Author, producer and playwright Jeff Stetson ’73, was working on a creative way to teach a group of students about the Civil Rights Movement when he came up with the idea for his most famous play, The Meeting, about an imaginary conversation in Harlem between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
“This was in the 1980s and not many of the students were alive during the Civil Rights Movement,” Stetson says. “One strategy I would use to stimulate the discussion was to write a play for the students — in this case about Malcolm and Martin. I ended up being unable to teach the class, but I continued to develop the play.”
Despite being the two most famous and important figures of the Civil Rights Movement, MLK and Malcolm X never held a meeting when they were alive, and spoke just once very briefly as they walked through the United States Senate in 1964 to watch the debates over the Civil Rights Act.
Stetson’s play imagines a meeting between the two figures in 1965 in a hotel in Harlem. The Meeting was an instant hit, selling out whenever it was produced during the summer of 1987.
“It really took off,” says Stetson. “I still remember Morgan Freeman coming in to see it twice that first summer. From there, it started getting produced all over the country and then the world.”
