The Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra performed Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed in March 2019 with artists including the Florida A&M University Gospel Choir and the Morehouse College Glee Club.
“On Wednesday, CEO of the Tallahassee Symphony Mandy Stringer [learned] that TSO had gotten a [grant] for a new specially commissioned work from Joel Thompson that will focus on the Tallahassee bus boycott,” writes Marina Brown in Thursday’s (6/11) Tallahassee Democrat (FL). “In March 2019, in a sold-out performance of Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,’ that was both thrilling and, in its pathos, devastating, the Florida A&M University Choir and the Morehouse College Glee Club joined with the full orchestra to sing what seven African-American men spoke in the minutes before they died—unarmed [they were killed by police or other officials]…. ‘ “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” left a deep impression on everyone,’ Stringer says. ‘It was viewed online 7,000 times in 2019. This month it has been seen 45,000 times.’ [The new] work from Thompson commemorates the Tallahassee Bus Boycott in 1956.… ‘Walk in Dignity’ … will be one of the first works TSO presents in the 2021-22 season … scored for two vocal soloists and the FAMU Concert Chorale…. Stringer says that the [eight-month] bus boycott is widely considered the most significant step forward in Tallahassee’s move to end racial segregation during the civil rights era.”
