One day, she was directing a play rehearsal on the stage of Seattle's Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. The next, Jacqueline Moscou was being escorted out of the building like a criminal.
That's how the artistic director describes what happened Oct. 19, when her Parks Department supervisor, Eric Friedli, handed her a letter putting her on paid administrative leave. Without any prior discussion, much less a disciplinary memo, Moscou says she was forced to lock up her computer, turn in her keys, and leave.
The cause? After being hired in 2002 as Langston Hughes' first artistic director -- one the Parks Department specifically put in charge of reinvigorating African-American arts at the city's historic Central District theater -- Moscou was told she was too pro-Black.
"The crux of the allegations against Jacqueline [are] that she only wants to hire African Americans and only wants to promote African Americans," says Antoinette Davis, one of Moscou's attorneys. "There is just no merit behind the allegations."
She had disagreements with other staff about whether Parks' was living up to its agreed-upon mission to serve the Black community, "but none of that, none of that," Moscou says, "added up to actually being walked out of the building." The development has shocked many who have followed Moscou's career as an actress, playwright, and director over the past 30 years in Seattle, including the last 10 directing Intiman Theatre's annual production "Black Nativity," a gospel musical by the poet Langston Hughes.
On Nov. 28, more than 70 people attended a meeting at the theater that was supposed to be about the Parks Department's business strategy and turned into a major airing of grievances about its ability and commitment to manage the center as a Black arts organization, with some suggesting the theater spin off from Parks as its own community organization. On Dec. 11, 12 people held a candlelight vigil for Moscou outside Langston Hughes while the theater's advisory council held a closed-door meeting to discuss her administrative leave, which has left Langston without an artistic director to run Moscou's programs.
As a result, Davis says, the production that Moscou had been rehearsing -- Dinah Was, a play about jazz singer Dinah Washington -- fell to pieces after the lead actress broke her ankle. But other programs that Moscou instituted, such as the African American Film Festival and the Back to its Roots Hip-Hop weekend, will continue, says Manuel Cawaling, the theater's managing director.
Moscou says she fought five years to get the Parks Department to honor what it started in 2000, when Parks reorganized Langston Hughes as a performing arts institution.
"They were looking to become a world-class performing arts center and they knew they needed to make some leadership and staff changes to do it," Moscou says. The problem she discovered after Parks hired her in 2002, however, was that "There was no real groundwork laid for the change to take place, so what you had instead of effective change was turmoil." Shortly after being hired, Moscou says she wrote a grant to pay for a community survey taken between 2003 and 2005. The results of the Roots Project, she says, showed that community members wanted an authentic performing arts institution that spoke "to, for and by the African American voice" as well as providing a training ground for young Black performers -- a critical finding at a time, Moscou says, in which gentrification was already displacing many Black families in Seattle's Central District.
But, at every turn, Moscou says, Parks staff resisted her authority and leadership in creating that vision. "Instead of being an asset, I was a thorn," she says, but she's not surprised: "As a woman and a Black person, we are often described as difficult, and worse, when we actually have an opinion that we want people to listen to."
The Parks Department would not comment on Moscou's leave. But, "Parks will listen carefully to the voices of all who want to be heard," says spokesperson Dewey Potter, "and will hold a full discussion of the issues."
In the meantime, Moscou is waiting for a decision from a Parks Department fact-finding hearing she attended Nov. 7. But the larger issue, Moscou says, is what happens now at Langston Hughes. "If one person has walked out of the building, even if it wasn't me, and no art can take place," she says, "it says something about the infrastructure [and] the commitment."