Theater Legend and Amistad Friend Remembered
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