Black Voices Matter: AVIATRIX
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
A Journalist Wrote the Play. The SABJ Is Bringing It to the Stage, to the Community — and to the Airwaves
March 14, 2026 | 4:30 – 6:30 PM
Northwest African American Museum
2300 S Massachusetts St, Seattle, WA 98144
SEATTLE, WA — More than a century after Bessie Coleman became the first Black and Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license, her story remains largely outside the mainstream historical record — the kind of erasure that journalism exists to correct, and that the performing arts exist to make impossible to ignore. On March 14, 2026, the Seattle Association of Black Journalists brings both disciplines to the same room. Black Voices Matter: Aviatrix arrives at the Northwest African American Museum as an evening built on a single premise: that a story this significant deserves every form it can take.
Veteran Seattle News Anchor and Reporter Angela Poe Russell was inspired by this story to become a playwright as well as a journalist. and it is precisely that combination that gives Aviatrix its compelling authority. Her original musical follows Coleman’s arc from the cotton fields of Texas to the skies of France, tracing a life that forced the world to expand its definition of who belongs in the air. This Black Voices Matter showcase features a special preview performance of Aviatrix, followed by moderated conversation hosted by Tyrah Majors and moderated by Deborah Horne, with audience engagement that is designed to carry the story beyond the walls of the museum. The complete musical will premier at Seattle Public Theatre in May.
Essex Porter and KD Hall serve as Executive Producers of both the live event and its broadcast production in their roles as board members of the Seattle Association of Black Journalists. The production will later be broadcast and streamed on Conversations with KD Hall.
Proceeds from the event support the Patricia Fisher Endowed Scholarship, which advances the next generation of Black journalists.
SABJ: Black Voices Matter is, at its core, an act of journalism — one that uses every form available to place the stories of Black people where they have always belonged: in the historical record, in living memory, and in the hands of the next generation.
TICKETS
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