The play ran for five months in Atlanta. A leading black lawyer, Colonel A. T. Walden, remarked, 'After the visit of The Crowning Experience, Atlanta will never be the same again.'11 It is a fact that integration was calmly and wisely achieved there in the next years, and John Kennedy, after he became President, sent for Walden to hear the story behind it.

When The Crowning Experience had a seven-week run in Washington that summer it drew 80,000 people, more than any play in the 123-year history of the National Theater. In September Drew Pearson's syndicated newspaper column described its effect in Atlanta, and added, 'Behind what happened in Georgia is an even more amazing story of how dedicated people from all walks of life are organizing to find a solution to a problem that our political leaders have been unable to resolve - the explosive challenge of Little Rock.'12

The explosion of violence in Little Rock, Arkansas, over the integration of black and white children in the schools, had made world news in the autumn of 1957, and it was one of the events which had stimulated the writing and production of The Crowning Experience. Buchman, who had had a group of black and white Africans with him in America at the time, urged them to take the film Freedom to Little Rock. They showed it first to the leaders of the white community, then to the Federal troops who had been despatched there, to the school authorities and to the leaders of the black integration committees. Among the latter was Mrs L. C. Bates, then President of the Arkansas NAACP. She had risked her life taking to a white school each morning the group of black children over whose presence there the riots had broken out. After seeing Freedom, Mrs Bates came with a party of both races from Little Rock to Mackinac. She there decided to visit the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, who, unknown to her, had also seen Freedom. The resulting interview was described by a CBS radio news commentator, summing up the principal events of 1959, as 'possibly the most significant news event of the year which marks the end of a hundred years' civil war in the United States of America'.13

500