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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
April 3, 2004
Letters to the Editor The Washington Post letters@washpost.com Dear Editor: Your April 3 review of Ben Hecht's "A Flag Is Born," the 1946 play revived by the American Century Theater in Arlington, noted that the sponsors of the original production, the American League for a Free Palestine (also known as the Bergson Group) canceled a planned performance at Washington's National Theater because the National discriminated against blacks. That show was, according to your reviewer, "transferred to Baltimore's Maryland Theater, which, to accommodate the show, changed its policy of allowing blacks to sit only in the balcony." "A Flag Is Born," a drama about Holocaust survivors and the need for a Jewish State, did indeed bring down the race barrier at the Maryland Theater--but not because the theater's management was particularly accommodating. Rather, the Bergson Group and the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP teamed up to force the change. Only after the NAACP threatened to picket and a Bergson Group leader announced that he would personally escort two African-American friends to the show, did the theater management reluctantly lease the premises to the Bergson Group, which permitted blacks to sit wherever they chose. The NAACP hailed the "tradition-shattering victory" won by the alliance of black and Zionist activists, and used that victory to help pave the way for the desegregation of other Baltimore theaters. "I am proud that it was my play which terminated one of the most disgraceful practices of our country's history," Hecht said. Breaking down this vicious and indecent tradition in Maryland is worthy of the high purpose for which 'Flag' was conceived and written...To fight discrimination and injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group." Cordially,
Rafael Medoff, Ph.D.
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