By Edward J. Boyer—April 9, 1999

Denise Nicholas’ mornings have become a familiar, necessary and disciplined pattern: an hour’s walk with a neighbor and then several hours at the computer. A novel is making its way across that screen. The excerpts she has allowed friends to see—or parts she has read publicly—have created an audience anxiously awaiting its arrival.

The story has its origins in her years in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, performing with the Free Southern Theater. The theater group went from town to town, bolstering morale of the civil rights workers and attracting audiences they hoped to get to the polls.

“I was very young, full of idealism, looking for the truth, looking for adventure,” she has written of those years.” What I learned in my two turbulent years … has been the spine of my person ever since.”

A national television audience first became familiar with Nicholas in the 1960s when she had a starring role in “Room 222,” a television series that aired for 4 ½ seasons.

Her following grew with roles in several movies such as “Let’s Do It Again” and “A Piece of the Action,” starring Bill Cosby and Sidney Portier. More recently, she had a recurring role as city Councilwoman Harriet deLong on “In the Heat of the Night,” starring Carroll O’Connor. She also wrote six episodes for the series.

“That work made me return to writing more seriously,” she said.

When we talked this week, we reminisced about mornings working out on the Dorsey High School track years ago. Or about gatherings at her Baldwin Hills home that have since taken on mythic proportions. She has since moved a few miles away.

But the conversation soon turned to writing and Mississippi and Tuesday’s election.

“Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement” had arrived in her mail a few days earlier. The book includes two of her pieces reflecting on that defining time when she left the University of Michigan to help register voters in Mississippi.

She remembers a bomb being thrown near the stage in one town. Luckily, no one was hurt.

“Have I taken leave of my senses,” she asked herself.

She knew the answer even in the midst of the natural terror that came with the territory in those days. In another town “people had the light of fear and the light of courage in their eyes,” she said. “We harvested hope everywhere we went.”

Harvesting hope.

“People don’t understand the width and breadth of the drive to register people to vote in the South,” she said, reflecting on forecasts of a low voter turnout at Tuesday’s election. “If they had a better feeling of what it took that summer, I don’t understand how you could be black and not vote. I don’t care what else is going on.”

Her novel will be another step toward giving people a feel for what it was like to be in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. It grew out of a short story she wrote years ago about a Mississippi woman who became the first black woman to vote since Reconstruction.

Its working title is “Before You Miss This Train,” and she hopes to have it finished in June.

“I read an excerpt of the short story at Book Soup in West Hollywood last year and the response was incredible,” she said. “People were curious about what happens to the characters. I decided to turn it into a longer piece.”

In a very short time, the book took on a life of its own. Once Nicholas gets her teeth into a subject, she becomes driven—ravenous to devour every morsel of information she can find. I saw that obsession years ago when she was researching the life of Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant, a black business woman who was one of the more mysterious figures of the Gold Rush Era in San Francisco. She later wrote a play around an imaginary interaction between Pleasant and civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

Her novel, loosely autobiographical, moves back and forth between Mississippi and Detroit, where she lived then. It has taken her away from auditions, early mornings in makeup, locations and the interaction with other performers and actors on television and movie sets.

Days now are morning walks and computer screens. And she is still harvesting hope. ◼︎

Denise Nicholas’ novel Freshwater Road was published to critical acclaim in 2005. Newsday hailed it as “Perhaps the best work of fiction ever done about the civil rights movement.”