Helping his son do homework helped Raki Jones win the annual drama competition staged by WMAR-TV and Arena Players in connection with Black History Month. The idea just took a decade or so to germinate.
Mr. Jones, 46, took the top award this year in the 13th annual Drama Competition for Black Writers, and the resulting one-hour production, "The Colored Cyclone," airs at 7 tonight on Channel 2.
Each year, the competition's winning play is mounted in a joint video production by Channel 2 and Arena Players.
Mr. Jones, a university film and television production instructor, focused his play on racial discrimination at the turn of the century by looking at one of America's greatest black athletes, Marshall W. "Major" Taylor.
Excuse me, who?
That was pretty much the reaction of Mr. Jones, too, when he first encountered Taylor's name while helping his son, Rabon, do a paper on black history about 10 years ago.
But Mr. Jones, an avid bicyclist, was particularly fascinated by the Taylor story.
Long before Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, Taylor broke racial barriers to become the first black star in his era's most popular speed sport: track bicycle racing. Taylor became a star here and abroad, although today he is largely forgotten in sports lore.
"I didn't know there had been this champion African-American cyclist until I saw his name in helping my son [now 21]," recalls Mr. Jones. After that discovery, Mr. Jones ran into Taylor's name again some years later in Arthur Ashe's 1988 book about black athletes, "A Hard Road to Glory."
"When I started the first time to pursue writing for the play competition, back in 1992, I began doing some research on Taylor," he recalls. But other activities intervened -- Mr. Jones makes documentary films about the arts in addition to teaching at Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia -- and the play was not finished that year.
Last summer, a trip to Bethany Beach, Del., where the Silver Spring resident trained on his own bicycle by riding 30 miles a day, inspired Mr. Jones to finish the Taylor drama. He wrote five drafts before submitting it to the drama competition.
In the plot, Taylor battles an effort by a rival to ban his participation in racing because of his color. The story includes three historical figures but is "entirely fictional," the playwright says.
"You can't use the play as a history lesson, but you can use it to teach some lessons," Mr. Jones notes. WMAR is distributing an educational guide about the play and its historical settings to enable teachers to tie in classroom lessons. (For information, call WMAR: [410] 377-2222.) The video of the play will be repeated at 1:30 p.m. March 18 on Channel 2.
The Arena Players cast are Sidney Hicks as Taylor; Tracie Thomas as his wife, Daisy; Donald Joseph Koch as Louis "Birdie" Munger, Taylor's manager; and Terry Dickey as rival racer Floyd Davis. Rick White of WMAR and Sandra Meekins of Arena Players co-directed and Harry Kakel of WMAR was executive producer for the project.
"It was a lot of fun, but somewhat more difficult than some productions we've done in the drama competition," says Mr. Kakel. For one thing, Baltimore no longer has a velodrome, the banked-track arena where sprint cycling takes place.
Action shots were thus done against a green "chroma-key" backdrop to create the illusion of racing. But the bikes in the drama are authentic, Mr. Kakel says, including a 1907 model borrowed from local collector Larkin Little, and two track bikes from Bobby Phillips, a notable Baltimore bike racer for the last three decades.
Mr. Jones says he is pleased with the result, given the competition's restrictions: just four characters and three settings.
And winning the competition has encouraged him to branch away from documentary work and pursue more fiction writing.