“First, I must say that you are a great actress.  Your portrayal of the various characters was fantastic.  Your  play and performance touched me.   My emotions were stirred up.  I experienced sadness, anger and rage.  Your play provoked many questions and reflections on the struggles, resistance and resiliency of blacks throughout history.   Not only the suffering and triumphs of our past but  the current injustices that must be challenged and changed.  I also experienced joy and pride during your performance.  I was proud that the black people of Montgomery, Alabama found the courage to come together and stand up at last -- with success they held the 381 days bus boycott.  I was also proud that these ordinary people, women, men and children challenged the unjust laws and fought for their full citizenship and their humanity.

Thank you for bringing this rich history and fantastic performance to Suriname.  I had to send my 3 daughters to your performance the next day, so that they could experience your powerful play and performance.”
With Love,
Liesbeth Venetiaan – Vanenburg
First Lady of the Republic of Suriname, South America

"Awele Makeba's work inspires new questions about how to teach and learn history.  Her presentation cannot help but provoke an emotional response that engages all facets of our common humanity and makes us question how much we really understand the past. This is her success: she unsettles our understanding of what we thought we knew so that we can come to know in new ways."
Sam Wineburg, 
Cognitive Studies in Education, Stanford University and author, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Temple University Press ©2001

"Awele Makeba's stirring performance of Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing! is theatre at its best. The play weaves together the voices of four women, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, JoAnn Robinson, and Rosa Parks and documents their acts in defying the Jim Crow laws during the Montgomery ( Alabama) Bus Boycotts in 1955.  Their roles as "upstanders" are important lessons - ones that continue to challenge us today- about participation as a responsible citizen in a democracy and about lessons of courage and faith. In bringing this untaught history to the stage and, indeed, to life, Makeba also reminds us that empathy and the capacity to understand and to own history helps us realize the best in ourselves."  
Margot S. Strom
Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves

“In over twenty-five years of work in public education and as an advocate and provider of professional development for teachers, I can think of no more powerful experience, no experience richer in potential for individual growth, than Awele Makeba’s performance of “Rage Is Not A 1-Day thing!”  If Facing History is right that there is great power in knowing something well, then her work, from the research and writing to the performance and its post-show dialogue, sets a standard and shines a light simultaneously...Awele’s work epitomized the theme of most importance for our learning – the honoring of critical and analytical thinking, historical thinking.”
Jack Weinstein
Director, Facing History and Ourselves, San Francisco Bay Area Region

"Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!" is living proof that young people have enormous power to influence the course of human events if they could just acknowledge that they have it in them.  In a world that tends to reduce adolescents to consumer markets, "Rage!" is a wake up call for youth to assert the impact of doing as a way of making positive contributions to the progress of humankind.  In a world that views the female gender as objects of desire, and otherwise invisible, stripped of any meaningful power, "Rage!" demonstrates that because courageous young women - girls really- have made a difference once, so too can today's blooming flowers.   Awele Makeba's performance is a gift for all those needing encouragement to do something of significance with their lives.  The story told is leadership by common folk, and with than, mountain ranges can be moved."
Benny Sato Ambush
Producing Artistic Director, Theatre Virginia

“Rage! is a dynamic, innovative  and interactive performance that unveils critical ideals, issues, events  and people -- youth and women, central to the historical "truth" of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a watershed moment in The Movement and the  expansion of democracy in America. Our students at Lanier High School in Jackson, MS and the Young People’s Project in Chicago, IL were mesmerized by your performance!"
Bob Moses, 
Founder, The Algebra Project and co-author, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, Beacon Press ©2001

“Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing is more than a depiction of the events surrounding one of the most important struggles in our nation's history -- the Civil Rights Movement.  It is the visual demonstration of how individual and social behaviors can be transformed into major historical events in any society.  In this context Awele Makeba's powerful one-woman performance can be applied by educators in their attempts to explain all of the great movements in history for social change and the advancement of the human and political rights.”
Andrew Stamp
Associate Executive Director
Virginia Association of School Superintendents

“In 'Rage', Makeba applies her well-honed skills as an actor and writer to do what I consider to be the sacred work of educating through the “holes of history” (as playwright, Suzan Lori Parks calls historical absences). We, in the general public, imagine we know the story of Rosa Parks, but through Awele Makeba's sensitive rendering, we are made aware of the ignored history of other African American female "freedom fighters." These are young women of the same era who also stood up for their rights, while all along carrying the additional burden of ordinary complicated teenaged lives. Makeba’s portrayal is especially moving for young audience members who can identify their own concerns regarding peer pressure, sexuality and social violence with those of the protagonists, which Makeba's embodies with full compassion on stage.  The message, of course, is that heroism is daily; and courage is a simple matter of taking a stand according to your principles.  As an educator in Drama and Creative Writing, I share this concern with Awele Makeba: how to teach integrity and bravery in the practice of making art.”
Cherríe L. Moraga
Artist-in-Residence, Stanford University