Tuesday, Jan. 10 2012 6:45PM
She had a dream
Actress to portray female Buffalo Soldier
By Rob Roberts, rroberts@lsjournal.com
Rob Roberts, the Journal
Lee’s Summit actress Sandra Campbell is pictured outside the Silent Unity Chapel, where she will appear in a Jan. 15 one-woman show about the life of Cathay Williams, a slave who posed as a man so she could enjoy the relative freedom of a Buffalo Soldier’s life.
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closeLee’s Summit actress Sandra Campbell will shed some of her clothing during a special Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration performance Jan. 15 at the Silent Unity Chapel, 1901 N.W. Blue Parkway, Unity Village. But don’t get the wrong idea. Under the mid-19th century slave clothing Campbell will don for the 2 p.m. performance, she’ll be wearing a late 1860s U.S. Army uniform. That’s because Williams will be presenting a one-woman show about the life of Cathay Williams. In 1866, Williams posed as William Cathay – a man – so that she could join the Buffalo Soldiers, a group of black soldiers formed after the Civil War to help fight the Indian Wars and settle the West. According to Campbell, Cathay Williams was born on the William Johnson plantation in Independence. As a young slave girl, she was relocated to a plantation near Jefferson City. And in 1861, at age 17, was forced into cooking, cleaning and laundry duty for the 8th Indiana Volunteer Regiment.
Five years later, having been exposed to the relative freedom of the soldier’s life, Williams enlisted in a Buffalo Solider infantry company, her 5-foot-9 stature allowing her to pass for a man. And her guise went undetected for two years, until October 1868, when she became seriously ill and her gender was discovered by a post surgeon.
Williams, her later bid for a military pension denied, died penniless in 1892, Campbell said. But like Martin Luther King Jr., the gutsy Williams continues to serve as proof that “if there’s a dream, something you want to achieve, you can achieve it,” Campbell added.
“Don’t limit yourself,” the actress continued, elaborating on the point. “Don’t let other people set boundaries for you.”
Campbell, who holds a master’s degree in management, serves as an adjunct business professor at Webster University and manages the Technical and Administrative Support Staff for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Certification Center in Kansas City.
She has served the FAA since 1978, she said, but she was inspired to pursue acting and dramatic writing on the side by her grandfather, whose mother was a slave and whose father was a slave holder.
Campbell spent summers in Arkansas with her grandfather as a young girl and reveled in the stories he told. And she was inspired to pursue her own dramatic leanings when he told her one day that she had “the gift of gab,” as well. Transferring her storytelling gift to the historic monologue genre, Campbell wrote “Follow Your Dreams,” a portrayal of early African American aviatrix Bessie Coleman, while serving as an FAA public affairs officer in 1996. She first learned of Coleman in 1995, when Campbell was asked to stand in for the late aviatrix during her posthumous induction into Women in Aviation, International Pioneer Hall of Fame.
“I was moved to tears,” Campbell said of the ceremony, during which she learned that Coleman was the first African American female to obtain her pilot’s license (in 1921, two years before Amelia Earhart earned hers) and that she’d had to learn French at a Chicago night school so she could take flying lessons in France.
A year later, after being asked to fill in as a guest speaker at a local middle school at the last minute, Campbell wondered what she might talk about, she said. And then she was struck by an inspiration: She would address the students as Bessie Coleman.
“I had two books about Bessie,” she recalled, “and that night (before her performance), I wrote 40 pages of notes” – notes that were polished and embellished into “Follow Your Dreams.” Since then, Campbell has since portrayed Coleman dozens of times. And in 2000, KCPT Channel 19 taped her performance of “Follow Your Dreams” before a live audience at the historic Gem Theater, making it available for future television, school and community audiences.
Campbell’s dramatic, civic and professional accomplishments have earned her numerous awards and accolades, including write-ups in Jet, Aviation for Women and LaFemme magazines; the Tuskegee Airmen Humanitarian Award; Greater Kansas City Federal Employee of the Year distinction; and inclusion on the Kansas City, Kan., Public Schools’ “Reasons to Believe” Alumni Honor Roll.
Campbell, who has even had her biography placed on the moon as an African American who’s made significant contributions to aviation and aerospace, is currently working on a ministerial degree through the Unity Urban Ministerial School in Detroit. She is scheduled to graduate this year and be ordained in 2013.
Donations from her upcoming performance at Unity Village will be used to send teenagers to Youth of Unity summer camp, Campbell said. To quality for the camp scholarships, applicants must be in the ninth through 12th grades and write original essays inspired by King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.”
Additional MLK celebration festivities at Unity Village will take place at noon on Jan. 16 at the Unity Inn. The program will include readings of King speech excerpts and a choir performance. The public is invited.
