Written by Tanya Terry, with featured photo by L.M. Land
A powerful play about unfairness will hit the new McCree Theatre at 6 p.m. March 29.
Flint Native Terence Grundy, director-producer of upcoming play “Police, Lawyers, Judges: Bullies With Power,” a true story by fellow Flint Native Kim Davis, read the thought-provoking book by the same name about three years ago.
Grundy shared that he learned Davis had tried to turn the book into a play a few times, but it previously didn’t work out for various reasons. Still, Grundy said he and Davis wanted Davis’ story to be shared as a play because they realized some people, even in the local community, had not read the book and may be unfamiliar with Davis’ nearly unbelievable story.
“We wanted to illustrate it on stage for people to become more aware about injustice,” Grundy said.
Grundy said from the first time he read the book, it “hit home.”
“The story needs to be heard,” Grundy added. “Oftentimes, stories are brushed under the rug. It’s good this story is being told.”
Davis encountered construction on her regular exit on her way to a third-shift job from the Flint area to Saginaw. Once she got to work, she asked some men in the break area if there was a way she could avoid construction on the exit in the future. They informed her of how to travel through Buena Vista, Michigan and do so.
“On her fourth night of going that way…I was stopped by the police and called a drug dealer,” Davis said.
The officers were able to tell Davis was from Genesee County.
“I was stopped; I was harassed; I was searched; I was thrown into the police vehicle,” said Davis. “They found nothing. They ran all of my identification. They found nothing. But the Caucasian officer didn’t like the fact that I talked back to him. So, I guess he decided I needed to be taught a lesson. They took me to jail, never informing me of why I was going to jail.”
Davis was jailed in Saginaw County.
Despite the negative experience, Davis said “God was there.” She said because of God’s goodness, her cellmates were very kind to her.
“One thing that really got to me was they prayed for me before I went before the judge.”
Davis, who had met Martin Luther King on September 11, 1977, fought the legal system for her civil rights. She was inspired to share what she learned when she ran into the sister of a woman who she grew up with at Meijer.
“She had ran into my sister, and my sister had told her what happened to me. She said ‘Kim, Kim. You have to share the goodness of God. You have to share it’. I said ‘ I don’t write books,’ and once I got home, I thought about what she said. I thought about how good my cellmates were to me, and I wanted to share the goodness of them. That’s why I did it. Sometimes we think of a person as a repeat offender, and think only that they come in and out of jail. But, they were so good to me, I wanted to share them with others.”
Grundy said although the book was first published in 2013, he feels this is an excellent time for the play to be shown to the public.
“This is a very pivotal time – because there’s so much injustice that’s going on in the world. It needs be told that it’s going on right in Genesee County!”
Tickets for the upcoming play are available at the Music Planet , at 517 W. Carpenter Road, as well as the New McCree Theatre, at 4601 Clio Road.
The music director is George Warren.
