I also recently had the distinct pleasure of speaking with another friend and fellow actor/playwright, Anne Undeland. We spoke about her brand new play “Lady Randy,” which is about Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome.
“A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.”
-- James Weldon Johnson
NAACP leader and author James Weldon Johnson wrote “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” in a little cabin off Alford Road on the Alford Brook and at the Mason Library.
Johnson wrote lyrics to 200 popular songs, including the “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” while he was, in addition, a lawyer, diplomat and early civil rights leader. He wrote many of his songs in a writing cabin on Alford Road in Great Barrington.
“I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its integrity against all the powers of hell.”
--- NAACP pamphlet from 1916
For unknown reasons, Yolande’s grave was left without a headstone. Her grandchildren were unaware of where she was buried, until her grandson Arthur McFarlane II was informed of it during a visit in 2012.
