amistad research center

John O’Neal, the playwright, actor, director, educator and community/civil rights activist died February 15, 2019, in New Orleans after a lengthy battle with dementia. He was 78. O’Neal was a founding member of the Free Southern Theater in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It relocated to New Orleans in 1965. The theater’s mission was “to use theater as an instrument to stimulate the development of critical and reflective thought among black people in the South” while

The papers of the Dent family of New Orleans provide a significant portrait of a prominent African American family during the era of the modern civil rights movement. Amistad received the initial deposit of the papers of patriarch Albert W. Dent, and his first born son Tom Dent in 1976, with continued additions until the death of the family’s matriarch, Jessie Covington Dent, in 2001. These two collections, the Albert and Jessie Dent Papers and the Tom Dent Papers, span over