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This performance and Q&A will be available to stream via The ArtsCenter’s YouTube through Juneteenth (Saturday, June 19th, 2021 at 11:59pm). Watching with family, friends and community members is a great way to celebrate this important national holiday!

What does a daddy say to his baby boy when the boogie man is real? Confronted by a surge in White supremacist activity and Confederate nostalgia in the nation that he calls home, one father struggles to explain this wave of hatred and bigotry to his son. In HAUNTED, actor and playwright, Dr. Sonny Kelly takes on the voices of historians, ancestors, elders, youths, politicians, pundits, and poets, as he traces the roots and routes of modern day anti-Black violence in America. Kelly recounts the roots of hatred and fear embedded in the story of the 1898 lynching of Manley McCauley in Orange County, North Carolina. He also tracks the routes of racialized violence in America as manifested in the colonial justice system, the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 2020 lynching of Ahmaud Arberry in Brunswick, Georgia. Kelly digs deep to examine the impact that racial violence has historically had on our minds, bodies, and souls in the land of the free and the home of the brave.