Lost Voices in Black History

In response to the national conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter, we at the Mint would like to affirm our solidarity with those who are currently seeking social justice. It is our mission to unearth lost plays and playwrights and we now commit to searching out the lost plays by Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. We have made a commitment to share our discoveries with you in a monthly series entitled "Lost Voices In Black History", co-curated by S.J. de Matteo and Aviva Helena Neff.

An archive of past newsletters can be accessed here.

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

Eulalie Spence
June 11, 1894 – March 7, 1981
Eulalie Spence was a Black playwright, teacher, director, and actress who immigrated to New York City from the British West Indies. She was an influential member of the Harlem Renaissance, writing fourteen plays, at least five of which were published during her lifetime. Spence, who described herself as a “folk dramatist” who made plays for fun and entertainment, was considered one of the most experienced female playwrights of the early 20th century, and received arguably more recognition than other Black playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance period. She presented several plays with W.E.B. Du Bois’ Krigwa Players, and was also an early mentor to theatrical producer Joseph Papp, founder of The Public Theater. Perhaps most notably, she became the first Black woman to be produced on Broadway in 1927 after a one night bill of her play The Fool’s Errand.

 

Early Life & Education
Spence was born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies on June 11, 1894, to Robert and Eno Lake Spence, the oldest of seven girls. She spent her formative years on her father’s sugar plantation. The plantation was destroyed by a hurricane, and she moved to New York City with her family in 1902, living in Harlem before eventually settling in Brooklyn. Because of her father’s difficulty in finding steady employment, Spence and her family lived in meager circumstances.

Spence overcame her impoverished childhood and managed to obtain an exceptional education. She graduated from Wadleigh High School and the New York Training School for Teachers. In 1924 she was a student at the National Ethiopian Art Theatre School, which was dedicated to the training and employment of Black actors. She received a B.A. in 1937 from New York University and an M.A. in speech in 1939 from Columbia University, where she studied under the great Hatcher Hughes.

 

Writing Career
W. E. B. Du Bois, founder and editor of The Crisis, the monthly journal of the N.A.A.C.P., surmised that Black Drama must be built from scratch, by Blacks for a Black theater. In 1926, he founded Krigwa (Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists). Krigwa sponsored a yearly literary contest that included a playwriting competition and fostered a theater company, the Krigwa Players, which rehearsed and performed at the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library. Spence finished second in the 1926 Krigwa playwriting contest for her one act play Foreign Mail. She went on to win four additional cash prizes from various other literary magazines for her plays Her, The Hunch, and The Starter.

The plays of Eulalie Spence helped to make a name for the Krigwa Players amongst both Black and white critics, however Spence and Du Bois did not see eye to eye, artistically or politically. Tensions between the two came to a head in 1927 when Spence’s play The Fool’s Errand competed in the Fifth Annual International Little Theatre Tournament. Spence was declared one of the winners, her play was published by Samuel French and The Krigwa Players were awarded a $200.00 cash prize (nearly $3,000 today). Du Bois took the $200.00 prize money and used it to reimburse production expenses and paid neither the actors nor Spence. The Krigwa Players disbanded as a result.

Another play by Spence, On Being Forty,  was produced  at least twice in the 1920s, once in October of 1924 by the National Ethiopian Art Theatre, then again in May of 1927 by the Bank Street Players of Newark, the first Black Theater in New Jersey. Spence also directed two plays, Before Breakfast by Eugene O’Neill and Joint Owners in Spain by Alice Brown for the Dunbar Garden Players, a short-lived theater group that was named in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

 

The Whipping
Spence’s only three-act play was her last, The Whipping, adapted from a novel written by Roy Flannagan. Spence crossed racial barriers when she approached the white author to secure publishing rights, and by hiring a white agent, Audrey Wood, who also represented Tennessee Williams. Spence cast Queenie Smith, a popular Broadway actress in the 1920s, in the lead role for the play, which was scheduled to open at the Empress Theatre in Danbury, Connecticut in 1933. The production was canceled without explanation four days before it was to open, and a disheartened Spence optioned the screenplay to Paramount Pictures for $5,000.00 (the equivalent of nearly $96,000 today). Shortly thereafter, the screenplay was filmed as Ready for Love, a 1934 film starring Ida Lupino and Richard Arlen. However, the studio refused to credit Spence as the author — a fact which she herself did not acknowledge until a public interview in 1973.

 

Mentorship of Joe Papp
Spence began teaching in the New York public school system in 1918. She spent over thirty years teaching elocution, English, and dramatics at the Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, where one of her most notable students was a young Joseph Papp. Spence was a progressive thinker who challenged her students to discuss social norms. Teaching in a predominantly white classroom, she encouraged her students to think about race and gender in the literature they studied, something that was almost unheard of prior to the 1960s. Her methods clearly had a tremendous effect on Papp, who later called Spence “the most influential force in his life.” He continued to speak about her in reverential terms well into his later life. Papp credited Spence with “scrubbing his tongue” of its Brooklyn accent and eliminating his “gutter speech” by teaching him grammar and proper enunciation. She brought professional actors to the class and gave her students poetry and plays to read outside of school. Papp would later note their particular relationship stating;

“She was interested in me. She made me feel good about myself. She took me under her wing… And she was interested in an area that I seemed to find interesting: language.” 

What’s interesting is that while Papp never forgot the impact Spence made on his life and career, he was entirely unaware of her life as a professional playwright, only learning about her theatrical work years later at a museum exhibit.

 

Critical Response & Later Interpretation 

Spence received significant critical acclaim throughout her career as a playwright. In reviewing her play Her in 1927, theatre critic William E. Clarke wrote in The New York Age,

“Her… was by far the best of the bill. It was a ghost story and was written with such skill that it rose to the heights of a three-act tragedy that might have been written by Eugene O’Neill.”

In the years that immediately followed  her death, white scholars systematically dismissed the merit and complexities of Spence’s writing due to her inclusion of Black dialect. However, in more recent years we have seen a shift in acknowledging her tremendous contributions to modern american drama. Spence was responsible for a major shift in attitudes on dialects in race drama by the mid 1920s. In their book Black Theatre, USA: Plays by African Americans: The Recent Period, 1935-Today, Theatre historians James Hatch and Ted Shine noted the significance of Spence writing “black characters into non-racial plots.”Contemporary scholar and writer Dr. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory has gone as far to say that Spence could be credited with “initiating feminism in plays by black women”.

 

Death & Legacy
Eulalie Spence died in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on March 7, 1981, at the age of 86. She had been living at the home of her niece, Patricia Hart, and died at the Warner Hospital. Hart occasionally corresponded with writers inquiring about her aunt, providing photos and additional biographical information. Spence’s obituary made no mention of her career as a playwright, saying only that she was a retired schoolteacher.

Spence has been overshadowed by the counterparts of her day such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson. While her name has been revisited on occasion in the twenty-first century by theatre historians, her powerful legacy and rightful place in theatrical history has become all but forgotten.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography 

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

Marita Bonner
June 16, 1899 – December 7, 1971
Marita Odette Bonner (Occomy) was an African American writer, essayist, and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance Era. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. Bonner is perhaps most noteworthy for extending the cultural reach of the Harlem Renaissance to Washington D.C., and Chicago — as she herself was never a resident of Harlem. She published three plays, three essays, and seventeen short stories during her lifetime.

 

Early Life & Education
Marita Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Joseph and Anne Noel Bonner. Bonner was one of four children, brought up in Brookline — a middle-class community in Massachusetts. She attended Brookline High School, where she contributed to the school literary magazine, The Sagamore. She excelled in German and Musical Composition, and was also an accomplished pianist. After graduating high school, she enrolled in Radcliffe College in 1918. During her four years  of study, Bonner was forced to commute to school from home, as African-American students were not permitted to board on campus. She excelled both academically and socially at Radcliffe — majoring in English and Comparative Literature, while continuing to study German and Composition.  

Two years after completing her studies, Bonner took on a position at Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C. — where she taught until 1930, during which time her mother and father both passed away unexpectedly. While in Washington, Bonner became closely associated with poet, playwright and composer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson’s “S Street Salon” was an important meeting place for many of the writers and artists involved in what was being called the “New Negro Renaissance”.

 

Writing Career
Throughout her career, Bonner served as a frequent contributor to The Crisis (the magazine of the NAACP) and Opportunity (the official publication of the National Urban League). She wrote three plays — The Pot Maker (1927), The Purple Flower – A Play (1928) and Exit, an Illusion (1929) — the most famous being The Purple Flower, which portrays black liberation. Many of Bonner’s written work dealt with poverty, poor housing, and colorism in the black communities. Bonner is one of the many frequently unrecognized black female writers of the Harlem Renaissance who resisted the universalizing, essentialist tendencies by focusing on atypical women rather than on an archetypal man. She regularly explored themes of poverty, familial relations, urban living, colorism, feminism, and racism in her works. Bonner was wholly opposed to generalizations of black experience, and wrote about several differing black experiences in her short stories and plays. She is thus remembered as an advocate for intersectionality and a documentarian of multicultural urban life. 

In 1930, Bonner married William Almy Occomy — the couple then moved to Chicago, where Bonner’s writing career took off. After 1941, Bonner gave up publishing her works and devoted her time to her family, including three children. She began teaching again in the 1940s and finally retired in 1963.

 

The Purple Flower
The Purple Flower is a one-act play widely considered to be Bonner’s masterpiece. Not set in any specific place or time, the piece utilizes hyper-theatrical themes to paint a chilling allegory for racial injustice in the United States. The play’s text was well received, and won Bonner first prize in the 1927 Crisis Magazine Literary Awards. The play is credited as the first known experimental work by an American woman of color — foreshadowing avant-garde playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy and María Irene Fornés of the Off-Off Broadway movement in the 1960s. 

A masterful mixing “biblical imagery and political allegory” the play seemed to “disrupt the thin skin of civilization.” The cast includes two sets of characters — “the Us’s”, who represent African Americans — and the White Devils. The White Devils live on the hill, located “Somewhere,” atop of which grows “the purple Flower-of-Life-at-Its-Fullest”. The stage is divided into two levels, separated by a thin board that Bonner calls the “thin-skin-of-civilization.” “The Us’s” occupy the upper level, which holds the dialogue and main action. The lower level is occupied by the “White Devils”, who have no dialogue but dance around and mimic the action on the upper level. The individual characters among” the Us’s” represent a variety of attitudes of the oppressed. 

The Purple Flower was never produced during Bonner’s lifetime.

 

Influence on the Harlem Renaissance
Bonner’s career had a significant impact on the period, as her writings addressed the struggles of people who lived outside of Harlem. Her greatest involvement in the movement was her emphasis on claiming a proud racial and gender identity. She argued against sexism and racism and encouraged other black women to join her quest for understanding, knowledge, and truth as a means to combat the oppression of race and gender. She also encouraged African Americans to use the weapons of knowledge, teaching, and writing to overcome inequalities. Unlike most Renaissance writers, she focused her writings on issues in and around the city of Chicago. Several of Bonner’s short stories addressed the barriers that African-American women faced when they attempted to follow the Harlem Renaissance’s call for self-improvement through education and issues surrounding discrimination, religion, family, and poverty. 

Bonner’s works focused on the historical specificity of her time and place. In “On Being Young — A Woman — And Colored”, Bonner explores the complex layered identity of black womanhood, discussing the difficulties that come with belonging to two distinct marginalized classes. She describes it as a “group within a group”, and discusses the frustrations that come with expressing anger not only as a woman, but as a black woman – she is doubly expected to express her anger with her own oppression “gently and quietly”, once from white society and once more from black male society. She is one of many writers of the era whose efforts to discuss intersectionality were groundbreaking, but have since been dismissed, forgotten, and largely eradicated from modern literary and theatrical canon.

 

Death & Legacy
Bonner died tragically from smoke inhalation during an apartment fire on December 7th, 1971. Her daughter, Joyce, later found two unpublished stories her mother had written. She arranged to have all her mother’s collected works published in one volume. 

Critical exploration of Bonner’s life and work has noticeably diminished in the twenty-first century, having been at its peak in the late 1980s. The Purple Flower made its world premiere at The Factory Theatre in Boston in 2014 — 87 years after it was written. The production received rave reviews and inspired a surge of performances on college campuses across the country — including a 2018 production at the Yale School of Drama.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography 

Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph. “Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’ Gardens.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 1987, pp. 165–182.

“Published writings, 1925-1941”. Papers of Marita Bonner, 1940–1986, SC 97, 5. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

“Marita Bonner .” Race, Gender, & Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne C{u28A5}Saire, Dorothy West, by Jennifer M. Wilks, Louisiana State University Press, 2008, pp. 74–75. 

Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. NetLibrary, Inc., 1999. 

Kent, Alicia. “Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism“. Legacy. Vol. 28, no. 1, 2011, pp. 141–143.

Brown, Amy. “Marita Odette Bonner (1899-1971) .” •, Black Past, 3 June 2020, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bonner-marita-odette-1899-1971/. 

“Marita Bonner.” Marita Bonner: Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Winner, chicagoliteraryhof.org/inductees/profile/marita-bonner. 

“Intimate Circles: Marita Bonner.” Intimate Circles | Marita Bonner, brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/awia/gallery/bonner.html.

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

Angelina Weld Grimké
June 16, 1880 – December 7, 1958
Angelina Weld Grimké was a poet, dramatist, journalist, teacher, essayist, radical feminist and lesbian icon. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880, she was raised in a biracial family with a considerable history of social activism. She is widely considered to be the first woman of color to have a play professionally produced in the United States. Since her death, Grimké has been venerated as a foremother of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke acknowledged her role as a significant transitional figure, calling her “a pioneer and path-breaker from whom the artistic vanguard inherited fine and dearly bought achievements.”

 

Early Life & Education
Angelina Weld Grimké was born on February 27th, 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father Archibald Grimké was a prominent African-American lawyer, while her mother Sarah Stanley was white and a successful writer. Stanley’s family was scandalized by the marriage, and the weight of their disapproval ultimately proved to be too much for the young couple. In 1883 Stanley left her husband and took young Grimké with her to live in the midwest. Four years later in 1887, Grimké was sent back to live with her father, and her contact with her mother became extremely limited. Sarah Stanley Grimké committed suicide several years later.

Growing up with her father in Massachusetts,  Grimké was educated at some of the best private schools the state had to offer.  Inspired by her late mother’s letters at the age of thirteen, Grimké began writing poetry. Her first poem The Grave in the Corner, was published in 1893 in the Norfolk County Gazette. She continued to publish her poetry throughout high school. Upon graduating she enrolled in the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (which later became a part of Wellesley College) supplementing her education with classes at Harvard University. In 1902, after completing her studies, she and her father moved to Washington, D.C to be closer to Archibald’s brother, Francis.

 

The Grimké Family
The Grimké name carries a long legacy of advocacy for racial justice. Archibald Grimké was a prominent Black lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Archibald was born into slavery near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1849. He was the child of Nancy Weston (an enslaved woman) and Henry W. Grimké (her white owner). After obtaining his freedom, he enrolled in college, graduating from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, serving as a co-founder and National Vice-President of the NAACP. His younger brother Francis James Grimké was a Presbyterian Minister and graduate of Princeton. Francis was regarded for more than half a century as one of the leading African-American clergy of the era, and was also a prominent activist in his own right.

Angelina’s paternal great aunt (and namesake) Angelina Emily Grimké was an abolitionist, political activist, women’s rights advocate, and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were the only white Southern women to become abolitionists. Together they traveled the abolitionist lecture circuit recounting their firsthand experiences with slavery on their family’s plantation. In February 1868 the sisters came across an article about Lincoln University, praising the academic prowess of a student named Grimké, who came to the university “just out of slavery”. Stunned, the sisters investigated, and found that Archibald and his siblings were her brother’s children. She and Sarah welcomed the boys and their mother as members of their family, and began financing the boys’ educations.

The Grimké Family legacy of radical social activism had a deep impact on Angelina’s writing career. If you wish to learn more about the Grimké family, please refer to Mark Perry’s biography Life Up Thy Voice (which can be purchased here).

 

 

Writing Career
Grimké worked as a teacher in Washington D.C for twenty-eight years. She first taught at Armstrong Manual Training School in both the physical education and English departments. It was during this time that she began to write. In 1907 she moved to a teaching position at the storied M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School) for Black students, renowned for its academic excellence, high-quality faculty, and progressive ideology. Grimké taught at the school for twelve years — during this time one of her pupils was the future poet and playwright May Miller.

While living in D.C Grimké published a large output of essays, short stories, and poems. Her works appeared in esteemed publications including The Atlantic, The Boston Evening Transcript, The Crisis, and Opportunity (among others). Her works were also collected in various anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance, including Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923, edited by Robert Thomas Kerlin), The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925, edited by Alain Locke), Caroling Dusk (1927, edited by Countee Cullen), and The Poetry of the Negro (1949, edited by Langston Hughes). These accomplishments aside, her greatest career success came in 1916 with her first full length drama, Rachel.

 

Rachel (Blessed Are the Barren)
With the financial stability of her teaching career, Grimké began to focus on her writing. She garnered critical acclaim for her poetry, much of which consisted of tributes to great African Americans, grief elegies, observances of nature’s beauty, and semi-veiled Queer love poems. Lynching was another common theme in Grimké’s work as she began to employ her pen to affect change. She was prolific and, though largely overlooked today, helped usher in the Harlem Renaissance before Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes became household names.

The NAACP put out a call for plays by Black authors as a vehicle to rally support against the infamous film The Birth of Nation. Grimké answered that call with her groundbreaking three-act drama, Rachel (originally entitled Blessed Are the Barren). The plot concerns the humble Loving family — the matriarch, Rachel Loving loves children and longs to be a mother, but after seeing the devastating effects racism has had on the children she cares for, and learning that her father and brother were lynched (her mother had kept the cause of their deaths secret), begins to grapple with the devastating realities that accompany raising black children.

Rachel is a lost landmark of American theatre. Regarded as the first play by an African American woman to ever be produced professionally, the play saw its first production in 1916 at the Miner Normal School, a teachers college for African Americans founded by abolitionist Myrtilla Miner. With a cast of local, African American thespians, the NAACP touted the production as “The first attempt to use the stage for propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the millions of Colored citizens in this free republic.” The production was a success, and was produced again the following year at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City.

Rachel would receive further attention, garnering critical acclaim after it was published as a book in 1920. Alain Locke commented that Rachel was “the first successful drama written by a Negro and interpreted by Negro actors.” The script has been reprinted multiple times over the past century — a scan of the first edition can be accessed online for free here. Rachel made it’s UK debut to critical acclaim in 2014 at the award winning Off-WestEnd, Finborough Theatre — a British company celebrated for their “rarely seen, rediscovered 19th and 20th century plays.”

 

Death & Posthumous Queer Legacy
Grimké retired from teaching in 1928. For the next two years she cared for her father during his final illness. After his death in 1930, Grimké ceased writing and moved to New York City. Her time in New York is somewhat of a mystery — she lived in seclusion, overwhelmed with the seemingly impenetrable barriers towards racial, gender, and sexual equality. She died in 1958 at the age of seventy-eight.

Following her death, her work published posthumously revealed an additional layer of her identity: her sexual orientation. While her writings published in her lifetime alluded to lesbian eroticism, those published following her death confirmed her Queer identity. The Dictionary of Literary Biography: African-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance states: “In several poems and in her diaries Grimké expressed the frustration that her lesbianism created; thwarted longing is a theme in several poems.” Many of these unpublished poems are explicitly lesbian, implying that she lived a life of suppression, “both personal and creative.”

It is believed Grimké was in a lengthy adolescent relationship with playwright Mary P. Burill. In 1903, Grimké and her father had a falling out when she told him that she was in love. Archibald Grimké responded with an ultimatum demanding that she choose between her lover and himself. Grimké family biographer Mark Perry speculates that this “lover” was a woman, and that Archibald may have already been aware of his daughter’s sexual identity. Burill later entered a life-long partnership with the renowned academic Lucy Diggs Slowe — Grimké passed away having had no known romantic partners during her adult life. 

Over the course of the past five decades Grimké’s unpublished writings have been championed by Historians and Queer Theorists, venerating her to the status of  “lesbian icon”. This past February, NewNowNext published a Black History Month article entitled: “Harlem Renaissance at 100: Angelina Weld Grimké, Lesbian Poet Laureate.”

 

 

 

Bibliography 

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

William Alexander Brown
William Alexander Brown was an American playwright, actor, and theatrical producer. Originally from the British West Indies, he moved to New York City where he founded The African Grove Theater in downtown Manhattan, the nation’s first commercially successful all-Black theatre company. Brown is widely considered by historians as America’s first known Black playwright.

 

Biography
Not much is known about Brown’s early life, including his date of birth. Born in the West Indies, he spent much of his early and young-adult life at sea, working as a steward. In 1815 he retired from his career as a steward on a Liverpool liner and purchased a house in New York City on the north side of Thompson Street. He noticed the lack of entertainment centers for free urban Blacks, and in 1821 he decided to open up an establishment in the backyard of his home that he called the African Grove. The “lavish affairs” he hosted included brandy and gin-toddies, wine-negus, porter and strong ale, accompanied with cakes and meats. In addition to offering food and drinks he encouraged his patrons to participate in the reading of poetry and performing dramatic interludes. One of his frequently invited guests was James Hewlett, a fellow retired steward and theater enthusiast. Inspired by Hewlett’s encouragement, Brown acquired a two-story building on the corner of Mercer and Bleeker Street. He converted the second floor into a 300-seat theatre and named it the The African Grove Theatre.

 

The African Grove Theatre
For some years, the African Company— the repertory players of the African Grove — played classics and many other plays with an entirely Black cast and crew for (mostly) Black audiences. This was the first commercially successful Black theater in the history of New York City. At the height of their success, Brown had to build an extra level of seats in the theater just to accommodate the white audiences that also wished to see their performances. 

The most popular plays at The African Grove were Shakespeare’s Richard III and Othello. The actors took creative liberties with the play texts and added songs and dance interludes to the original material. One critic described an 1821 production as follows:

“…Negroes resolved to get up a play, and used the upper apartments of the African Grove for a performance of Richard III. A dapper, wooly haired waiter at the City Hotel personated the royal Plantagenet in robes made up from discarded merino curtains of the ballroom. Owing to the smallness of the company King Henry and the Dutchess were played by one person. (Odell, George. National Advocate, 21 September, 1821).

 

The Drama King of Shotaway
In 1923 The African Grove Theatre made history when they produced Brown’s play The Drama of King Shotaway, founded on Facts taken from the Insurrection of the Caravs on the Island of St. Vincent, written from Experience by Mr. Brown (1823) — the first known play by a Black playwright in the United States. The play was based on the life of Joseph Chatoyer (Satuye), a Garifuna chief who led a revolt of Black Carib people on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent against the British colonists in 1795. It has been theorized that Brown may have drawn inspiration for the play from his own first hand experience, seeing as Brown’s career at sea coincided with the Carib Wars and the transatlantic slave trade. Unfortunately, little else is known about the play as there are no existing copies of the text.

 

Racism & Backlash
“The African Grove Theatre and Company had to be mobile when they started doing plays because the police were constantly raiding their performances and pressuring them to stop performing, due to the rowdiness of the white members of the audience. William Over states that the whites had initially found it curious and amusing that a company of Black actors was attempting to do Shakespeare, but that they later became very hostile. The African Theatre attempted to remedy the situation by creating a partitioned area for whites at the back of the theatre, but the hostile whites continued to create disturbances which eventually closed the theater.” -Jonathan Dewberry

Brown’s theater proved to be highly successful and threatening to neighboring theaters, particularly when he opened up a theater space next door to the well-established Park Theater. Shortly after, the police shut down the theater after complaints from Stephen Price (the owner of the Park Theater) and white theater goers.  Brown continued performing outdoors illegally, but these final attempts proved to be in vain. The last recorded performance of the African Theatre occurred on Mercer and Houston Street in January 1824.

 

Mentorship of Ira Aldridge
Shortly before the tragic end of The African Grove Theatre, a young actor named Ira Aldridge joined the repertory company. Under the mentorship of Brown he was trained in the works of William Shakespeare. Confronted with the persistent discrimination which Black actors had to endure in the United States, Aldridge emigrated to Liverpool, England in 1824. There he would go on to have a legendary stage career, becoming one of the most celebrated Shakespearian actors of the nineteenth century. 

Aldridge is the only actor of African-American descent among the 33 actors of the English stage honored with bronze plaques at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. He was especially popular in Prussia and Russia, where he received top honors from heads of state. At the time of his sudden death, while on tour in Poland, he was arranging a triumphant return to America, with a planned 100-show tour to the United States.

 

Death &  Legacy
Brown went bankrupt after the forced shutdown of The African Grove Theatre. There is little information about his later life, but he is believed to have passed away in 1884. It was not until after the American Civil War that all-Black theatre companies began to emerge again.

Brown established the first US theater that catered to Black audiences in the way that only white audiences had been catered to previously. It was one of the first spaces that gave free Black citizens a sense of inclusion, as well as the ability to immerse themselves in theatrical culture and see a reflection of themselves in works written by Black playwrights and performed by Black actors. 

Brown’s life has been immortalized by playwright Carlyle Brown’s 1994 drama The African Company Presents Richard III. The play has been performed throughout the United States, and was published by Dramatist Play Service — it can be purchased here. 

In 2017, the Daytime talk-show The View did a brief segment on Brown and The African Grove Theatre for Black History Month. The segment can be viewed here, or by clicking the image below.

 

 

Bibliography 

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

Georgia Douglas Johnson
(September 10, 1877 – May 15, 1966) 
Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1877 – May 15, 1966), was a Black poet, playwright, cultural commentator, musician, and activist. A trailblazer in every sense of the word, Douglas was the most prolific playwright, and the most widely published woman poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Over the course of her career she wrote 200 poems (published in four volumes), 28 plays, and 31 short stories. 

In addition to her astounding literary output, Douglas is remembered as the founder of the famous S Street Salon in Washington, D.C. — one of the most celebrated literary salons of the 20th Century — and for serving under President Calvin Coolidge as the Commissioner of Conciliation in the Department of Labor. Johnson’s literary success made her the first Black woman to get national notice for her poetry since Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and made her arguably the most famous Black woman writer in the United States until the rise of Alice Walker.

 

Early Life & Education
Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp was born on September 10, 1877, in Atlanta, Georgia to Laura (née Douglas) and George Camp. (In an autobiographical sketch Johnson recalled her first school days were in Rome, Georgia before moving to Atlanta with her mother). Her mother was of mixed African-American and Indigenous American heritage, while her father was of mixed African-American and European heritage.

Douglas received her primary school education in Atlanta, where she excelled in music, reading, recitation, and physical education. It was during this time that she developed a lifelong love of music that she expressed in her plays, which make distinct use of sacred music. In 1893 she graduated from Atlanta University (the HBCU known today as Clark Atlanta University) at just 16 years old. She then embarked on a teaching career in both Atlanta and Marietta, Georgia. In 1902 she left teaching  to pursue her love of music, studying composition at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio (she would continue to compose original music until 1959). She returned to Atlanta and served briefly as a school principal, and in 1903 she married Henry Lincoln Johnson, a prominent Black attorney and Republican politician. The couple had two sons.

The Johnson family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1910, as Henry was appointed as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a political patronage position under Republican President William Howard Taft. The Recorder of Deeds was at the time “regarded as the premier political patronage position reserved for Black Americans.” While the city had an active cultural life among the elite people of color, it was far from the Harlem literary center of New York, to which Douglas was attracted. Douglas’s marital life was at odds with her artistic ambitions, as her husband was not supportive of her writing — insisting that she devote more time to becoming a “homemaker”, rather than publishing poetry. Nevertheless, in 1916 The Crisis (the official journal of the NAACP) began regularly printing Johnson’s poetry, and two book-length collections of her verse soon followed: The Heart of a Woman (1918), and Bronze (1922).

 

Poetry & Politics
Douglas had already begun to submit poems to newspapers and small magazines when she lived in Atlanta. While her first poem was published in 1905 in the literary journal The Voice of the Negro, her first full-length collection of poems was not published until 1916. The poems in her first collection, The Heart of a Woman, are largely apolitical; Johnson wrote them under the influence of prominent African-American critic William Stanley Braithwaite, who encouraged his peers to aim for “refinement and lyricism” rather than topical concerns. Braithwaite also wrote the introduction to the collection and praised them for these qualities:

“The poems in this book are intensely feminine and for me this means more than anything else that they are deeply human.” 

By contrast, the poems in Bronze are explicitly focused on issues of gender and racial justice. Johnson herself was self-conscious about this change in emphasis, but felt she had a responsibility as the mother of “Black children born into the world’s displeasure.” In keeping with Johnson’s active participation in the Congregationalist Church, many of the poems in Bronze have an optimistic tone — communicating her faith, and her belief that racial justice is possible. During the 1920s, Douglas Johnson traveled extensively to give poetry readings, serving as a beacon of hope in her community. 

Johnson’s husband Henry Lincoln died unexpectedly in 1925, forcing her to become the family’s primary wage earner. She struggled initially, taking on menial clerical work — but as a gesture to her late husband’s loyalty and political service, Republican President Calvin Coolidge appointed Johnson as the Commissioner of Conciliation in the United States Department of Labor— a groundbreaking appointment for a Black woman. She held this position for nine years, investigating the hazardous working conditions that many low-income Americans endured in the early 20th century. She was relieved of her duties in 1934, during the regime change of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her time at the DOL provided her with the financial stability to focus on her writing, and informed the political nature of much of her work. She went on to work in DC Public schools, and sold articles to newspapers as a freelancer, earning enough to send both her sons to college (her son Peter was a graduate of Dartmouth and Howard Medical School, while her son Henry Lincoln, Jr. was a graduate of Bowdoin College and Howard Law School).

 

Anti-lynching Activism 
Although Johnson spoke out against race inequity as a whole, she is perhaps most remembered as a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement, as well as a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition. Her activism was primarily expressed through her plays, first appearing in the play Sunday Morning in the South in 1925. Johnson was a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke. The organization sought a federal anti-lynching bill.  

Johnson refused to give her plays happy endings since she did not feel it was a realistic outcome, as a result, she had difficulty getting her plays published. However, her anti-lynching activism was immortalized through her poem The Ordeal, which was published in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation. The outspokenness of her plays is sometimes credited with her obscurity as a playwright, as racial violence was considered a taboo subject.

 

Plays
Johnson was a well-known, and well respected figure in the National Black Theatre Movement. Arguably the greatest cultural ambassador of the Harlem Renaissance, she assembled and inspired the group of artists and intellectuals who generated the next generation of Black theatre artists and educators. In total, Johnson wrote 28 plays, only eleven of which exist today. These eleven titles include, A Sunday Morning in the South (1925), Blue Blood (1926), Paupaulekejo (1926), Plumes (1927), Safe (c. 1929), Blue-Eyed Black Boy (c. 1930), Starting Point (1930s), William and Ellen Craft (1935), Frederick Douglass (1935), And Yet They Paused (1938), and A Bill to Be Passed (1938).

In 1926, Johnson’s play Blue Blood won honorable mention in The Opportunity drama contest. Her play Plumes won the competition the following year in 1927. Plumes is a folk drama that relates the dilemma of Charity, the main character, whose baby daughter is dying. She has saved up money for the doctor, but she and her confidante – Tilde – don’t believe the medical care would be successful. She has in mind an extravagant funeral for her daughter instead – with “plumes, hacks, and other fancy trimmings.” Before Charity can make a decision, her daughter dies. Plumes was produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre between 1928 and 1931. 

All of Johnson’s plays were radical, interrogating subjects like the inadequacy of the American healthcare system, the lack of rights and resources for Black veterans, the economic disparities tethered to race, and interracial marriage. At the end of her life, she compiled a formal catalogue of her writings. She divided the 28 plays  she wrote into four groups: “Primitive Life Plays”, “Plays of Average Negro Life”, “Lynching Plays” and “Radio Plays”. The first section of her plays, “Primitive Life Plays”, features Blue Blood and Plumes, which were both published and produced during Johnson’s lifetime. Johnson was one of the only women whose work was published in Alain Locke’s anthology Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. Although most of her plays are lost, the typescripts for eleven of her plays exist in collections at multiple academic institutions. Dr. Akasha Gloria Hull is credited with the rediscovery of many of Johnson’s plays. In her book Color, Sex, and Poetry, Hull argues that Johnson’s work needs to be reclaimed as an exceedingly distinguished product of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

Music & Weekly Newspaper Column
According to Johnson’s Catalogue, she produced at least two dozen “written and copyrighted” songs, including a “Georgia State College School Song” (for the future Savannah State University), and she collaborated with the classical singer/composer Lillian Evanti on several published pieces. Much of Johnson’s music is now archived in The Georgia Douglas Johnson Collection, which appears in Small Collections in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale University. 

In addition to her poetry, playwriting, prose writing, and work with the DOL, Johnson wrote a nationally syndicated Newspaper Column entitled “Homely Philosophy” from 1926 – 1932. The column was published in 20 different newspapers, including The New York News, The Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Tribune, and The Pittsburgh Courier. Her column achieved wide-spread popularity, and helped many members of the Black community cope with the realities of the Great Depression.

 

The S Street Salon
Shortly after her husband’s death, Johnson transformed her house at 1461 South Street NW into “The S Street Salon”, which would become one of the most famous literary salons of the 20th century. S Street was a place where Black artists and intellectuals like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Eulalie Spence would come together for readings, workshops, and discussions. The S Street Salon helped to nurture and sustain creativity by providing a place for Black artists to meet, socialize, discuss their work, and exchange ideas. According to Scholar Akasha Gloria Hull, Johnson’s role in creating a place for Black artists to nurture their creativity made the movement a national one because she worked outside of Harlem and therefore made a trust for intercity connections. Dr. Elizabeth McHenry describes Johnson in her book Forgotten Readers as

“A woman of tremendous energy, much of which she channeled into her effort to create for the writers who gathered in her home on Saturday nights an atmosphere that was both intellectually stimulating and properly supportive.”

Johnson called her home the “HalfWay House” for friends traveling, and a place where they “could freely discuss politics and personal opinions” and where those with no money and no place to stay would be welcome. While Black men were allowed to attend her weekly meetings, they mostly consisted of Black women, many of whom she personally mentored. These women included the likes of Angelina Weld Grimke, Marita Bonner, May Miller, Mary Burrill, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Zora Neale Hurston. They would later become known as the “Saturday Nighters.” Johnson was especially close to Miller and Grimké, providing extra care and support in nurturing their creative voices. The Salon was known to have discussions on issues such as lynching, women’s rights, and the problems facing Black families. Johnson continued this tradition for 40 years.

 

Later Life, Death, and Legacy
In 1962, Georgia Douglas Johnson published her fourth and final volume of poetry, Share My World. The collection’s titular poem “Your World” describes the journey of a person recognizing their potential in the world, using a bird in flight as a metaphor to represent the brave act of “flying” free from the limitations that would keep them from reaching their fullest potential. Johnson wanted her final published work (and her life) to serve as a testament for all the Black women who came after her, stating “Your world is as big as you make it”.

In 1965, Atlanta University presented Johnson with an honorary Doctorate of Literature, praising her as:

 

“A sensitive singer of sad songs; faithful interpreter of the feminine heart of a Negro with its joys, sorrows, limitations and frustrations of racial oppression in a male-dominated world; dreamer of broken dreams who translated her disappointments into such memorable and immortal lines as: “The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / and enters some alien cage of its plight, / and tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / while it breaks, breaks, breaks, on the sheltering bars …”

 

Johnson died in Washington, D.C. home on May 15, 1966. Much of her unpublished work was lost, including many papers that were discarded after her funeral. At the time of her death, her protege the poet and playwright May Miller, sat at her bedside, stroking her face while repeating the words “The poet, Georgia Douglas Johnson”. 

Georgia Douglas Johnson remains not only the most prolific poet and playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, but also the most criminally neglected. Her tremendous legacy has become almost entirely lost to history, a mere footnote in the lives of her contemporaries and proteges. Like so many women writers who came before her, Johnson was acclaimed during her life, forgotten after her death, and is now relegated to the margins of literary and theatrical history.

 

 

 

Bibliography 

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

May Miller
(Jan. 26, 1899  —  Feb. 8, 1995)
May Miller was an award-winning playwright, poet, and professor who first came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Miller was the most widely published female playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, having nine of her twenty plays selected for publication during the height of her playwriting career. She was active in the famous literary salons of Georgia Douglas Johnson, and later held salons in her own home, using Johnson’s as a model. Miller helped establish the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, serving as Chair of the Literature Panel for the Commission’s first three terms. From her retirement from teaching in 1943 until her death in 1995, Miller dedicated herself to writing poetry, publishing nine books of poems, and one edition of “collected works” — including Dust of Uncertain Journey (1975), Halfway to the Sun (1981), and Collected Poems (1989).

 

Early Life
May Miller was born in Washington, DC to Annie May Butler and the famed author, philosopher, and sociologist Kelly Miller. Kelly Miller was a distinguished member of the Black intellegentsia of the early 20th Century who described himself as one of the “first fruits of the Civil War, one of the first African Americans who learned to read, write and cipher in public schools.” He was the first Black student to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he studied advanced mathematics, physics and astronomy. Kelly Miller was appointed professor of mathematics at Howard in 1890, and founded the schools Sociology department in 1895. He  graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1903, and was appointed Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1907. 

Miller’s childhood home was located on the university’s campus, and served as a gathering place for the Black intellectuals and artists. She often told stories about having to give up her childhood room for visits by her fathers friends W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar. She also spoke of visits by Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke. Miller attended the famed Dunbar High School in DC, where she studied under famous playwrights Mary P. Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimké. It was during this time that her father introduced her to his friend Georgia Douglas Johnson. Miller became an active weekly participant of Johnson’s S Street Salon, one of the most famous literary salons of the 20th century. Miller’s writing flourished under Douglas’s  mentorship, and the two would remain close until Douglas’ passing in 1966.

Miller graduated from Dunbar High School at the age of 16, continued onto Howard University where she graduated at the top of her class in 1920 (a draft of her valedictorian speech is archived, along with all of her publications and personal letters at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University) and won an award for her play Within the Shadow.

 

Career as a Playwright 
As a drama major at Howard University, she directed, acted, and produced plays while collaborating with Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory in the founding of a Black drama movement. For periods from 1920 – 1925, she lived in Harlem, and at other times, she traveled there from Washington with her friends Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. It was during this time that she pursued graduate studies in both poetry and drama at American University in Washington DC, and Columbia University in New York City. In the subsequent years she moved to Baltimore and taught speech and drama at Frederick Douglass High School. While in Baltimore, she worked with the Krigwa Players (a multi-city theatre company, co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and Regina M. Anderson), which gave her the opportunity to continue acting. It was during this time that she wrote some of the most important plays of the Harlem Renaissance. Her 1925 play The Bog Guide won a prize in a contest held by Opportunity magazine that also awarded works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen. The following year her play The Cuss’d Thing was an honorable mention in a drama contest sponsored by Opportunity. Her play Scratches was published in The Carolina Magazine in 1929.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Miller wrote twenty one-act plays, including Christophe’s Daughter (1935), In The Dark (1930), and Samory (1935). Many of her plays, like Scratches (1929), Stragglers in the Dust (1930), and Nails and Thorns (1933), addressed racial issues including colorism, classism, lynchings, and the experience of Black Americans in the United States military. She also wrote many historical plays about the Black experience, four of which were anthologized in the 1935 anthology, Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Miller sought through her writing to portray Black people with a level of “respect and dignity” that had been absent in drama. She married John Sullivan in 1941 and wrote her last play, Freedom’s Children on the March, in 1943. The following year she retired from the Baltimore schools system and turned her attention to poetry.

While Miller achieved tremendous success in the world of publishing dramatic literature, she would never live to see a professional New York staged production of one of her plays. However, in 2017 New Perspectives Theatre Company in Association with the New School for Drama presented two readings of Miller’s plays, as well as a selection of her poetry.

 

Teacher & Poet
Miller spent twenty years teaching Speech, English, Theater, and Dance at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, Maryland. She retired from teaching in 1945, and inspired by the work of the Chicago Imagists and Archibald Macleish, turned her attention towards writing poetry. Miller had begun writing poetry at an early age, and often wore a pair of earrings she had purchased with her earnings from her first published poem. Miller was a prolific poet — she published nine poetry collections, and her poetry was found in the pages of well-known literary magazines, including Poetry, Phylon, The Antioch Review, The Crisis, The Nation, and The New York Times. Her success as a poet led to her being named poet-in-residence at Monmouth College, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and West Virginia State College, Bluefield. She also served as a guest lecturer at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. 

Miller’s work enjoyed critical acclaim well into the 1980s. O.B. Hardison, former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote, “May Miller is a Washington institution… a leader of Washington’s poetry community.” May served as poetry coordinator of the Friends of Arts program in the District of Columbia Public Schools. Miller’s poetry was once praised by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks as “excellent and long-celebrated”. Former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hayden once said that “Miller writes with quiet strength, lyric intensity. She is perceptive and compassionate, a poet of humane vision.” 

When the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities was established, Miller was named chair of the Literature Panel for three terms. In 1976 she read her poetry at the inauguration of Washington D.C.’s first home-rule mayor, Walter Washington. The following year she read at the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. Her works have been immortalized in the 1972 Library of Congress collection of poets reading their own work.

 

Death &  Legacy
By the end of her life, Miller’s published plays included The Bog Guide (1925), Scratches (1929), Stragglers in the Dust (1930), and Nails and Thorns (1933) Christophe’s Daughters (1935), Harriet Tubman (1935), Sojourner Truth (1935), and Samory (1935).

Her published volumes of poetry include Into the Clearing (1959); Poems (1962); Lyrics of Three Women: Katie Lyle, Maude Rubin, and May Miller (1964); Not That Far (1973); The Clearing and Beyond (1974); Dust of Uncertain Journey (1975); and The Ransomed Wait (1983). Editor of Green Wind (1978) and My World (1979), she also authored a book of children’s poems, Halfway to the Sun (1981). 

May Miller died on February 8th 1995, at the age of 96. Her lengthy obituary in The Washington Post concluded with the following; 

“She wrote with feeling about people and places in and around Washington and about memories and folk tales from her childhood. In the 1970s and 1980s, she often read her poems aloud at formal and informal settings.One of her favorites was a poem titled “Pond Lament,” which was influenced by stories about croaking frogs and which she liked to deliver in a frog-croaking style; “Who’ll dig my grave when I die? Not I. Not I. Who’ll pay my debts when I die? Not I. Not I.”

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

by S.J. de Matteo

 

Zora Neale Hurston
(Jan. 7, 1891  —  Feb. 8, 1960)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, anthropologist, filmmaker, performer, and dramatist. A star of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s career spanned more than three decades, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than 50 short stories, essays, and plays.

Prolific in her day, and forgotten after her death, Hurston went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. However, interest in her work was revived in March of 1975 after Pulitzer-Prize winning author Alice Walker published the article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine. Today Hurston is celebrated as one of the most distinguished American artists of the 20th Century.

 

Early Life
Hurston was the fifth of eight children born to John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). John was a Baptist preacher and local politician, and Lucy was a school teacher. All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. As a small child her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897, and in 1902 he was asked to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist. Valerie Boyd, acclaimed writer and author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, had this to say of Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville:

“In Eatonville, Hurston was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of Black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see Black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town’s two churches and see Black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood.”

Hurston’s mother died in 1904, and her father quickly remarried Mattie Moge in 1905. They sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, though they eventually stopped paying her tuition and she was dismissed.

 

Education
Hurston did not return to school until 1917, when she enrolled in Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore, Maryland. In order to qualify for a free high-school education, Hurston began claiming 1901 as the year of her birth (a lie she would use for the rest of her life). She graduated from Morgan in 1918. She then began her studies at Howard University, in Washington, DC. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for Black women, and co-founded The Hilltop, the university’s still existent student newspaper. She took courses in Drama, English, Spanish, Greek, and Public Speaking, and earned an associate degree in 1920. She continued taking classes at the university, and in 1921, she wrote the short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea”, which garnered her much praise and an invitation to join Alain Locke’s literary club, The Stylus. 

In 1925 accepted a scholarship from Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer to Barnard College of Columbia University. While at Barnard she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas. She also worked with noted folklorist Ruth Benedict, and future anthropologist Margaret Mead. Hurston received her B.A. in Anthropology in 1928, when she was 37; she was Barnard’s first Black graduate. After receiving her B.A., Hurston studied for two years as a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University, working further with Boas during this period.

 

Literary Career
When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of its central writers. In Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, Valerie Boyd describes Hurston’s bold entrance onto the scene in the following words:

“Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity Magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story “Spunk,” a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions. The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room–jammed with writers and arts patrons, Black and white–and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: “Colooooooor Struuckkkk!” Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived.” 

 

Anthropology & Folklore

From 1927 – 1932 Hurston immersed herself in the cultural practices of various diasporas in the American South and throughout the Caribbean. This research greatly informed her writing. Her 1935 book, Mules and Men explores stories she collected in two trips: one in Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, and one in New Orleans. Hurston’s decision to focus her research on Florida came from a desire to record the cross-section of Black traditions in the state. In her introduction to Mules and Men, she wrote, “Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West”. Hurston documented 70 folktales during these trips to Florida. Her trips to New Orleans yielded a number of stories about Marie Laveau and other voodoo traditions. The book embraces both her own re-immersion into the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document Black traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences. Subsequently, Mules and Men has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as Ethnography and Critical Race Theory.

 

Career as a Playwright

Despite being celebrated for her fiction and anthropological research, Hurston’s role as a playwright has not received significant attention from critics and scholars of her work. Her love for theatre was born during her teenage years while working as a maid for a touring Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. This love solidified while studying drama at Howard University, where she became interested in playwriting and producing. Hurston believed that the richness of Black culture and folklore could achieve its fullest potential on the stage, if it could be shared in an unadulterated form. Hurston’s output as a playwright was prolific, we know she wrote many plays, unfortunately many of her manuscripts are believed to be lost. The total number of plays penned by Hurston remains unknown. At present, eight of her plays, and two full-length musicals are archived in the Zora Neale Hurston Plays Collection at the Library of Congress.

In 1925 Hurston published her one-act play Color Struck in the magazines Opportunity and Fire!!. The play received much critical attention and was possibly staged by the Negro Art Theatre of Harlem. Her second one-act play The First One reinvented the biblical story of Noah and the Curse of Canaan with an all Black cast. The play was published in the 1927 anthology Ebony and Topaz. A Collectanea. Hurston also served as a dramaturge and performer for two white-authored Black musical reviews: Jungle Scandals and Fast and Furious. She wrote some scenes for Jungle Scandals (which was canceled before it’s first performance) and authored four of the thirty-seven sketches in Fast and Furious, which she also performed in. The show opened on September 15, 1931, and closed after just one week of performances due to poor reviews. Hurston hated the experience, writing to a friend that white producers “take all the life and soul out of everything and make it fit their idea of what Broadway should be like” and that they “squeezed all the negro-ness out of everything”. However she later noted that these experiences taught her “a lot about the mechanics of the stage” which proved important for her later playwriting endeavors. 

Hurston bounced back with her most successful production in 1932, when she self-produced The Great Day on Broadway at the Golden Theatre. The play, consisting of a collection of spirituals and folk music, followed the lives of workers at a railroad camp. The production was written, directed, choreographed, and performed by Hurston, with a company of forty-one actors. Hurston financed the play with her own. During its initial run the play received rave reviews and ran for several months — it even began touring throughout the country. The Great Day had subsequent performances at the New School for Social Research and the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York City. Hurston wrote in a letter to her patron Charolette Osgood Mason that upon seeing the play “George Antheil, the French composer, paid me the compliment of saying I would be the most stolen-from Negro in the world for the next ten years at least. He said that this sort of thievery was unavoidable. Unpleasant, of course, but at the bottom a tribute to one’s originality.”  Despite this success, Hurston never recouped the money she put into the initial production. The program from the original Broadway run can be accessed here.

 

 
As the community of writers, artists, and intellectuals who formed the Harlem Renaissance were dispersed by the Great Depression, Hurston sought refuge in academia. In 1934, she established a school of dramatic arts at the HBCU, Bethune-Cookman College, in Daytona Beach Florida. In 1956 the university bestowed her with an award for “Education and Human Relations” in recognition of her achievements in drama. (The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy). Later in life she worked as a professor in the drama department at another HBCU, North Carolina Central University in Durham. She ultimately returned to Florida.

 

Later Life & Death
During her last decade, Hurston worked as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. In the fall of 1952, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, the Editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to go to Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. Hurston had a special assignment to write a serialized account, The Life Story of Ruby McCollum, over three months in 1953. This job ended abruptly when she and Nunn disagreed about her pay, and she left. This incident with the Pittsburgh Courier was a recurring theme throughout Hurston’s life. While Hurston had been lauded with awards and critical-acclaim, she was chronically underpaid. For this reason, she struggled financially at the end of her life. For a short period she lived with family in Florida, but eventually left due to underlying hostility and resentment towards her writing — as Hurston had based much of her material on her family and childhood friends. She eventually had to enter the St. Lucie County Welfare Home, as she was unable to take care of herself. She died of heart disease on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her remains were placed in an unmarked grave, in a service unattended by her family. The opening line in her obituary from The New York Times read “Zora Neale Hurston, author, died in obscurity and poverty on Jan. 28,  it was reported today.”

 

In Search of Zora Neale Hurston
In the early 1970’s, future Pulitzer-Prize winning author Alice Walker made the personal discovery of Hurston as an author. Outraged that she had never known of her existence during her studies at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence College, Walker began researching Hurston’s life and career. Eventually, in 1973 Walker found the unmarked gravesite where Hurston had been buried. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with “ZORA NEALE HURSTON – A GENIUS OF THE  SOUTH / NOVELIST / FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST – 1901 – 1960.”  Walker chronicled this process in an article entitled  “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in a 1975 edition of Ms. Magazine. Walker lobbied for renewed interest in Hurston, and it worked. Many of her major works have been republished (perhaps most notably by the Library of America), she is the subject of numerous conferences and doctoral dissertations, and her life has been chronicled in various books and films. Her most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, has sold millions of copies since 1990, and was made into a feature length film in 1999 by Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones, starring Halle Berry.

 

Posthumous Publication & Legacy
After Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer and friend, Patrick DuVal, passing by her house, stopped and put out the fire, saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. You can read the full story here. 

Hurston infamous collaboration with Langston Hughes, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, was produced on Broadway in 1991 by Lincoln Center Theater, and was published shortly there after. Hurston’s manuscript for Every Tongue Got to Confess, a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously in 2001. Her nonfiction book Barracoon was published in 2018. Eatonville, Florida celebrates Hurston’s life every year with the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. Eatonville is also home to the Zora Neale Hurston Museum of Fine Arts. The Zora Neale Hurston House in Fort Pierce has been designated as a National Historic Landmark. Hurston was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994, and the New York Writers Hall of Fame in 2010. An excerpt from her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road was recited in the documentary film August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, directed by Ava DuVernay, which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

by S.J. de Matteo & Aviva Helena Neff

 

Mary P. Burrill
(August. 28, 1881  —  March. 13, 1946)
Mary P. Burrill was a Black playwright, educator, and activist whose work was prominent before and during the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Washington D.C. in the 1880s, Burrill was educated at Dunbar High School, and was the first known Black graduate of Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She became the second Black woman produced on Broadway when her play Aftermath competed against Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and J.M. Barrie in the 1928 Little Theater Tournament at The Frolic Theatre. Burrill is remembered for her complex and politically disruptive plays that chronicled the Black Experience and women’s reproductive rights in early 20th century America.

 

Early Life & Education
Mary P. Burrill was born in Washington, D.C. to John H. Burrill and Clara E. Burrill. She was educated at M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School) for Black students, renowned for its academic excellence, high-quality faculty, and progressive ideology. There she developed an interest in literature and theatre. Upon graduating from high school in 1901, she moved with her family to Boston, where she enrolled at Emerson College and became the first Black student to graduate from the school in 1904. During Burrill’s adolescence and early adulthood, she had a romantic relationship with Angelina Weld Grimké, later a famous poet, educator, and playwright. Letters between the two date back to 1896, when Mary and Angelina were 15 years old. 

Burrill returned to Emerson in 1929, and received a B.L.I. (Bachelor of Literary Interpretation) degree in 1930. During her junior year, Burrill wrote Unto the Third and Fourth Generations: A One Act Play of Negro Life. The play was published in the college yearbook of 1930 and earned the title of “Best Junior Play of the Year.”

 

Teacher & Playwright 
After graduating from Emerson in 1904, Burrill returned to Washington D.C in 1905 to teach at Armstrong Manual High School. In 1907 she became the Director of the Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression, and later returned to her alma-mater, Dunbar High School, where she remained until her retirement in 1944. She was much loved as a teacher of English, Speech, and Drama, and encouraged many of her students to write plays. These students included Willis Richardson (the first Black playwright produced on Broadway) and May Miller (the most published playwright of the Harlem Renaissance). During her early years of teaching, she wrote The Other Wise Man, a monologue she presented to high school and community audiences every Christmas season.

In 1919, two of her best known plays, They That Sit in Darkness and Aftermath, were both published. They That Sit in Darkness first appeared in a 1919 edition of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, a progressive monthly publication that advocated for women’s reproductive rights. In this one-act, a young mother keeps having children even after midwives caution her to “be careful.” She eventually dies in childbirth, and her eldest child must forgo college to care for her brothers and sisters. The play shows birth control as a way to escape the cycle of poverty. Burrill considered her plays to be deliberate acts of political protest advocating radical positions on race and gender issues. 

Burrill was a prominent member of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famed S Street Salon, among the likes of Angelina Weld Grimke, Marita Bonner, May Miller, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Zora Neale Hurston.

 

Aftermath
Burrill’s most remembered play, Aftermath, was first published in April of 1919 in an edition of Liberator, a white, left-wing periodical edited by the socialist Max Eastman. The play is noteworthy for anticipating the events of the Red Summer of 1919 when white supremacist terrorism and racial riots took place in more than three dozen cities across the United States. The play tells the story of the Thornton family as they eagerly prepare the return of John Thornton, who has been fighting overseas in WWI. John has just been awarded the French War Cross for single-handedly fighting off twenty German soldiers and saving the lives of his entire company. As the plot unravels, it is revealed that while John was abroad his father was lynched by white mob, and his sister Millie has chosen not to tell him. The play ends with John, having returned home and learned the truth, loading his service revolver and leaving home to settle the score. The play was met with critical praise upon its publication, but was not performed professionally until nine years later when staged by the Krigwa Players in 1928. 

The Krigwa players were co-founded W.E.B. Du Bois and playwright Regina M. Anderson in 1925 to “advance the careers of Black playwrights and actors.” The Krigwa Players achieved great commercial success in ticket sales, and great critical acclaim from both Black and white critics in the late 1920’s. However, after an infamous feud with playwright Eulalie Spence in 1927, Du Bois left the company (you can read more about this story in our Eulalie Spence newsletter). After his unceremonious departure from the company, Du Bois contacted Burrill requesting permission for the players to enter her play Aftermath as their bid for the 1928 Little Theater Competition. Burrill agreed, unaware that Du Bois was no longer affiliated with the players.

The production was a critical success, with the New York Daily News writing; “The Krigwa Players presented the only original play of the evening, Aftermath, the work of Mary Burrill. It had moments of beauty and salient points of pathos.” However the play was criticized for its “cheap melo-dramatic claptrap” ending, an ending Burrill did not write. The Krigwa Players added an additional scene in which John returns to the stage having been shot, and melodramatically dies onstage. Burrill was furious about the change, which had been undertaken without her awareness or consent. (The effect was to dull the militancy of Burrill’s message, perhaps in deference to the white producers of the theatrical tournament.) Devastated, Burrill wrote to Du Bois and called on him at his home, but he would not see her. Transcripts of their letters show him writing her weeks later, admitting that he had never actually read Aftermath, nor was he in any way involved with the production. 

Burrill would not live to see any of her plays produced in New York again. However, in 2015 JACK in Brooklyn produced a reading of Aftermath, directed by Courtney Harge of the Colloquy Collective. The reading marked the first in a series highlighting black-authored anti-lynching plays running at JACK as part of their Forward Ferguson series, focused on artistic work tied to racial justice movements of the past and present. In 2021 the Metropolitan Playhouse and Artemisia Theatre both announced plans for virtual readings of Aftermath.

 

Relationship with Lucy Diggs Slowe

Burrill’s partner of twenty-five years, Lucy Diggs Slowe, was also a woman of remarkable achievement. Slowe received her BA from Howard University, where she was one of the nine original founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first sorority founded by Black women. She was instrumental in drafting the sorority’s constitution, and served as the chapter’s first president. After graduating in 1908, Slowe returned to Baltimore to teach English in high school. During the summers, she started studying at Columbia University in New York, where she earned her Masters of Arts degree in 1915. Slowe was also a tennis champion, winning the national title of the American Tennis Association’s first tournament in 1917, making her the first Black woman to win a major American sports title. In 1922, Slowe was appointed the first Dean of Women at Howard University, the first Black woman to serve as Dean of Women at any American university.

Burrill met Slowe in 1912 — three years later Slowe moved to DC to teach at Armstrong Manual Training Academy, and the two women began a relationship. Close friends of the couple, most of whom were other Black women writers and educators, treated them as a couple.  Slowe and Burrill decided to buy a house at 1256 Kearney Street in nearby Brookland, then a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood in Northeast Washington. They lived together on Kearney Street for over fifteen years. Their home became an important gathering place, as Burrill and Stowe would host  parties and intellectual gatherings attended by female Howard students and prominent writers and artists, including Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. According to Robert Malesky, “That Kearny Street home became a refuge for Howard’s female students, and Slowe regularly hosted get-togethers there to talk, counsel and encourage her young charges, often meeting beneath the trees in her back yard or gathered around an open fire in the living room. The women also received many other guests there, mostly educators such as Mary McLeod Bethune, but also politicians and activists from around the country.” Burrill left Kearney Street in 1937 when Slowe passed from kidney disease.

The Slowe-Burrill house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020 for “its significance to African American and LGBT history.”

 

Mary P. Burrill and Lucy Diggs Slowe in the backyard of their DC home
(courtesy of the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

 

Death &  Legacy
Shattered by the death of Slowe, Burrill moved out of their house and into an apartment near Howard. She retired from Dunbar High School in 1944 and moved to New York City, where she died two years later on March 13, 1946. She is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

In 2019 Washington D.C. City Council member Kenyan McDuffie introduced a bill to the D.C. Council to build eight new statues depicting “accomplished women and people of color who were born and raised in D.C.” The bill identifies four names, including Mary P. Burrill. 

A sign on the African American Heritage Trail in Washington D.C. commemorates Burrill for writing “the first feminist play by a Black woman.”

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

by S.J. de Matteo & Aviva Helena Neff

 

Regina M. Anderson
(May. 21, 1901  —  February. 5, 1993)

Regina M. Anderson (May 21, 1901 —  Feb. 5, 1993), was a Black librarian, writer, activist, and interdisciplinary theatre artist. Remembered today as the “Librarian at the Nexus of the Harlem Renaissance,” Anderson’s life and work served as a catalyst for much of the cultural movement. Alongside friend and roommate Ethel Ray Nance she co-hosted the famed West Harlem Literary Salon, and co-organized the Civic Club Dinner of 1924, an event frequently cited as the “birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance.” An indomitable figure of Black Theatre History, Anderson co-founded the Krigwa Players with W.E.B Du Bois and later served as the Executive Director of the Harlem Experimental Theatre. An accomplished playwright, Anderson authored multiple plays that were published and produced in the 1930s, all under her pen-name “Ursula Trelling.” Frequently cited as the first Black person to head a branch of the New York Public Library, Anderson was instrumental in the early years of programming, acquisition, and community engagement at the 135th street branch, a location that would eventually become the celebrated Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

 

Early Life & Education
Regina M. Anderson was born in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, to Margaret Simons Anderson and William Grant “Habeas Corpus” Anderson. Her parents’ collective ancestry included African, Native American, East Indian, and European descent. Her mother was a ceramics artist, and her father was an esteemed attorney. Due to her parents’ success in their prospective careers, Anderson grew up in a well-respected, upper middle class family. After her parents’ divorce she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Normal, Illinois. After a few years she journeyed back to Chicago and graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1919. She studied at the Historically Black College Wilberforce University, where she cultivated a love for literature, and worked as an assistant librarian in the university’s Carnegie Library. After one year at Wilberforce she returned home to Chicago and was hired as a junior library assistant at the Chicago Public Library, while also taking classes at the University of Chicago.Anderson traveled to New York City in 1923 on vacation, but decided to stay after falling in love with the city. Once settled in New York she took a job at the Womrath Rental Library, later applying for a position at the New York Public Library. The NYPL hiring process demonstrates the complex topography of historic socio-cultural dynamics. When asked to give her race on the application, Anderson simply wrote, “I’m American.” Three or four days after completing her application, Anderson received a request to return to “discuss” her answers. When questioned again about her racial identification, she reaffirmed that she was an American, but Anderson was told “You’re not an American. You’re not white.”  Her interviewer eventually informed her that she was hired, but added, “we’ll have to send you to Harlem,” due to her skin color.

 

Librarian at the New York Public Library
Anderson was assigned to the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, where she worked under legendary activist Ernestine Rose, a trusted white ally who became an outspoken advocate for local Black Americans served by the branch. Anderson enthusiastically supported Rose in her community outreach activities, including co-curating the North Harlem Community Forum, which hosted famous speakers such as Franz Boas and W.E.B Du Bois (who had been a friend and client of Anderson’s father while in Chicago). Lectures covered a wide range of radical topics including “philosophy, war, peace, journalism, labor, psychology, sociology, economics, militarism, literary, poetry, theatre, race-relations, and more.” In her first year at the library Anderson notably invited Joseph Freeman, an early proponent of Marxism and Communism, to deliver a lecture regarding the legacy of American imperialism, and the French literary figure Anatole France, whose books had been banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Anderson also sought out University of Pennsylvania professor Scott Nearing, who had been fired for speaking against WWI.Anderson’s radical programming efforts received much attention, and in 1924 she was invited to grace the cover of a special issue of Messenger magazine, that featured “Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented, and successful.” The accompanying article by Theophilus Lewis celebrated her work at the library, stating that “The credit for a great deal of the success achieved this season is due to Miss Regina M. Anderson, who has largely directed and executed the difficult tasks of publicity and finance.” Anderson continued her successful public programming efforts, organizing lectures by influential figures such as famed Black Socialist Hubert Harrison, and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Anderson began attending City College in 1926, graduating in 1929. She later received a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Library Services. She eventually published an influential dissertation entitled, “A Public Library Assists in Improving Race Relations.”

 

Anderson with patrons at the 135th Street Branch. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/PUBLIC DOMAIN

 

The Harlem West Side Literary Salon
Soon after Anderson began her tenure at the 135th Street branch, she relocated to a fifth-floor apartment at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue with two other women, Ethel Ray Nance and Louella Tucker, both of whom worked for Opportunity Magazine, the official journal of the National Urban League. The apartment was spacious, and had a beautiful view, leading the three roommates to playfully refer to it as “Dream Haven.” Thanks to her roommates’ connections, “Dream Haven” became publicly known as the “West Harlem Literary Salon,” functioning as a salon and frequent gathering place for artists and intellectuals of the period (much like Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famed S Street Salon in Washington, D.C.). Anderson quickly immersed herself in Harlem’s burgeoning community of artists, and would soon form close bonds with writers Zora Neal Hurston, Jessie Redmond Fauset, and James Weldon Johnson; poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; and arts patron A’Lelia Walker (the daughter Madame C.J. Walker).In 1924, Zora Neale Hurston ended up moving in with the roommates for a brief period, staying on their couch. Later the same year, Anderson and Nance were enlisted to co-organize the March 21st, 1924 Civic Club dinner that united dozens of Black intellectuals, an event that would later be hailed as the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance. Afterwards, many of the attendees returned to Dream Haven with Anderson and Nance, to celebrate and “eat bacon and eggs.” After three years in the apartment Anderson moved out of Dream Haven upon marrying Bill Andrews, a lawyer for the NAACP, and future New York State Assemblyman.

Today Dream Haven is listed as an NYC LGBT Historic Site, thanks to the welcoming environment it created for various queer artists of the period.

 

A party on the roof of Regina Anderson’s home, at 580 St. Nicholas Ave. in Harlem. From left to right, attendees included Ethel Ray (Nance), Langston Hughes, Helen Lanning, Pearl Fisher, Regina Anderson (Andrews), Rudolf Fisher, Luella Tucker, Clarissa Scott (Delany), Esther Popel, Hubert Delany, Jessie Fauset, Marie Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. SCHOMBURG CENTER/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

 

Climbing Jacob’s Ladder & Other Plays
 In total, we know of four plays written by Anderson, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (1931), Underground (1932), Matilda (n.d.), and The Man Who Passed (n.d.). In 1931 the Harlem Experimental Theatre produced Climbing Jacob’s Ladder. The title of the play was derived from the Black American spiritual, “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” and tells the story of a lynching through a community gathering in a church. Anderson’s dramaturgy was unique amongst her peers, as her play was set outside of the home, and featured children. It is also noteworthy that Anderson’s children lacked all innocence, keenly aware of the violence they will face due to the color of their skin. Upon viewing the play, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to Anderson, saying “Your play was thrilling. I enjoyed it immensely, and it gripped the audience.” The play was historic for being one of the first professionally produced lynching plays written by a Black woman.

Anderson’s next two plays Underground and Matilda both tell the story of slaves escaping through the Underground Railroad. Underground was produced in 1932 at the New School for Social Research, and then again at St. Philips parish House. Anderson’s final play The Man Who Passed was never produced during her lifetime, but was published posthumously in 1996. The play was well ahead of its time, exploring the politics and isolation of “passing for white.” The Man Who Passed paved the way for future playwrights like Adrienne Kennedy and Cassandra Medley, who would later explore similar themes.

 

The Krigwa Players & The Harlem Experimental Theatre
In 1925 Anderson and W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded The Krigwa Players, with Du Bois serving as the company’s Chairman. The Krigawa Players were a new kind of theatre company devoted to advancing the careers of Black playwrights and actors. Revolutionary in every sense, the players achieved great commercial success in ticket sales, and received critical acclaim from both Black and white critics during the late 1920’s. Much of the company’s success was due to their ongoing creative collaborations with playwright Eulalie Spence. When the Krigwa players disbanded around 1928 (after W.E.B. Du Bois had  disastrous disputes with Eulalie Spence and Mary. P. Burrill), Anderson and other members of the Harlem community decided to organize the Harlem Experimental Theatre. Anderson later recalled:“When Dorothy Peterson, Harold Jackman, and one or two others sat with me and discussed how we could recreate the little theatre Dr. Du Bois had established with Krigwa, we met in the 135th Street Library… What do we want to do? What is our goal? What are we going to achieve? These were the questions…. And so, the Harlem Experimental Theatre was born.”

The group began producing in 1928 at the basement black-box theatre of the 135th Street Library. They found success with acclaimed productions of Plumes by Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Get Thee Behind Me, Satan by Robert Dorsey. Eventually the company started staging Anderson’s plays. While the company was still associated with the NYPL, Anderson wrote her under the pseudonym “Ursula Trelling,” in order to protect her job. Discontent with only producing and writing, Anderson took to the stage, starring in many productions as well. In 1931 the ensemble moved to St. Philips Parish House and continued producing many original works by Black authors, as well as several white authors. Legendary Broadway actress Rose McClendon joined the group later as a director, offering her professional guidance and expertise. The group continued to operate until the mid 1930s, when the Federal Theatre Project came to New York City, and many of their members defected. After the demise of her own company, Anderson continued to encourage and advise other little theatre group by Black artists, including the Harlem Suitcase Theatre and the American Negro Theatre. Anderson was a well-known, and highly respected figure in the Black Community during the Little Theatre Movement. As a cultural ambassador of the Harlem Renaissance, she assembled and inspired the group of artists and intellectuals who encouraged the next generation of Black theatre artists and educators.

 

Scene from the Harlem Experimental Theatre production of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder by Regina M. Anderson

 

Later Life
In 1938, Anderson was named the head of a New York Public Library branch on 115th Street, the first ever African-American to hold this distinguished title. She would later lead the Washington Heights branch, where she continued to welcome speakers, encourage community use of the library, and host theatrical groups. Anderson was honored at the 1939 World Fair in New York City by the Women’s service league of Brooklyn for her work with the NYPL and cultural programming. She was one of just 10 Black women recognized, alongside icons like Jessie Redmon Fauset (literature), Dorothy Height (religion), Augusta Savage (sculpture), Phillippa Schyler (piano) and Ethel Waters (the stage).

Due to the NYPL’s strict retirement policy, she left the library in 1966, at age 65, after 42 years of service. Before her retirement, Anderson served as the National Urban League’s Representative to the U.S. Commission for the United Nations. As the second Vice President of the National Council of Women, she worked with the State Commission for Human Rights. Anderson received countless awards, including an Asian Foundation grant that enabled her to visit India, Hong Kong, Japan, Iran, Thailand, and Afghanistan, to meet with visiting scholars who had been guests in the programs she directed at the library. She settled in upstate New York after her retirement, and in 1971 she and longtime friend Ethel Ray Nance co-edited a book titled Chronology of African-Americans in New York, 1921–1966.In 1980 Anderson was honored by AUDELCO for her contributions to African American Theatre, Debbie Allen and Gregory Hines co-hosted the event.

 

Death &  Legacy
Outliving virtually all of her friends and fellow artists of the Harlem renaissance, Anderson died on February 5th, 1993, at Bethel Nursing Home in Ossining, New York. She was 91.

In 2015, Dr. Ethelene Whitmire of the University of Wisconsin, Madison authored Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian (University of Illinois Press), a biography advocating for the inclusion of Anderson’s  legacy within the cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance.

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

by S.J. de Matteo & Aviva Helena Neff

 

Willis Richardson 
(November. 5, 1889  —  November. 7, 1977)
Willis Richardson was a pioneering Black playwright who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. In the words of eminent Black Theatre scholar Darwin Turner, “Willis Richardson… was not the first Afro-American to write a play, but he was the first significantly productive Afro-American playwright.” He made history in 1923 when his play The Chip Woman’s Fortune ran at the Frazee Theatre, making him the first Black playwright produced on Broadway. By the end of his life he had published two anthologies of Black plays, which contained the works of other playwrights as well as his own, a collection children’s plays, and 48 individual plays, 20 of which have been published; and most of the rest have been preserved at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Hatch-Billops Archives in New York City. To this day, Richardson is remembered as one of the most prolific American playwrights of the twentieth century.

 

Early Life & Education
Born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1889, Willis Richardson’s early life is shrouded in uncertainty. Not much is definitively known about Richardson’s parents, largely due to questions raised by his surviving family regarding elements of his personal autobiography. His mother, Agnes Ann Harper Richardson was a housewife who is remembered as “wholeheartedly devoted to raising her son”, although his family believes that Agnes was in fact his grandmother, and Richardson’s biological mother was Julia, his much older “sister.”  In his autobiography, Richardson names Willis Wilder as his father and recalls that he was a well-read bricklayer who heavily involved himself in Wilmington’s local Black politics.  This was significant because Wilmington was one of the few cities nationwide that had a community of Black Americans who occupied prominent social positions including elected offices and law enforcement.

At age nine, Willis Richardson and his family survived what is now known as the Wilmington Massacre of 1898. Angered by the success of the Black community, white supremacists launched a violent assault on Wilmington’s Black businesses and neighborhoods, destroying the newspaper offices and forcibly removing the democratically elected coalition of white and Black republicans from office. The white supremacists who incited the Wilmington Massacre killed up to 100 Black Americans and forced more than 2000 out of the city, overturning Wilmington’s majority Black census status. Like many other Black families, the Richardsons relocated to Washington D.C. shortly after the 1898 massacre, seeking a safer environment. Although Willis Wilder, Richardson’s father, is not frequently mentioned by Richardson or his family in surviving texts, Wilder is credited with encouraging Richardson’s love of reading and writing. Richardson recalls being teased by neighbors for reading too much:“I used to forget the rest of the world and become a part of the adventures of Frank and Dick Merriwell, Old King Brady, the Liberty Boys of Seventy-six, the James Boys, and others too numerous to mention.” 

While in D.C., Richardson attended the famed M Street School (later renamed Dunbar High School), the first Black public high school in the country, where he was mentored by playwright Mary P. Burrill. After graduating, Richardson was awarded a partial scholarship to Howard University, but his family could not afford to send him to college, so he studied via a correspondence school while working as a clerk at the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving.

 

“The Hope of a Negro Drama”
Inspired by Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel (1916) Richardson wrote a pioneering article for The Crisis entitled “The Hope of a Negro Drama”, in which he outlined the values he wanted to dramatize in his own plays;

“When I say Negro plays, I do not mean merely plays with Negro characters… Miss Grimke’s Rachel is nearer to this idea; still even this, with its Negro characters, is not exactly the thing I mean. It is called a propaganda play, and a great portion of it shows the manner in which Negroes are treated by white people in the United States. Still there is another kind of play; the kind that shows the soul of the people; and the soul of this people is truly worth showing.”

Richardson’s first adult play was published in The Crisis and produced in St. Paul, Minnesota the following year.

 

 

The Deacon’s Awakening
From 1916 to 1918, Richardson took correspondence courses in poetry and drama, and once he considered himself sufficiently prepared, he began to write plays, submitting them mainly to The Crisis, where his work came to the attention of the Editor, W.E.B Du Bois. In early 1920, Du Bois published four of Richardson’s children’s plays in The Brownie Book, a magazine for Black children that Du Bois himself edited. Richardson’s first adult one-act play, The Deacon’s Awakening, was published in The Crisis in November of 1920. The play was produced the following year by an amateur theatre troupe in St. Paul, Minnesota.The Deacon’s Awakening is a brief but dynamic play that explores the patriarchal power structures that exist within the Black church. A “suffrage drama” in nature, the play tells the story of a church deacon who, upon learning of a suffrage group in his congregation, plans to bring all the would-be women voters before the Church Board for disciplinary action; that is, until he learns that his own wife and daughter are active members of said group. Richardson is noteworthy for being the first male dramatist to critically engage with the complex nuances of sexism in the Black community.

Between 1921 and 1923, Richardson unsuccessfully campaigned to get The Deacon’s Awakening produced by the Howard Players in Washington, D.C. Richardson first approached noted author and librarian Edward Christopher Williams, as Williams had been one of his teachers at Dunbar High School and had since moved on to work at Howard. Williams was successful in placing Richardson’s plays in the hands of the Co-Directors of the Howard Players, Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory. Richardson stated in a 1972 interview, “They liked my writing and wanted to put on a play of mine, but you see the President of Howard University was a white man at the time and they couldn’t get his consent.” Upon hearing of this rejection, W.E.B Du Bois intervened, and put Richardson in touch with his friend Raymond O’Neil, the Artistic Director of the Ethiopian Players in Chicago, Illinois.

 

 

The Chip Woman’s Fortune
In the early 1920s the Ethiopian Players of Chicago wanted to produce a Black play, but didn’t know any Black playwrights. The Player’s Artistic Director reached out to W.E.B Du Bois, who put him in touch with Richardson. This connection resulted in the Players producing Richardson’s new play The Chip Woman’s Fortune, on January 29th, 1923. Described as a “folk drama in one-act,” The Chip Woman’s Fortune tells the story of a store porter in a small southern community who is about to lose his job because of an unpaid debt of purchase. The porter attempts to get money from an elderly woman who is rooming with his family, although she struggles to financially support herself  by picking up chips of wood and bits of coal in the street. What unfolds is an intimate tale of community, economic survival, and second chances.

The success of the original Chicago production led to its subsequent re-staging as part of a triple bill alongside Oscar Wilde’s Salome and a jazz interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. This re-staging opened in Washington D.C. on April 23rd, 1923; at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem on May 7th, 1923; and finally on Broadway at the Frazee Theatre on May 15th, 1923. This production is of tremendous historic significance, as it was the first dramatic work by a Black author to be produced on Broadway (Black writers had previously been represented on the Broadway stage in musical and vaudeville revues, but never with a play). The Broadway production enjoyed a short run with healthy ticket sales and critical praise. Drama critic John Corbin praised Richardson’s realistic Black characters in his review for The New York Times, writing’ “The Chip Woman’s Fortune is an unaffected and wholly convincing transcript of everyday character. No one is glorified or otherwise tricked out to please; and no one is blackened to serve as a “dramatic” contrast.” The Chip Woman’s Fortune was first published in Fifty More Contemporary One Act Plays, edited by Frank Shaw (New York: Appleton, 1928). The play has since been reprinted multiple times, and can be read here.

 

Success as a Playwright
Following his triumph on Broadway, Howard University agreed to produce Richardson’s play Mortgaged, and according to the playwright, “this was the first play by one of our people to be staged there.” The play was met with thunderous acclaim, and was staged by numerous  high schools and universities throughout the 1930’s following its publication in Readings From Negro Authors, edited by Otelia Cromwell, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Eva Dykes. In fact, many of Richardson’s 40 completed plays would go on to enjoy dozens of professional, academic, and amateur productions across the United States. From 1925 – 1940, professional productions of Richardson’s plays were mounted by the Gilpin Players in Cleveland, Ohio, the Negro Art Players in New York City,  the Krigawa Players in New York City, the Krigawa Players in Washington, D.C., the Howard Players in Washington, D.C., the Ethiopian Players in Chicago, Illinois, and the Playground Athletic League in Baltimore, Maryland.

Richardson’s plays were radical in nature and well ahead of his time. Over the course of his prolific career, he covered complex topics including Black women’s rights, the exploitation of the Black working class, classism within the Black community, interracial marriage, Prohibition, and American slavery. His plays received consistent critical attention, and received numerous awards (he was the second-most decorated playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, after friend Eulalie Spence). Richardson was twice awarded The Amy Spingarn Prize in Literature and Art, once in 1925 for his play The Broken Banjo, and again in 1926 for his play Boot-Black Lover. In judging the 1925 contest, famed dramatist Eugene O’Neill  commented “I am glad to hear the judges all agreed on The Broken Banjo, and that the play was so successfully staged; Willis Richardson should certainly continue working in his field.” Subsequently, The Broken Banjo was also awarded the Edith Schwab Cup from Yale University. During his life, Richardson was invited to join the Dramatists’ Guild,  the Authors’ League of America, and the Harlem Cultural Council.

Seeing the need for Black children to know their history, Richardson edited two anthologies, Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro (1930), and Negro History in Thirteen Plays, with friend and colleague May Miller (1935). Little was heard from Richardson after 1940, except for a production of his one-act play Miss or Mrs., produced by the Bureau of Engraving’s Dramatic Club in Washington, D.C., on May 5th, 1941. This production is of some significance, as Richardson worked in this Federal bureau, and was presumably associated with the production.

 

 

Later Life, Death, & Legacy
Richardson continued to work as a clerk in the Bureau of Engraving until his retirement in 1954. Two years later, he published his third a final collection, comprised of five children’s plays, The King’s Dilemma and Other Plays for Children.

Richardson died in 1977 in relative obscurity. He was posthumously honored with the “Outstanding Pioneer Award” from AUDELCO in 1977, announced merely a few days after his death.

Richardson’s home at 512 U St. in the Ledroit Park neighborhood of Washington D.C. has been designated a Historic Landmark, and hosts a sign from the African American Heritage Trail.