17th–18th Century Blacks are depicted in farces and melodramas as glorified minstrels; servants/maids; comic “raccoons”; “fools”; ignorant West Indians; and shuffling, cackling, singing, and dancing “darkies.”
1789 Josiah Henson, an escaped slave and reputed model for Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is born in Charles County, MD. In 1849, Henson publishes The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada as Narrated by Himself.
1821 On Mercer Street in New York City, William Alexander Brown forms the African Grove Theatre and the first known all-black acting troupe. James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge, the principal actors, perform Shakespearean dramas, the classics, and lighter popular melodramas.
1825 Ira Aldridge (1807–65) arrives in London from the United States to begin his professional acting career. He performs for 42 years throughout Europe, Russia, and the British Isles.
1829 Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a white delineator, first performs on a Washington, DC, stage in blackface. He influences the minstrelsy performance tradition (whites imitating negative portrayals of blacks) that lasts over 100 years.
1844 Le Théâtre Français produces Victor Séjour’s first play, Diegareas, which inaugurates a brilliant career for Séjour. He is one of the more commercially successful black dramatists of the 19th century in Paris.
1846 Ira Aldridge’s play The Black Doctor opens in London.
1850 The Federal Fugitive Slave Law allows any claimant of a runaway black slave to take possession of his slave upon establishing proof of ownership before a federal commissioner. The ramifications of this law on escaped slaves are explored in plays with abolitionist themes.
1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published. It portrays the plight of the black slave in highly emotional language. The novel becomes America’s greatest hit by a white writer for the next 80 years. Later, George L. Aiken adapts it into play form.
1856 The Escape; or, Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown is reportedly the first play written by an escaped black slave. It is read frequently at abolitionist society meetings but never produced.
1858 Victor Séjour writes The Brown Overcoat. It is produced the following year.
1865 The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee after the Civil War to terrorize blacks and keep them in check.
1867 Howard University, chartered by the federal government, is established in Washington, DC.
1878 B. J. Ford and J. A. Arneaux are the leading black Shakespearean actors of the period. They perform in their own black companies, such as the Astor Place Colored Tragedy Company. Arneaux publishes an edited version of Richard III in 1886.
1891–1900 In a multipronged attack, black theatrical pioneers set out to destroy the minstrel pattern that seriously distorts their image. Sam T. Jack’s The Creole Show opens in Boston. It is among the first black productions that break from the minstrel pattern by allowing black women to perform in a musical revue and to be featured as singing women.
1895 John W. Isham’s The Octoroons, a musical, breaks further from the minstrel pattern. His next play, Oriental America, makes an even greater break from this form. Bob Cole organizes the Worth’s Museum All-Star Stock Company in New York City and begins the first training school for black performers.
1896 Sissieretta Jones, a black opera singer, is nicknamed “Black Patti” after the Italian soprano Adelina Patti. She is the first known black singer to appear at Wallach’s Theater in Boston. She organizes Black Patti’s Troubadours. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, vaudevillian and movie star, first appears in vaudeville on the Keith circuit.
1898 Black colleges begin to encourage play production among their students. Tuskegee Institute in Alabama appoints Charles Wood, a classical actor, as a professor of drama and elocution. A Trip to Coontown, a musical operetta by Bob Cole and William Johnson, is the first known musical comedy presented by blacks for blacks. Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook’s Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk, more than any other work, bridges the gap between minstrel shows and musicals.
1899 Bert Williams and George Walker produce their first musical show on Broadway, The Sons of Ham, at the Grand Opera House. The show further bridges the gap between minstrelsy and musical comedy. It also initiates a 12-year collaboration that lasts until Walker’s death in 1911.
1900 Bob Cole wrote the highly successful A Shoo Fly Regiment, a musical about blacks in the U.S. forces in the Spanish–American War.
1902 2 September: Bert Williams and George Walker’s In Dahomey, with lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar and music by Will Marion Cook, opens to enthusiastic notices at the Globe Theater in Boston. It becomes the most artistically and financially successful black musical of its time.
1905 Atlanta University initiates the custom of presenting a Shakespearean play by the graduating class. W. E. B. DuBois and others found the Niagara Movement, which is later known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
1906 Robert T. Motts forms the Pekin Stock Company in Chicago and includes drama on the bill. Bert Williams and George Walker star in Abyssinia by Alex Rogers, Jesse Shipp, and Will Marion Cook. The next year, the same authors produce Bandana Land. Henrietta Vinton Davis produces William Edgar Easton’s play about the Haitian revolution, Dessalines, in Chicago. The Louisville, KY, poet Joseph C. Cotter publishes the drama Caleb the Degenerate, which is concerned with the racial theories of Booker T. Washington.
1911 S. H. Dudley, a black actor and entrepreneur, buys theaters in Washington, DC, and Virginia and organizes his own chain of black theaters, the S. H. Dudley Theatrical Enterprise. This is the first black theatrical circuit of record that became known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit.”
1912 Henrietta Vinton Davis performs in a production of an original tragedy, Christophe, by William Edgar Easton at the Lenox Casino in New York City.
1913 13 October: The Star of Ethiopia, W. E. B. DuBois’s monumental drama commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, premiers at the Armory in New York City.
1914 The Lincoln Theatre in Harlem presents its first known black play, The Odd Man’s Boy by Henry Cramer. S. H. Dudley also writes and produces several shows there. The Lafayette Stock Company is formed in Harlem for the promotion of black theater.
1915 Anita Bush assembles the Lafayette Players (1915–32) at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Russell and Rowena Jellifes (both white) organize the Karamu Theatre in Cleveland, OH, as part of a private philanthropic social welfare center. The Jellifes encourage blacks to engage in their drama and theater productions. Charles Gilpin forms a stock company, the Gilpin Players, which produces and writes plays especially for the Karamu house.
1916–25 African American female playwrights begin to emerge, such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, Marita Odette Bonner, and May Miller. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People unsuccessfully tries to prevent the showing of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Griffith bases the film on Thomas Dixon’s violently antiblack book The Klansman. Black nationalist and reformer Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) arrives in New York City and establishes the newspaper The Negro World. He gains tremendous support for the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), his “back to Africa” movement.
1917 On Broadway at the Old Garden Theatre, white playwright Ridgeley Torrence uses black life as subject matter in Three Plays for the Negro Theatre: Simon the Cyrenian, The Rider of Dreams, and Granny Maumee. These nonmusical shows are greeted with great success. It marks the first time on the American stage that black actors perform in a drama and command the serious attention of critics, the general public, and audiences. It also reintroduces black actors to the legitimate Broadway professional stage.
1919 February: W. E. B. DuBois organizes the first pan-African congress in Paris, France. 17 February: The 369th Regiment marches up Fifth Avenue to Harlem. Blacks, upon returning home from World War I, are denied equal employment opportunities. June to December: A period that becomes known as the “Red Summer” because of the number of blacks who are killed during the race riots throughout the country. There are 25 race riots in such cities as Washington, DC; Chicago; Charleston, SC; Knoxville, TN; and Omaha, NE. September: The Race Relations Commission is founded. 15 December: Charles Gilpin makes his Broadway debut as William Custis, the black clergyman in the American production of John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln. Marcus Garvey forms the Black Star Shipping Line. Benjamin Brawley publishes The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States.
1920 August: Marcus Garvey’s UNIA Convention is held at Madison Square Garden. 1 November: Charles Gilpin plays Brutus Jones to great acclaim in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street in New York City. It runs for 399 performances. Gilpin receives the Drama League Award and the NAACP Spingarn Medal. James Weldon Johnson is elected its first black officer (secretary).
1921 22 May: Shuffle Along by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (lyrics by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles) opens at Broadway’s David Belasco Theater. It is the first record of a musical revue written and performed by African Americans. Professor Montgomery Gregory, a Harvard graduate, begins offering college credit at Howard University toward a degree for production work. September: Marcus Garvey founds the African Orthodox Church. The Colored Players Guild of New York is formed.
1922 The House of Representatives approve the first antilynching legislation.
1923 Marcus Garvey is arrested for mail fraud and sentenced to five years in prison. Jean Toomer’s Cane is published. Willis Richardson becomes the first African America to have a serious one-act dramatic play produced on Broadway, The Chip Woman’s Fortune.
1924 21 March: The Civic Club Dinner, sponsored by Opportunity, brings black writers and white publishers together. This event is considered the formal launching of the New Negro Movement. 15 May: Paul Robeson stars in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings.
1925 March: Alain Locke and Charles Johnson edit the Survey Graphic issue “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which is devoted entirely to black arts and letters. 13 October: Appearances by Garland Anderson opens on Broadway. It is the first full-length serious drama to play Broadway.
1926 30 December: In Abraham’s Bosom, an antilynching play by Paul Green (white) and starring Rose McClendon, opens on Broadway. It is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
1935 24 October: Mulatto, a play about miscegenation in the Deep South by Langston Hughes, opens on Broadway. It becomes the longest running drama (373 performances) on “The Great White Way” of its time.
1935–39 President Franklin D. Roosevelt launches the Federal Works Progress Administration Program that establishes Negro Units in key cities throughout the United States.
1940 Abram Hill and Fred O’Neal form the American Negro Theatre. Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ opens off Broadway at the Henry Street Playhouse and moves to the Royale Theatre on Broadway for a limited run.
1943 Othello, starring Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, opens at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. It sets a record for the run of a Shakespearean play (296 performances).
1953 24 September: Take a Giant Step by Louis Peterson about the urban flight of middle-class blacks opens to critical acclaim on Broadway.
1954 26 October: In Splendid Error by William Branch about the meeting between Frederick Douglass and John Brown opens at Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. Harry Belafonte becomes the first African American to receive the Tony Award for supporting or featured role in the musical John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.
1955 November: Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, a play within a play addressing the representation of black actors on Broadway, opens off Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. It receives the Obie Award for best play.
1957 28 March: Loften Mitchell’s A Land beyond the River opens at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. It confronts a pressing issue of its time—public school desegregation.
1959 11 March: The decade of the 1950s reached its zenith with A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece about a black family purchasing a new home in an all-white neighborhood in Chicago. Hansberry’s first play opens on Broadway to wide critical and popular acclaim under Lloyd Richards’s direction. Aside from attracting the interest of white playgoers, the play also helps to lure black audiences to professional Broadway theater.
1960s–70s Over 600 community and university black theater organizations flourish with the works of Ben Caldwell, Sonia Sanchez, Martie Charles, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Barbara and Carlton Molette, Ted Shine, and dozens of others. Among the college and university theater teachers who lead the development of black playwrights during the summer at the University of California at Santa Barbara are Owen Dodson at Howard University, Tom Pawley at Lincoln University, Randolph Edmonds at Florida A&M, Ted Shine at Prairie View, George Bass at Brown University, and William R. Reardon at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
1960 4 May: Gene Frankel’s (white) production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks: A Clown Show begins its long successful run off Broadway at the St. Mark’s Playhouse, giving center stage to James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., and many other rising black actors.
1961 28 September: The comedy Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis opens at the Cort Theatre on Broadway. The cast includes Davis, Ruby Dee, Godfrey Cambridge, Alan Alda, Beah Richards, and Sorrell Brooke.
11 December: Black Nativity by Langston Hughes opens at the Forty-first Street Theatre on Broadway. It becomes a Christmas holiday classic.
1963 Approximately 200,000 civil rights activists march on Washington, DC, resulting in the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Congress.
1964 24 March: Dutchman by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) opens at the Cherry Lane Theatre off Broadway. Jones’s manifesto “The Revolutionary Theatre” heralds the black revolutionary drama of the 1960s. Claudia McNeill receives the Tony Award as dramatic actress for Tiger Tiger Burning Bright.
1967–87 A resurgence of black community theater groups takes place around the country, most notably in Boston; Buffalo, NY; Chicago; Cleveland, OH; Detroit; Los Angeles; New Orleans; Harlem; Philadelphia; and Washington, DC.
1967 Douglas Turner Ward, Robert Hooks, and Gerald Krone organize the Negro Ensemble Company at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Greenwich Village, New York City.
1968 The New Lafayette Theatre is founded by Robert MacBeth. 2 January: The Negro Ensemble Company premiers its first production, Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. Barbara Ann Teer launches the National Black Theatre in Harlem. She concentrates on black communal ritual theater as advocated by writers like Carlton Molette and Paul Carter Harrison.
1969 James Earl Jones is awarded the Tony Award for his performance as Jack Johnson in Howard Sackler’s (white) play The Great White Hope. Professional theater ensembles emerge throughout the country: in New York City the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop, Negro Ensemble, Richard Allen Center, AMAS Theatre, New Federal Theatre, New Lafayette Theatre, and National Black Theatre; in Los Angeles the Inner-City Cultural Center; and in Seattle Black Arts/West. With the advent of black female playwrights, they depict an empowered and multidimensional image of women. Adrienne Kennedy wins the Obie Award for her avant-garde play Funnyhouse of a Negro.
1970 The 1970s were rife with the success of musicals—Purlie, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, The Wiz, Bubbling Brown Sugar, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Eubie. Charles Gordone becomes the first African American playwright to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize for No Place to Be Somebody. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men by Lonnie Elder III was also nominated. Black dramas invade the “Great White Way” (Broadway)—Joseph Walker’s The River Niger, Melvin Van Peebles’s Don’t Play Us Cheap, Phillip Hayes Dean’s Paul Robeson, Samm-Art Williams’s Home, A. Marcus Hemphill’s Inacent Black (starring Melba Moore), and Richard Wesley’s The Mighty Gents (with Morgan Freeman). There is a rapid increase in the number of black people in the audiences, but by the mid 1970s, the momentum of community black theater dwindles.
1971 14 March: The Negro Ensemble Company produces Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain at the St. Marks Playhouse off Broadway. It receives an Obie Award. 29 November: Ernie McClintock directs N. R. Davidson’s play El Hajj Malik about Malcolm X at his Afro-American Studio Theatre in Harlem. It typifies the best of the sociopolitical theater presented throughout the country.
1972 The New Lafayette Theatre disbands. This is where Ed Bullins is discovered as a promising playwright, along with Richard Wesley.
1973 Vivian Robinson forms the Audience Development Committee (Audelco), an organization that awards excellence for off-Broadway black theater productions. My Sister, My Sister by Ray Aranha receives a Drama Desk Award for playwriting, and Seret Scott wins for best actress. Barbara Montgomery wins both the Audelco and Obie Award as the mother.
1974 The River Niger by Joseph A. Walker receives the Tony Award for drama. This is the first play the Negro Ensemble Company takes to Broadway.
1976 November: Steve Carter’s Eden is the winner of the Audelco Award for best play of the year.
1977 Ntozake Shange utilizes poetry, dance, and color symbolism in her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf’ to popularize a new form she calls a “choreopoem.” It receives the Outer Critics Circle Award, a Grammy, an Emmy, and three Obie Awards for the playwright, the producers (Joseph Papp and Woodie King Jr.), and actress Trazana Beverly, who also won a Tony Award and a Theatre World Award.
1978 Phillip Hayes Dean’s play Paul Robeson opens on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontainne Theatre amid criticism for Dean’s depiction of the title character played by James Earl Jones.
1981 Laurence Holder receives an Audelco Award for best playwright for When the Chickens Came Home to Roost (1981) starring Denzel Washington and Kirk Kirksey under the direction of Allie Woods, Jr. It is about a fictitious meeting between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
1982 Charles Fuller receives the Pulitzer Prize award in drama for A Soldier’s Play.
1984 August Wilson makes his Broadway debut with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle best play award. This is the first play in Wilson’s 10-play cycle about black existence in America set in every decade of the 20th century.
1985 Alice Childress receives the Audelco Pioneer Award.
1986 George C. Wolfe takes theater audiences by storm with his satirical revue The Colored Museum, which opens at the NYSF/Public Theatre in New York City. Woza Africa! is the Lucile Lortel Award winner for outstanding musical/play.
1987 August Wilson’s Fences, a play about family life, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Tony Award, and the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Awards and Citations. Douglass Turner Ward, founder of the Negro Ensemble Company, relinquishes the artistic directorship after 20 years of service.
1988 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
1989 Larry Leon Hamlin organizes the first National Black Theatre Festival held in Winston-Salem, NC. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre production of Song of Sheba premiers in Harlem and wins eight Audelco awards.
1990 August Wilson is awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson and receives the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Awards and Citations.
1991 Two Trains Running by August Wilson wins the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Awards and Citations.
1992 August Wilson is named “Pittsburgher of the Year” by Pittsburgh Magazine.
1993 George C. Wolfe is appointed director of Joseph Papp’s NYSF/Public Theatre in New York (its first black director).
1996 June: August Wilson gives his “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech before the National Convention of the Theatre Communications Group, advocating black theater for black people, that sends reverberations throughout the theater community. 16 October: Distinguished theater and movie veteran Jason Bernard dies of a heart attack at age 58 at the height of his creative potential.
1997 In a national setting at New York’s Town Hall with Anna Deveare Smith moderating, Robert Brustein and August Wilson debate the pros and cons of black theater versus white theater.
1998 The first meeting of the African Grove Institute, a gathering of black theater professionals, is held on the campus of Dartmouth University. It is headed by August Wilson, Victor Walker II, and 43 other professional theater practitioners.
1999 August Wilson’s King Hedley premieres at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre.
2000 Tyler Perry first appears in drag as the Madea persona in his play Woman, Thou Art Loosed. He begins renting theaters on the “Urban Circuit,” formerly known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” to great success.
2001 Martha Jackson Randolph, cofounder and coartistic director at Atlanta’s Jomandi Productions for over 22 years, abruptly resigns to accept the artistic directorship at the Ensemble Theatre in Houston, TX, her hometown.
2002 The Classical Theatre of Harlem produces a revival of The Blacks. Jitney by August Wilson wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Suzan-Lori Parks becomes the first African American woman to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize for drama with her play Top Dog/Underdog. George C. Wolfe receives an Obie Award for best direction, and Jeffrey Wright wins for best performance for Topdog/Underdog.
2003 August Wilson receives the New Dramatists Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding artistic contribution to American theatre. 17 March: Rob Penny, Pittsburgh playwright and confidant to August Wilson, dies. May: The world premiere of Gem of the Ocean by Wilson takes place at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and is directed by Marion McClinton. 19 May: Mos Def receives the 48th annual Village Voice Obie Award for outstanding achievement in Fucking A. 2 June: Whoopi Goldberg coproduces a revival of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson at the Royale Theatre on Broadway. Goldberg assumes the title role opposite Charles Dutton.
2004 The revival of the black Broadway classic A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry returns to Broadway 45 years later with a cast of television and movie stars and a rock mogul. Audra McDonald (Ruth) and Phylicia Rashad (Mama) are Tony Award winners. Rashad is the first black woman to receive the award for best dramatic performance by an actress in a play. Sanaa Latham (Beneatha) is nominated for a Tony Award. Sean “Puffy” Combs plays Walter Lee. September: Charles Weldon, a member of the Negro Ensemble Company since 1970, is chosen to become its new artistic director. He replaces artistic director O. L. Duke, who tragically lost his life in an automobile accident.
2005 29 June: Lloyd Richards dies after a prolonged illness. He is director of the epical Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Center, and the Yale Repertory Theatre and the mentor of August Wilson, whose plays Lloyd eventually directed. 2 October: August Wilson dies. Two months later, the Virginia Theatre is renamed the August Wilson Theatre. 21 November: S. Epatha Merkerson wins an Audelco Award for outstanding performer in the musical/female lead actress category for Cheryl L. West’s Birdie Blue.
2006 The Signature Theatre in New York City dedicates its entire season to the plays of August Wilson.
2007 The resurrected Negro Ensemble Company under Charles Weldon produces Samm-Art Williams’s In the Waiting Room in New York City. 20 April: August Wilson’s Radio Golf opens on Broadway, the 10th and final play of his 10-play cycle. It is nominated for four Tony Awards. 8 June: Larry Leon Hamlin dies. He was the force behind the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. Four years after Phylicia Rashad played the matriarch (Aunt Ester) in the Broadway production of Gem of the Ocean, she directs the Seattle Repertory Theatre production, one of the first women to do so. October: Tim Bond is appointed chair of the drama department at the University of Syracuse and artistic director of Syracuse Stage in upstate New York. He joins the handful of African Americans who have become artistic directors at white regional theaters. The others are Sheldon Epps, Kenny Leon, Tazewell Thompson, Harold Scott, and George C. Wolfe. 19 November: The Audelco Awards celebrates its 35th anniversary at City College in New York City.
2008 21 July: Barbara Ann Teer, founder of the National Black Theatre, dies.