Spiritual Connections Community Center for Outreach recently marked Black History Month by playing host Feb. 3 to a travelling production of “Excerpts of the Life of Sojourner Truth.”

The play staged by Peoples Drama Ministry ran Feb. 2 at the Booker T. Theater.

Born into slavery, Truth worked for emancipation for blacks and equality for women in the 19th-century United States.

“The theater was packed with the old, the young and the in-between,” a release about the play says. “Some cried because they remembered what their parents told them about their grandparents who were brought up as a slave. Then there were others who had no idea who she was or what she had done.”

One facet of the production was Peoples Drama’s use of local extras in the cast. Those chosen for the Rocky Mount production were Linda Hinton, Costella Nicholson Cooper, Essie Davis Milbourne, Loretta Braswell, Nakyia Davis, Kalik Davis, Timothy Coley Jr., Mystic Hunter, Johnny Lyons and Dexter Davis.

A program after the play presented seven local and three other women the center’s Sojourner Truth Pioneer Award of Excellence. The local honoree were Angela Bryant, a N.C. state senator; Carol Allen-White, Edgecombe County clerk of court; Helen Gay, a former Rocky Mount City Council member; Mary Shell, overseer at Open Door Ministry of Faith Deliverance Center; Dr. Lisa Nelson Robinson, a Rocky Mount surgeon and co-medical director of Nash Breast Care Center; Alice McKnight Dickens, prelate of God’s United Churches of Deliverance; and Anne Edge, Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools board member. The other recipients were Dr. Michelle Craig; a family practitioner-geriatrician in Washington and the actress who played the youthful Truth in the production; Pamela Murphy Lewis of Charlotte, a regional secretary for Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; and the late Pauline Evans Lewis, an adjunct professor at S.C. State University.

Spiritual Connections Community Center for Outreach works with other community groups, businesses and volunteers to develop mentoring programs for adults who are socially or economically deprived.

For information, call Evangelist Linda Murphy at 252-955-2917.