Medcalf: St. Paul play highlights life of Black woman who fought for equal pay

As he stumbled upon the subject of his next script, Terry Newby also made an important admission.

“I had never heard,” the lawyer and playwright said earlier this week, “of Susie Morris.”

But that’s also the beauty of history. Just when you believe you understand it, you learn how little you actually know.

“Little Rock, 1942,” a play written by Newby and Jim Lundy will run for one night only at 7 p.m. on Friday at the Landmark Center in St. Paul. It tells the story of Morris — later known as Sue Cowan Williams — and her young, heroic lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, as they fight the system to earn equal pay. The play also highlights a significant tie between the Civil Rights Movement and a courtroom in St. Paul.

Morris was a teacher in Little Rock, Ark., who represented a union of Black teachers who demanded equal pay with their white peers. Their plea was rejected by the local school district, which claimed the disparity was rooted in merit, not race. Sound familiar? And out of spite, officials increased the pay of white teachers after Morris’ initial request was made.

In 1941, Morris decided to sue the district. Her case eventually moved to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals at the Landmark Center — a federal building until the 1960s — where Marshall, an NAACP attorney at the time, won the appeal on her behalf in 1942. The bench that once stood in Courtroom No. 4 remains at the Landmark Center. A key portion of the research for the play came from the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, which covered the case extensively. But that chapter is only the beginning of Morris’ story.

Her life was uprooted by her sacrifice. Even though she won the case, she lost her job and had to do contract work for more than a decade until a judge restored her original teaching position.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the Black history I consumed in my youth was often presented from a man’s perspective. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Marshall and others were typically depicted as strong men and leaders who had resolve and courage. Some of them even gave up their lives for their beliefs.

But our collective offerings on Black history tend to fail in their portrayals of the Black women who were equally significant — more significant in many cases — than the men who receive the most praise. Rosa Parks wasn’t a docile seamstress who just sat at the front of a bus in 1955. She’d been the leader of the Montgomery, Ala., NAACP’s youth division and worked as an activist for years. Fannie Lou Hamer, an activist who suffered physically and emotionally as a freedom fighter in the Jim Crow South, wasn’t quiet about her dismay when King wouldn’t allow women to speak at the March on Washington in 1963. And Coretta Scott King wasn’t only King’s wife. She was an anti-war activist who protested the Vietnam War long before her husband got involved.

But those women, like Morris, have been pushed to the background of the conversation around progress. That’s why the Landmark Center’s play is so important.

“In light of the current climate, I think it’s very important that we continue to emphasize some of these important civil rights victories and just how tenuous they were,” Newby said. “We all know about Thurgood Marshall, but I’d never heard of Susie Morris and she took on this case that had a pretty big personal sacrifice to herself and her family. It’s fascinating.”

I also asked Lundy and Newby how Morris is depicted within her family in the play. The details of her marital life are limited. In the play, however, her husband starts out as an advocate before he grows more concerned about her stance. Yet, Morris perseveres. I think that theme matters. Because it showcases Morris as a leader who agreed to champion a cause that changed lives, unfortunately at the expense of her own.

“It takes people like her who suddenly find themselves in a position of being able to do something positive,” Lundy said. “And in her words, in the show, it’s like, ‘If I see something wrong, I have to do something to fix it for the benefit of other people. It takes that kind of resilience to create a better world.”

For Marshall, the Morris case was a pivotal domino that led to Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, which ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. He went on to become the first African American Supreme Court justice. Books and movies have highlighted the details of his immaculate life.

But Morris’ story has not received the same fanfare. A quick Google search reveals multiple sources that place the site of the appeal in her equal-pay case as St. Louis and Kansas City, not St. Paul. “Little Rock, 1942” is a grand and honorable attempt to do what was not done while Morris, who died in 1994, still lived: tell the world how much she mattered.

“She was resilient. She was not going to let this go,” said Amy Mino, the Landmark Center’s executive director. “It took such courage to go forward with that because she really was out there on her own. She saw that it was not fair, it was unequal and she really felt compelled to do something.”