By Patti Roberts

Playwright Ginger Rutland is at the Guild Theater ready to stage her play “When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story” for the third time.  

The play, based on a book Ginger’s mother, Eva Rutland, wrote in the early 1960s about the Rutland family’s joys and challenges traversing life as a middle-class Black family in Sacramento, was first staged at the Pioneer Congregational United Church of Christ in 2015 before a successful run at the Sacramento Theatre Company in 2019. 

Ginger had tweaked the play along the way and was set to have it staged at the Guild Theater in 2020, but the theater went dark when COVID hit. It’s now back at the Guild, opening Nov. 8 for a three-week run, with a cast that includes Broadway actor Francois Battiste as her father, Bill Rutland, and local actors Imani Mitchell as Eva and Brooklynn T. Solomon as Ginger. 

Ginger describes her mother’s book as “the story of a well-educated, middle-class Black woman born and raised in the segregated Jim Crow South who moves to Sacramento in 1952 with her husband and four young children.” And Ginger describes her play as “not another play about Black grievance. It’s the love story of my parents and of our family. My mom wanted to show a huge swath of Black America who were missing from the narrative — the Black middle and upper classes.” 

Ginger’s perspective on her mother’s book and her own play reveals her deliberate choice to highlight the positives of Black experiences, emphasizing love, joy and triumph, a narrative often overlooked in mainstream storytelling in favor of stories about struggle. 

“I see a lot of Black theater that’s sad,” Ginger said. “I’ve been Black all my life and things just aren’t all that bad. I wanted to write a play that talked about the fun and joy of being Black. Yes, there [was] discrimination, but there was, and is, an awful lot of triumph too. We overcame those challenges and thrived by accomplishing the American Dream.” 

The play, and Eva’s book, describes some of the discrimination they faced in Sacramento, including the redlining that determined where Black people could buy a house. The racist practice systematically denied services such as mortgages, insurance loans and other financial services to residents of certain areas, based on their race or ethnicity. 

Ginger comes from a family of trailblazers — her father was a civilian logistics expert at McClellan Air Force Base during a time when there weren’t many Black men working there. And her mother wrote her ground-breaking book in 1964, then began her long career as a Harlequin Romance author. 

Ginger herself has always been a trailblazer. She started her journalism career with KCRA in the ‘70s as their first Black woman reporter. She then worked at KRON in San Francisco for 10 years before coming back to her hometown in 1988 as a member of The Sacramento Bee editorial board and a regular commentator for Capital Public Radio. 

Rutland recently spoke to us about her family stories, her experiences growing up in Sacramento and what it was like to be one of the first Black women to work at a local TV newsroom. 

Why did your family choose to move to Sacramento? 

We moved here in 1952 — mom, dad and four children including me. My dad was working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio as a civilian logistics expert — one of the only Blacks on base. He wanted a transfer to California, discovered McClellan Air Force Base Sacramento, and came up with a clever plan. He sent his resume with his photo attached to Air Force bases outside of California — all which rejected him. When he sent his resume to McClellan he did not attach a photo of himself, and was accepted.  

What neighborhood did your family move into and what were the restrictions in Sacramento? 

My dad had a Black real estate agent but was only shown dilapidated houses, so he went by himself and saw a Curtis Park house for sale, and since he saw Asians across the street, he figured they would also sell to African Americans. Our neighborhood was integrated with Asians, Blacks and whites. 

We moved to Curtis Park, 2622 27th Ave. At the time, that was the only part of Curtis Park that was outside the redlining. 

What were your own childhood memories about Sacramento? 

They were mostly happy. I grew up loved and protected. I knew we were Black, of course, and that came with a certain amount of tension. If you behaved badly, it would reflect not just on you and your family but on all Black people, too. 

What was it like in school as one of the few African American girls? 

“I didn’t experience any overt discrimination, but you were always aware when you were the only Black in a situation. They would separate the few Black students in elementary school, so we weren’t in the same classes, and you were last chosen as a dance partner in dance class. In high school [at McClatchy High School], whites only dated whites and Blacks only dated Blacks. We didn’t go to white kids’ parties. We had our own parties. 

Did your mom’s writing inspire your own path in journalism? 

My mother taught me about the beauty of language, but it was my father who really inspired me to be a journalist. He subscribed to every newspaper and news magazine of the era, and we watched the Civil Rights struggle play out every night on TV news. Those are the things that inspired me to become a journalist. 

What was it like when you broke barriers as one of the first African American women getting into journalism? 

When I started at KCRA in Sacramento, I was one of the first Black women on camera. I had a big afro, which was pretty unusual at the time. I did stories about Oak Park, which was really depress[ing] at that time. I also covered the [1978] Bakke decision; the Supreme Court ruling involving a white man who claimed he was a victim of reverse discrimination when he was denied admission to UC Davis Medical School. The ruling did not end affirmative action but altered it substantially. 

What do you hope people take away from your play? 

I hope they learn something about their own community, how difficult it was to get a job and to get a house. And our history of what it feels like to be told “I can’t serve you” and the humiliations — an arc that stretches from World War II and the post-war years, to the Civil Rights movement and Black Power movement, and the challenges we still face today.  

But I hope they also take away the joy and fun that was in our family despite what they faced. This is a love story of my parents and of my family.  

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.