I thank my editor, Jon Woronoff, for keeping me on track; Ruthmarie Mitsch for the proofreading and editing; the playwrights for the scripts; the black theater–producing organization heads for providing venues for the plays; and theater pioneers, researchers, educators, and scholars for sharing their research and keeping African American theater alive and in the eye of the theater world.
I thank all the librarians and curators of archives, repositories, and personal collections for their generous assistance, in particular James V. Hatch, the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York City; Richard H. Engleman, Sayer-Carkeek Collection, special collection and preservation division; Liz Fugate; and Theatre Arts at the University of Washington. Other collections I found useful were the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library; the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection; Federal Theatre Project at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA; National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; and the collections in Chicago and Los Angeles.
I thank the actors, directors, and theater practitioners for the personal correspondence, telephone conversations, interviews, and talks. I also thank the sponsors of symposiums at such conferences as Black Theatre Network and the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC.
I especially thank Douglas Q. Barnett for agreeing to work with me on this project. He has been a student of black theater since his stage debut in A Raisin in the Sun in 1961. His vast knowledge of theater both locally and nationally has contributed immeasurably to the final product of this book. He thanks in particular the librarians and curators of the Seattle Public Library system for their assistance. He extends kudos especially to Carletta Wilson at the central downtown branch; Samuel Jackson at the Douglass-Truth branch; and Kathy Harvey, Theatre and Performance, Sayre-Carkeek Collection.