely and members of the Spicely committee.
Regarding the research of the piece: it is a deep dive into as much information as we can find, and in finding that information, deciding what’s what can be dramatized, what story we want to tell, and how we want to tell it.
Of course, we want to tell as much as we can, as much as we know—which isn’t a whole lot—about who Booker T. Spicely was. Reading letters that his brother sent to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in defense of his brother and hoping that there would be a fair trial of Herman Lee Council, the man who killed Spicely, as well as what the rest of the community of Durham at the time was saying about the murder of Spicely, what they were saying about Herman Council, and, of course, what actually happened that night on July 8, 1944 when Spicely boards a bus there in Durham to go back to Camp Butner and he sits in the second seat from the back of the bus. In no way was he in the front of the bus and in no way was he disobeying segregation laws. When Council, the bus driver, asked him to get up and move to the back, he did.
According to eyewitnesses, on the way to the seat in the back, he may have jokingly said a few things, like “I thought I was fighting this war for democracy. It seems strange that I’m wearing the same uniform that these white soldiers are wearing and fighting for the same freedom, the same democracy, it seems odd that I cannot sit in the same seats that they occupy.”
The bus driver had words and had a different opinion about that and kept pushing it. Moments later, when Spicely decided to exit the bus in the back, eyewitnesses say he apologized to Herman Council. Why did he apologize? I suppose it was the person he was.
[Council] followed Spicely off the bus, approached him with a pistol, and then shot him twice in the chest. Spicely fell into the street. The bus driver reboarded the bus, put his pistol away, and drove off. Spicely was taken by police, oddly enough, to Watts Hospital, which was the all-white hospital at the time. They took him there and the doctor, of course, said, ‘I can’t treat him.’
The police forced the doctor to give him a blood alcohol test. Again, why? We’re not altogether certain, but it seems that they were trying to help Council, to say that Spicely was drinking and being belligerent in some way. He was not drinking, nor was he being belligerent. They eventually took him to Duke Hospital where he passed away. In court, Council was acquitted of all charges in only 28 minutes of jury deliberation.
In other plays, you’ve portrayed famous characters like Jackie Robinson. Is it different trying to embody someone like Spicely who is not as historically well-known?
Not really. With any piece, I try to find specific stories. I try and find those parts of that history, within those events, or within those individuals’ personal history that is unknown, that is rarely talked about, that make up what and who that person is or what and who that event eventually became.
And so I approach it in the same way, trying to tell the story from multiple angles, as well as I possibly can.
As it was once said to me, “There are three truths: your truth, my truth, and the truth.” And the actual truth is somewhere in the center of that and I try and tell a story from as many angles as I can—so that we can get closer and closer, as close as we can to the actual truth.
How do you approach telling the story of someone like Spicely, who was violently murdered, without letting that abrupt and violent end define their entire life?
I try and recreate the human being. I try and learn as much as I can about that person who lived and in portraying them, I try and embody them as a human being, who had hopes, dreams, a sense of humor. That ultimately makes the untimely death, the killing of these individuals, so much more tragic in an audience’s heart because now it’s not just a news article. This is an individual who lived, breathed; had a family that grieves for them. If I’m doing my job well, the audience grieves.
Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that you think readers should know?
I most want to thank the Booker T. Spicely committee for giving me an opportunity to help tell a story that happened not only in Durham but also elsewhere in the South.
This play gives me the opportunity to present that Durham story in other communities across the country that are trying to figure out ways to tell the story of their lynchings and killings. Perhaps they’ll see this play and think they could similarly tell their stories so that future audiences can learn not just about Private Spicely, but about other individuals across the country that were tragically taken from us before their time.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.