23 November 2010

Retracing the Steps of a Lion


Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness." Approximately nine years after King was born, Walter Mills, a former teaching principal at Parole Elementary School, decided he would walk in the light.

The Lion and the Fox, a play written by Mill's son-in-law, T. G. Cooper, is the story of how Mills' altruism defeated destructive sefiness. The play was imaginatively staged in front of a packed housed at the Banneker-Douglass Museum by Dr. Vivian Spencer, an Anne Arundel County Community College professor, to reveal the racial tension of the time.

The cast featured such dignitaries as Judge Clayton Greene, Jr., Court of Appeals, 5th Appellate Circuit as Thurgood Marshall; Chuck Farrar, former Anne Arundel County Councilman, played Noah Hillman, the lawyer for the County; Dr. Kevin Maxwell, the present Anne Arundel County Schools Superintendent, played former Anne Arundel County Schools Superintendent, George Fox; and Vincent Leggett, the former head of Black in the Chesapeake Foundation, played Music Brown. Anthony Spencer reprised the lead role of Walter Mills.