Professional speaker, storyteller and writer Janice Brooks will join Tom Williams for the hour on Thursday's AU Brooks is performing her one-woman show "Traveling Shoes"Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. in the Caine Performance Hall on the USU campus in Logan. "Traveling Shoes" depicts eight women of American history: Sojourner Truth, Barbara Jordan, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisholm, Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams, Rosa Parks, Biddy Mason, and Jane Manning. The show is presented by UPR and is part of the USU Provost's Series on Instructional Excellence in celebration of Black History Month.
Along with abolitionist, orator and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth and Underground Railroad heroine Harriet Tubman, "Traveling Shoes" also highlights the lives of civil rights champions Rosa Parks, Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm was the first African-American woman elected to Congress and in 1972 became the first majority-party black candidate to run for president. Jordan was the first African-American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction and the first southern black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Also featured in "Traveling Shoes" are the stories of Cathay Williams, Jane Manning and Biddy Mason. A former slave, Williams disguised herself as a man to serve as a Buffalo Soldier in the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment shortly after the end of the Civil War. Born free in Connecticut during the early part of the 19th Century, Manning was converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1840s. Mason grew up as a slave in the Deep South before being taken to Utah and eventually California, a free state.
"Traveling Shoes" is co-sponsored by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Caine College of the Arts, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, Office of Global Engagement, Center for Women and Gender, Access and Diversity Center and the Department of History.
