This past weekend, October 23-26, I had the pleasure of attending Spelman College’s 2025–26 season opener, Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, directed by Keith Arthur Bolden. The play opened the Department of Theatre & Performance’s new season themed “Black Joy as Resistance,” and it could not have been a more perfect beginning. Set in Harlem during the summer of 1930—the beginning of the Great Depression—Cleage’s story draws us into a world pulsing with art, love, st