Why Janelle Monae Should Play Sister Mary Antona Ebo?

Janelle Monae should play Sister Mary Antona Ebo if they ever decide to do a film on her. Monae has been getting busy with these various acting roles. She recently starred in the film, Harriet. She was also a voice actor in Lady and The Tramp and Ugly Dolls. Monae will also star in Antebellum next year.

Antebellum is an upcoming American horror film written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz.

Monae would give the Sister Antona Ebo role Justice. She has proven she can carry a movie like this with good box office numbers. She is also evolving as an actress.

Sister Antona Ebo left a lasting impact on social justice and civil rights as a whole, especially in part to African-American society. It started when she traveled to Selma, Alabama, for the Selma March in March of 1965. Initially she wasn’t going to go, but after “Bloody Sunday” she couldn’t help but to partake in the movement. “Bloody Sunday” was when Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists held a peaceful protest, until the police and white vigilantes ambushed activists by clubbing, beating, and using police dogs on them. Sister Ebo was the only black woman religious (or nun) to fly to Selma, until she rallied a group of sisters to go. Seeing her presence there, along with the others from the convent were inspiring to the protestors.

On top of Sr. Ebo being there, nuns of the 1960s were of a whole new era. They crossed boundaries into culture, they followed the works of the seperate orders of black nuns from previous generations which were to participate in helping African-American communities, and they left their traditional apostolic works within Catholic institutions to try something broader. These new works would be crossing racial lines to address basic human needs.

Sr. Ebo was a huge figure in the march and from it she used her voice and public status to accomplish running a hospital in 1968. She welcomed all. Shaped by a traumatic past experience in which her dying father was refused admission to St. Mary Hospital in St. Louis, according to historian Shannen Dee Williams, Sr. Ebo “refused to abandon God’s call on her life or accept white supremacy as normal in the church.” Along with the hospital, she became the founder of the National Black Sister’s Conference, she received her master’s degree in theology, she was a council leader for the community of St. Louis, among other notable accomplishments. Thinking of social justice and Sr. Ebo’s contributions to society, we are better able to appreciate the radical decision she made to become one of three African-American women to join the Sisters of Saint Mary. Sister Roberta Fulton, in her book God’s Work in Living Color, describes Sr. Ebo as a “Harriet Tubman and Moses for her people. She is very committed. She has been a mentor to a lot of us. She says things like ‘Keep on keeping on.’”