Arts & Entertainment
‘She Who Dared’ Opera Showcases Black Female Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement
Lesser-known Black female heroes are taking center stage in a new opera aptly called “She Who Dared” at the Chicago Opera Theater.
The opera spotlights the women who challenged segregation in Montgomery, using classical music infused with sounds of gospel, jazz and the blues to tell the story centered around seven women.
Rosa Parks is one of the most recognizable figures in the civil rights movement, known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White man, which led to her high-profile arrest. There were, however, others alongside and before Parks that exercised that same brand of disobedience.
The cast of “She Who Dared” rehearses ahead of the opera’s June 2025 run at the Chicago Opera Theater. (Michael Brosilow)
The other trailblazing women in the show are: Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith and Jeanetta Reese. Colvin, Browder, McDonald and Smith all went on to be plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal court case that challenged the constitutionality of segregated public transportation.
Jasmine Habersham, who plays the 15-year-old Colvin, found the preparation for the role both illuminating and personal.
“I like to do a lot of research, but this was kind of hard because there wasn’t much research about her in general, which is why we’re doing this opera in the first place,” Habersham said.
Habersham, a native of Macon, Georgia, said she felt pride in being able to bring a hidden figure to the forefront while also dispelling negative stereotypes about Southerners.
“I often think people have this really wrong connotation about people from the South — that we’re uneducated, lazy,” Habersham said. “I feel like this opera breaks down a lot of these barriers, understanding that each one of these women had something to fight for regardless of their station or education.”
The cast of “She Who Dared” rehearses ahead of the opera’s June 2025 run at the Chicago Opera Theater. (Michael Brosilow)
When composer-librettist duo Jasmine Arielle Barnes and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton started working on this project in 2022, they didn’t anticipate the themes to hold relevance in 2025.
“Unfortunately, history continues to repeat itself,” Barnes said. “There’s always a space of relevance for history, especially Black history in this country, which is often forgotten, often erased, often left out of the fuller picture of America’s history.”
Some major hits to civil rights and the arts have happened under President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump last month signed the “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order, which seeks to cut back the use of “disparate-impact liability,” a core principle of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that questions whether seemingly neutral policies have a disproportionate impact on protected groups.
Mouton recalled a friend of hers saying the classical space is “ripe for revolution,” and said she believes opera was the perfect medium to blend ideas of Black classicism and American history.
“We’ve seen many Black singers from Jessye Norman to Marian Anderson come into these spaces and really break down and change how things are done, but that’s not necessarily how we culturally talk about this space,” Mouton said.
Audiences can see “She Who Dared” at the Chicago Opera Theater in one of three performances, slated for June 3, 6 and 8.
