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Session:         Page of 592

Q:

No, no, it does.

Foner:

Okay. So he'll write a dramatization, and then for a week before the program, we announce it. We get a speaker, it will be either Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Ralph Abernathy.

Q:

How did you have access to people like that?

Foner:

You call somebody, you call somebody, and you call somebody, and you find out, and we'd say we'll make a contribution to this and to that. And so Ossie writes a script. He dramatizes that case. Then for a week before the program, he will come every day with a group of actors and actresses, who will come into the conference room, and they will rehearse it. They will do it as a staged reading, but he's directing it and rehearsing it, and usually a singer with it, whether it's Pete or Bob DeCormier or something, they're going to do appropriate songs for it. And then Ossie is in--this is before the hospitals. Every year he's doing this and Ruby is coming. Ruby, I remember, comes and does the scenes from “Shalom Aleichem,” and we're doing -- Sidney Poitier is part of it, Will Geer, whoever is around is coming, because of Ossie. One year Ossie is in the musical “Jamaica” with Lena Horne, and that's the year we're beginning to organize hospital workers. So, Ossie, I remember going to him in the dressing room and telling him about the hospital organizing campaign and maybe we should do a dramatization because it would bring hospital workers to it. It's '1958, we're beginning. He starts to dramatize the Montefiore campaign in a living newspaper thing, and who does he bring to narrate it, and we rehearse all day Sunday -- Ricardo Montalban. And there's Ricardo Montalban and Will Lee and Will Geer -- that kind of people, and Bob DeCormier is there. And I remember I'm sitting with Bob, a Sunday, and I'm saying to Bob, “Isn't it wonderful what Ossie will do?”

And Bob says, “There's only one person who would get Ricardo Montalban to give up his Sunday to come and rehearse here.” You know he's rehearsing under Ossie's direction to do the thing. “It's Ossie Davis.” So you had this kind of thing that's happening.

For example, one year the Negro history program, because “Jamaica” ran for two years, he brings the cast of “Jamaica.” Who's in the cast of “Jamaica”? A little kid, Augie Rios, who's a star. He's about eight, nine years old. He could never get Lena. He's getting the singers and the dancers from “Jamaica,” and they're doing things. I remember that program we also brought in John Henry Faulk. Mean anything to you?

Q:

Not really.





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