A trailblazing author in African American theater, as well a conspicuous left-wing cultural worker in the 1930s and 1940s, Theodore Ward was a principal contributor in dramatic art to the early stages of the Black Chicago Renaissance. In 1935 he was a founding member of the radical Black South Side Writers Group, and in 1938 his Big White Fog: A Negro Tragedy in Three Acts expressed the classic Chicago Renaissance theme of the impact of Northern racism on veterans of the Great Migration.
The triumph of Big White Fog launched Ward on a forty-five year career during which his performed plays, a small fraction of his oeuvre, provided vivid renditions of sundry controversial themes and well-researched episodes from African American life and history. Moreover, Ward employed popular forms to address intricate political and social issues without making concessions in his content to popular taste. Although Ward passed much of the 1940s and 1950s in New York City, he returned to Chicago in 1964. There he continued to write and produce plays in relative obscurity for most of the last two decades of his life.
Nearly all of available information about the early years of Ward’s life stems from interviews he gave to the Communist press in the late 1940s, and to several academic researchers in correspondence and interviews during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Little of this data has been independently corroborated, nor has any substantial research been carried out in relation to Ward’s private life. The fine points of his association with radical political and cultural organizations are also unascertained. The principal exception has been the controversy surrounding the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) production of Big White Fog in Chicago.2 Even if many of Ward’s anecdotes about his family history and itinerant youth cannot be positively validated, such memories played a pointed role in shaping the literary imagination and political engagement that inform his plays.
Furthermore, a general representation of Ward’s personal associations and political commitments can be gleaned from correspondence by and about Ward in various archives. There are especially revealing letters in papers held by the Schomburg Library in New York and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Besides, there is a small record of some of Ward’s own prose writing on politics and culture that can be consulted, as well as the documentary record of editorial positions Ward assumed on politically affiliated publications.
James Theodore Ward, who ceased using his first name when he started writing, was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, the eighth of eleven surviving children. Thibodaux was the seat of Lafourche Parish, forty miles West of New Orleans in a rich sugarcane and truck-farming delta. Ward’s father, Everett Ward, was an upright Christian schoolteacher who peddled religious books and classics along with patent medicine from a horse-drawn wagon. Ward’s paternal grandmother, a former slave, had lost her right hand when her master discovered that she had learned to write.
Everett Ward was an enthralling storyteller, and at an early age Ward indulged himself in reading the sample chapters that his father utilized to sell books. However, his father, an admirer of Booker T. Washington, was personally conservative and tried to discourage his children from listening to jazz. Among the books attracting the young Ward was Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Ward was enthralled by the fancy English of the character Mr. Micawber. Often he tried to speak and write letters in this style.
Ward’s mother, Mary Louis Pierre Ward, was a housewife. Ward believed that his maternal grandfather was killed while leading a rebellion of hundreds of Lafourche Parish field workers in the post-Emancipation years. Their aim had been to obtain a daily wage increase by requiring planters to come into town to hire their workers. The family legend was that the planters arrived with rifles and sought out Ward’s grandfather, gunning him down in front of his house. Ward’s mother kept the bullet to show to her children, but refused to reveal the planter’s name for fear that they might be tempted to take revenge.
When Ward’s mother died in 1915, while giving birth to her eleventh child, the family disintegrated and the thirteen-year-old Ward wandered North. Drawn toward Chicago by the tales of freedom and opportunity that he picked up from Black Pullman porters, Ward ended up in Cairo, Illinois. Although a white couple offered to take him in, Ward jumped a train to St. Louis. There he survived by finding work in a barber shop and shining shoes. Soon he migrated up to Chicago, where his eloquent speaking style attracted the attention of a friend of Chicago Black community leader Ida B. Wells. Wells was a journalist, editor, diarist, autobiographer, lecturer, suffragist, antilynching crusader, and civil rights activist, celebrated for her exposés of race riots North and South. Wells fed Ward and helped him obtain a job at the YMCA while he attended public school and then found him supplementary work delivering jewelry for a shop.
In the 1920s, however, Ward was consumed by wanderlust. He traveled around the Northwest while reading voraciously. In Portland, Ward worked as a boot-black and a housecleaner. In Seattle he shined shoes and gambled. With a background of reading novels by Knut Hamsun, Jack London, and Gustave Flaubert, Ward now immersed himself in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser and Joseph Conrad as well as the Harvard Classics editions of Descartes, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Goethe. In due time, Ward landed in Salt Lake City, Utah. With some savings from his success at gambling, he initially spent his time studying English grammar and frequenting a shoe-shine parlor to hear the embittered discourse of its owner on the past and future of African Americans. In the parlor Ward also met Gale Martin, a white labor journalist connected with the NAACP. Martin introduced Ward to Louis Zucker, an English professor at the University of Utah, who encouraged Ward to write fiction based on his experiences. After examining some of Ward’s work, Zucker urged that Ward take one of his writing courses through an extension program. He furthermore inspired Ward to apply for a Zona Gale Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. Ward enrolled in the course, producing both poetry and fiction, and subsequently recalled selling a piece to Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories for $75.
Ward was successful in winning the Zona Gale fellowship, and he moved to Madison in the fall of 1931. At the end of the year he relocated to Chicago, but his work so pleased Zona Gale that she personally renewed the fellowship and sent an emissary to convince Ward to return for a second year, 1932–33. During these two years in Madison, Ward, still chiefly an aspiring poet and fiction writer, first mastered theatrical reading. On his own local radio show on WIBA he recited verse and sections of plays, with Chekhov and Shakespeare becoming his preferred writers. Ward was then offered the opportunity to stay at the university and enter a degree program, despite his lack of a high-school education. By the summer of 1933, however, he had become disheartened with the isolation of university life for African Americans.
Returning to Chicago, Ward happened to attend a chapter meeting on Michigan Avenue of the John Reed Club, a Communist-led cultural group. There Ward witnessed the performance of a skit treating the right of African Americans to vote in the South. Ward felt that he had the personal capacity to produce a superior writing job and began to formulate the idea for a play called “Sick and Tired.”
While meditating on the concept of “Sick and Tired,” Ward recalled that he had once attempted to write a play when he was twelve years old and living in Louisiana. Ward’s elementary school teacher decided that the class would perform some plays, and Ward won the part of female character, turning out to be the star of the show. Ward was so inspired by the experience that he determined to write his own play. Teachers at the school were enthusiastic about the end result, but his parents responded differently. His mother read the play in silence and then turned it over to Ward’s father. After reading the play, Ward’s father threw it in the fire and called it the Devil’s work. Ward immediately blocked out the experience until it returned to memory following his sojourn at Wisconsin and experiences at the John Reed Club.
Now permanently residing in Chicago, Ward used his friendship with a social worker to secure a job with the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). He became a recreational director for the Abraham Lincoln Center on the South Side, starting in 1934 and lasting until 1938. By 1937 Ward was directing one-act plays at the Center, but, when the Federal Theatre was founded, he also became part of the Chicago Negro Unit as an actor. At this time he revised the dramatic conception he formulated after the John Reed Club meeting into a one-act play called “Sick and Tiahd.” The plot of the play, which has not survived in any public archive, dealt with a southern African American poor farmer who had his own family and plot of land to raise cotton.3 However, the farmer was beaten down by the system. He had been borrowing money from white moneylenders, but now they claimed that he owed more than he actually did. When the Black farmer refused to submit, a fight ensued during which a white man was badly injured by falling on a ploughshare. The white community organized to kill the Black worker, who turned to his Black friends in the hope that they would unite for self-defense. To his surprise, his friends insisted that the situation was hopeless and that he must flee.
Yet the Black worker refuses to flee, announcing that he is “sick and tired.” Instead, he sends away his wife and children, preparing to fight. The wife, however, returns and insists on standing by her husband. When the whites knock on the door of the home of the Black couple to demand that poor farmer come out, the Black rebel ends the play by announcing that “You’ll have to come and get me.”
The play brought Ward to local attention in 1937, when he won second prize in a Chicago Repertory Theater contest. First place was won by Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936), a one-act play about a Southern Black chain gang. At this point Ward began to think seriously about a career as a playwright. Although “Sick and Tiahd” was never produced outside of the contest, Ward himself gave a reading at the Lincoln Center. The occasion was a public meeting following the formation of the Communist-led National Negro Congress in 1936, and was attended mostly by several hundred African American students.
By then, Ward had already met the budding Communist poet and fiction writer, Richard Wright. In late summer or early fall of 1935, Ward was sitting in the Main Reading Room of the George Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library when Wright came over and introduced himself. Subsequently Ward invited Wright to visit Ward’s WPA class in dramatics at the Abraham Lincoln Center. Out of their discussions about the need for a community of Black writers to critically discuss each other’s work was born the notion of a “Chicago Negro Writers Group” that would meet in Ward’s classroom on Sunday afternoons. The workshop, later called the South Side Writers Group, more or less continued until Wright left Chicago in 1938. The central figures included Wright, Ward, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Marian Minus, Edward Bland, Russell Marshall, and Robert Davis. Many other aspiring writers drifted in and out, and occasionally white writers also attended.4
Then, in the spring of 1937, members of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project of Chicago began to organize a protest against a planned production of Paul Green’s play, Hymn to the Rising Sun. This work was to be directed by Charles DeSheim, a Jewish American radical with a background in New York City’s Group Theater. Wright, who was transferred from the Federal Writers’ Project to serve as publicity agent for the production, was allied with DeSheim. It was mainly Black members of the company who insisted that DeSheim be replaced by an African American director and argued that Hymn to the Rising Sun was objectionable to Blacks.
Since Ward was known to be sympathetic to both the play and director, Wright felt that Ward could assist him. It was at this time that Wright induced Ward to transfer from the WPA Recreational Project to the Negro Unit of Federal Theatre. Ward later expressed the view that the Black actors antagonistic to DeSheim were being manipulated by those hostile to the more left-wing elements in the Federal Theatre, possibly even at the behest of conservative whites. In Ward’s judgment, DeSheim and those around him were unprejudiced whites trying to develop theater in accordance with a vision of the labor movement in which the freedom of Black and white workers was mutually interdependent. Ultimately Wright and Ward were defeated; DeSheim was forced out and the play was canceled.
That same year Ward wrote Big White Fog: A Negro Tragedy in Three Acts, his first full-length play. This work would become a landmark production by the Chicago Federal Theatre of WPA in 1938. Ward later recalled that the origin of the play went back to his travels in the 1920s, when his emerging literary sensibility coalesced around a graphic image from nature. In those years, in addition to reading classic and popular literature, Ward followed Black writing in The Crisis, Opportunity, and Chicago Defender. He had also heard about the Harlem Renaissance poets. Then, during a trip to the Pacific Coast, Ward, traveling on a freight train on the Great Northern Railroad, stopped off at a place called Horseshoe Bend.
Before him stretched a tremendous spectacle where trains had to cross a giant canyon. In the center he saw the fog growing, and Ward was stunned by both the magnificence of the countryside as well as his isolation as an African American from his homeland. In trying to grasp this disconcerting relationship, Ward was struck by a feeling that African Americans lacked a clear point of view of their own as to the causes of their dilemma and possible solutions. Instead, Blacks were indoctrinated mainly by the racist views of white people—views that surrounded African Americans like a “big white fog.” This image haunted Ward for years and eventually led to his setting out to write a play that would create clarification and even provide a theoretical perspective on the Black situation. In the play, African Americans are lost for a time in the fog of white racism, but ultimately gravitate toward the light of Marxism.
Big White Fog is in no way autobiographical, other than making use of this image from Ward’s youth. Ward claimed, however, that the events dramatized were drawn from an incident in Chicago when a Black man was shot during an attempt of the Communist-led Workers Alliance to stop the eviction of an African American family. Ward had read that the man killed was part of the Great Migration, coming North with his family to escape the racism of the South. Moreover, the victim was a hard-working man with some education.
In relation to other aspects of the play, Ward had also observed how young Black saleswomen in Chicago became the object of lecherous white salesmen. The women felt obligated to curry favor out of the financial desperation of their families. Ward additionally had been impressed by the number of educated Black men he knew who were forced to find employment as porters and window-washers. Moreover, Ward adapted the situation of the son, Les Mason, of being denied a college scholarship due to his race, from newspaper articles. Nevertheless, Ward did invent a past for his protagonist, Victor Mason, as a follower of Marcus Garvey. Ward crafted Mason to be a symbol—an honest man who tried to do something for his family and his people.
Ward asked Wright to read over the play and was later dismayed to find that Wright had employed the notion of a “Big White Fog” in three places: “Fire and Cloud,” which appeared as part of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); the short story “Bright and Morning Star” (originally published separately but incorporated into the 1940 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children); and Native Son (1940). In his 1947 essay on “Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat,” Ward would castigate Wright for his theft of the theme, and also announce that Wright ultimately abandoned it after his 1944 break with Communism because “it allowed too much freedom as well as the Negro’s finding his way out.” Instead, Ward maintained that Wright chose “to conceive of the Negro as being trapped in a steel cage, cut off from all freedom of movement, choice, or decision—a prisoner in the hands of forces beyond his volition or control.”5
The production of Big White Fog by the Federal Theatre Project was preceded by considerable controversy that has been carefully documented and analyzed by scholar Rena Fraden in Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre 1935–1939 (1994). Ward himself wanted to attract a broad, interracial audience, but the acting director of the Chicago Project, Harry Minturn, was nervous about booking a radical Black play into the mainstream Chicago Loop Theater. Minturn preferred a theater on the Black South Side because he thought that the play’s social realism might achieve the greatest response in that milieu. To scout out support in the Black community, Minturn dispatched his choice of director for Big White Fog, Shirley Graham, a writer who would later marry W. E. B. DuBois.
Nervous about the possible response from the Black community, Graham arranged for Ward to read his play in a “preview” at the South Side YMCA. This would allow her to judge audience reaction. According to a report that Fraden uncovered that was authored by Graham, the audience included NAACP and Urban League representatives, as well as churches, funeral associations, and integrated theater clubs. Although the audience was respectful at the time Ward gave his reading, the subsequent reaction against his depiction of the Black middle class in the play was extreme. Graham reported that the view was widespread that Ward’s portrait was not realistic and relied on stereotypes.
Graham concluded that Ward’s play, which she had thought to be benign at first, actually contained elements that would offend almost every sector of the Chicago black community—especially the church establishment, businessmen, and followers of Marcus Garvey. Moreover, she concluded that the producing of a play that frankly discussed color prejudice among Blacks would only open up old wounds before the eyes of the white public. Following Graham’s disturbing report, Minturn was even more hesitant about the play than before; he was resolved to keep it from a broad public, if it was to be produced at all.
Yet, for reasons that Fraden was unable to determine, there was a last minute turnaround at the Project. Not only was the play produced, but it was performed at the Great Northern Theater at the Loop. To Minturn’s surprise, it ran for thirty-seven performances before an enthusiastic, integrated theater crowd. There had even been a fear among some FTP members of possible race riots around the theater, but these did not materialize. Critical responses in the press were positive across the board. Nevertheless, Ward was ever afterward outraged at the treatment his play had received at the hands of Minturn, alleging jealousy and invidious personal motives on the part of Big White Fog‘s various antagonists. Ward was grateful, however, for the unflagging support of Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan.
Big White Fog is a dramatized historical allegory of contending social and political forces in the Chicago African American community, and perhaps other urban centers, between 1922 and 1932. Chicago was the second largest African American urban population in the United States, where Blacks, about one-quarter of the total citizenry, were concentrated on the South Side. Historically Big White Fog mirrors the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey movement (organized as the Universal Negro Improvement Association), aimed at uniting the Black Diaspora to encourage agriculture in and migration to Africa.
Although the play centers primarily around choices made by members of one extended family, and the consequences of their decisions, Ward seems to be using the family as a microcosm of the larger community. In this sense, realism was intentionally violated. This equivocal allegorical dimension may have a factor that led to the misunderstanding by opponents of the play on the South Side. Some community members had objected to the production on the grounds that no single family could embody such extreme positions. Others held that it was a slander on Ward’s part to imagine that a typical Black family had members who behaved in the ways depicted in Big White Fog. There was especially anger at the portrait of the daughter, Wanda, who succumbs to prostitution with a white man. Notwithstanding, in light of Ward’s overall aims, the scholarly consensus is that he succeeded admirably in capturing the essence of the principal political choices as they appeared to many radicals in the Depression. Since the 1930s, the play has undergone a number of revivals and has stayed in print up to the present, although more as a period piece than the practical guide to action that Ward intended.
In Big White Fog, a pair of brothers-in-law, Victor Mason and Daniel Rogers, represent the failure of two moral and political choices made in the 1920s. When the play opens, Victor is a hod-carrier and Daniel a Pullman porter, both men with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families. At first, Victor seems the sole loser as he pledges allegiance to the Marcus Garvey movement; moreover, after Garvey’s shipping line is closed down for using unsafe vessels and Garvey himself arrested, Daniel becomes even more devoted to donating money in an effort to keep his failing fantasy alive. Dan, in contrast, is a budding capitalist who sees an opportunity to make a big profit by purchasing apartment buildings and cutting the rooms into smaller units (“kitchenettes”) in order to double his income. By the time of the Great Depression, Victor has lost everything and faces eviction, while Dan has been financially devastated as well, forced to rent out parts of his own house to individuals engaged in prostitution and crime.
A critical figure in the play is Victor’s oldest son, Lester, who had hopes of breaking free of the limited circle of choices by going to college. When Lester wins a scholarship, this option seems possible; but then his plans are dashed when he receives news that his African American identity will exclude him as a recipient. Lester subsequently accepts the generosity of his uncle, Daniel, who agrees to help with Lester’s tuition if the nephew works for him part time. Soon Lester finds himself attracted to Socialist ideas, through a friendship he develops with a Jewish classmate, Nathan Piszer. As the family’s fortunes grow worse, the seeds of this Socialist idea develop into a full-blown identity with the Communist movement in 1932. At the climax of the play, an interracial Communist-led protest is mobilized in a dramatic effort to save the Mason family from eviction.
The women in Ward’s tragedy play a paradoxical role. Daniel’s mother-in-law, Martha Brooks, is created as a brutal portrait of self-hatred among the Black middle class. She is obsessed with her white ancestry and wholly unsympathetic to the struggles of her son-in-law to find dignity in the racist North. Indeed, Brooks harbors a hatred of Daniel’s dark complexion, a sentiment that bursts forth from her in an ugly family explosion. The result is permanent disaffection, and for a time Brooks leaves the Mason household to move in with the Rogers family. Brooks’s daughter, Ella, seems loyal to her husband Victor at first, even sharing to some extent in his Garveyite aspirations. Yet Ella is disillusioned earlier and more willing to capitulate to the ideas of her brother-in-law, Daniel. As the crisis deepens, Ella chooses to side with her mother against her husband.
Most complex is the daughter, Wanda, who in some ways is drawn to her father’s idealism and even assists him in his work. Nevertheless, in her early twenties Wanda makes a fateful decision to give up on school. She has a talent for academics and there was a possibility that she might find a secure, if poorly paid and undignified, career as a teacher in a segregated institution. Instead, Wanda opts to take immediate employment in a drugstore with the aim of having a salary that will enable her to have a good time in the here and now. In this choice Wanda is somewhat inspired by her uncle, Percy Mason. Percy is a veteran of World War I who was humiliated upon his return from the military and who has since taken refuge in alcohol and cabaret life. Wanda is furthermore pushed forward by her “fast” friend, Claudine, who seems unmoored from the residue of ethics that still lingers in Wanda, inhibiting Wanda about trading sexual favors for money.
As the Mason family’s finances unravel, Wanda is eventually drawn into a liaison with an older white drug salesman who frequently visits the drugstore. Although Wanda has apparently been sexually free, and even led on some wealthy white men to obtain gifts, this ultimate act is solely motivated by her belief that she must get money for the family to prevent their eviction. When her liaison is unexpectedly exposed to her family, she is bitterly denounced by her self-righteous brother and father. Victor then determines that he will accept no aid at all from Wanda or the offer of his brother-in-law to put his family up; instead, he joins forces with the Communists to forcibly resist the eviction.
After Victor is shot by the police, however, he rethinks, as he lies wounded, the tragic set of circumstances that have impinged on the choices made by him and his family. He now more fully grasps his own misjudgments and illusions, and comes to forgive and embrace his daughter, regarding her as similarly victimized. Unfortunately, the reconciliation is cut short by Victor’s death, and there is no change-of-heart shown by Lester. The son simply points to his interracial group of comrades as the answer to Black oppression. The play ends with Victor achieving status as a martyr to the cause, and the eviction temporarily halted.
Ultimate victory is by no means assured, but the implication of Big White Fog is strong that the course of the son and his Communist friends offers the only way out of the “Big White Fog” that had hitherto obscured all choices. The protestors are described as all male, and the women in the cast are silent and marginalized in the closing statements.
The political atmosphere in which Big White Fog was produced must be reconstructed in order to judge the likely impact of the play. In the late 1930s, the U.S. Left appeared to be on the ascendancy. Growth in the organization of the industrial working class had been dramatic, with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936. A year earlier, the turn of the Communist International to the Popular Front strategy had resulted in a dramatic increase in membership and influence for the Communist Party in the United States. In that ambience, the uplifting ending probably seemed plausible—a gesture toward a future of interracial working class unity that would transform the capitalist system of racism and class exploitation into a new world.
In later decades, of course, the ending may well have been read as forced, contrived, anachronistic, and even somewhat perplexing. That is, in the late 1930s, the martyrdom of Victor might seem more admissible as a necessary sacrifice for an ultimate end that was within sight. In post-Depression years, with the absorption of the Communist-led Left into wartime patriotism and then the hegemony of anti-Communism during the Cold War, such a climax was more likely to appear as predictable “agitprop,” and as an unnecessary waste of a decent man’s life. Moreover, Victor’s son, Lester, constitutes a weak symbol of the bridge to the future. The son’s character is never much developed, and his ultimate rage against his sister is never redeemed through the new understanding revealed by his father before the latter’s death. Indeed, despite Ward’s effort to transcend politically the Garvey movement and to find the necessary light through Communism to escape the big white fog, Victor’s spirit remains the “victor” while the son, Les, seems to be very much less of a moral force.
Originally subtitled “A Negro Tragedy,” the reference to tragedy is double-edged. On the one hand, the allegorical aspects of the plot resonate with themes from African American history, suggesting that the lot of the African American people is tragic as a whole. Indeed, from Ward’s view, the obscuring of options by a big white fog was the experience of an entire population. At the same time, the tragic figure is clearly Victor. His nobility lies in his commitment to a vision that he believes will provide a collective solution for Africa’s lost children in the United States, but his flaw is a pride that renders him slow to admit error and respond to possible alternatives until very late. Yet there is irony in that, in place of his father’s Garvey movement and African homeland, Les is substituting the new utopian fantasy of the USSR as a savior for African Americans. There is an implied element of progress in the transition from the father’s Garveyism to the son’s Communism that may today appear to be more ironic than Ward imagined.
Following Big White Fog, Ward was identified in the public eye with Communism. Later in life he would insist that the play was not Communist propaganda but only a realistic assessment of the choices that were accessible at that time. In one sense, Ward’s retrospective self-defense had a point in that his Marxist politics were not deduced, top-down, from any ideological or organizational loyalty. He had throughout his life encountered a number of sympathetic, antiracist whites, and he found the Communists championing causes to which he himself had felt drawn. Ward did not need the Communists to tell him that interracial unity of Black and white workers was a politically attractive project in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, the strong religious training of Ward’s youth may have encouraged a state of mind requiring faith in some ultimate vision of redemption and purpose in life. Finally, the play itself, despite the favorable portrait of Communists, did not fit comfortably into any particular Party line of the moment.
In fact, Ward’s choice to represent Communism by means of the Jewish-identified student, Nathan, was somewhat at odds with the Popular Front emphasis on “Americanization,” and the Communist effort to center typical working people as the hope of a new future. Besides, even though the play was written during the era when the Communist Party was promoting Popular Front unity among Communists and liberals to stave off fascism and consolidate liberal democracy, Ward decided to set the play in the early 1930s. At that time, different policies, more militant and more focused on proletarian unity, prevailed, and Big White Fog suggests that a violent uprising, not support of the liberal New Deal, is the only solution to racial and economic oppression.
Although Ward certainly traveled in Communist cultural circles in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was only in the postwar era, after the collapse of the Popular Front, that he emerged as an editorial board member in Communist publications and a more direct spokesman for Communist causes. Yet the evidence of Ward’s correspondence does not suggest that he was categorically against the Popular Front and nostalgic for the approach of the early 1930s. Rather, like many Left writers drawn to the Communist movement and the spell of the USSR, Ward still reasoned for himself within a Marxist framework. He made his own choices and alliances according to a variety of factors, and his principal aim was always the writing and production of plays.
Following Big White Fog, there was no letup in Ward’s activity. In 1938 he also completed a brief play about lynching called “Even the Dead Arise.” It had some features of a fantasy where the ghosts of lynched men hold a convention to protest the continuation of lynching. Ward even depicts Haitian revolutionary Touissaint L’Ouverture rising in his tomb to dispatch messages to the U.S. Congress. In 1939, no longer affiliated with Chicago WPA, and hoping to launch a career in New York theater, Ward came East while singing in the chorus of the Federal Theatre production of Swing Mikado, a popular adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 comic opera, The Mikado.
Ward, usually called “Ted,” was at that time a trim, slightly built man of thirty-seven, with a soft, handsome face. Once in New York, Ward promptly contacted Richard Wright, who had arrived a year earlier to write for the Daily Worker. Wright’s departure from Chicago had followed a bitter conflict with Black Communist Party members in the Chicago branch of the Party. Wright felt that they were trying to control or discourage his writing, and they in turn accused him of “Trotskyism,” apparently because he had no qualms about talking to individuals critical of the Party. Yet Wright mended his ties to the Party in New York and was a rising figure in cultural circles.
Wright came to see the Swing Mikado production as Ward’s guest. Subsequently Wright arranged for Ward to move into the apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvesant in which he shared rooms with an interracial Communist couple, Herbert and Jane Newton. After Ward accidentally set a fire by falling asleep with a burning cigarette, he was asked to leave the building. He then moved to the Douglass Hotel in Harlem, where he was immediately joined by Wright. Now that he had settled in New York City, he learned that the Federal Theatre was to be closed down by Congress and that he was out of work.
In 1940, Ward organized and became president of the Negro Playwrights Company in Harlem. On the Board of Directors were Langston Hughes, Powell Lindsay, Owen Dodson, George Norford, and Theodore Browne. Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Edna Thomas, Max Yergan, Gwendolyn Bennett, Rev. John Robinson, Alain Locke, and George B. Murphy Jr. served as Associate members. A colossal benefit was held at the Golden Gate Ballroom where Wright appeared with Robeson and Hazel Scott to raise funds for the company to pay for the Lincoln Theater at 135th and Lennox Avenue.
Big White Fog was the only production of the Negro Playwrights Company, with a cast featuring Canada Lee, Hilda Offley, Frank Silvera, and Lionel Mona-gas. The setting of the play was designed by Perry Watkins, and Powell Lindsay served as director. Ward later estimated that 24,000 white New Yorkers attended the performances, but that only 1,500 African Americans came, indicating a failure to develop roots in the community. There was strong support for the play in statements by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, V. J. Jerome, and others on the Left, but the major newspaper reviews were hostile on political grounds. Ward subsequently concluded that the strongly anti-Communist atmosphere of the years of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939–1941, created the basis for the poor reception among critics.
In June of that year Ward married Mary Sangigian, a Euro-American office manager. Ward had known her in Communist circles in Chicago, and in New York she had left-wing theater connections. Their relationship, however, caused some controversy in the Communist Party milueu. Ward believed that black women in the movement resented his interracial relationship with Mary. Nevertheless, the marriage lasted two decades, and they had two daughters, Elsie Virginia and Laura Louise.
When Wright began planning for a theatrical adaptation of his novel Native Son, he approached Ward about scripting the interpretation. Ward, however, required a financial subsidy to support him and his family during the period of preparation. Wright insisted that none was available at that time. Relations between the two men were complicated by Ward’s suspicion that Wright was antipathetic to Mary. Ward suspected that Wright believed that Mary had been a party to the Communist efforts to discredit Wright as a “Trotskyist” when Wright was in Chicago. Ward did, however, adapt Wright’s short story “Bright and Morning Star,” which was performed at a summer resort colony.
In 1941, Ward began doing research and completed a draft of the writing of Our Lan,’ a play about reconstruction. He read W. E. B. DuBoiss’s Black Reconstruction (1935), as well as studies of the same era by Communists such as Herbert Aptheker, Elizabeth Lawson, and James S. Allen. He also examined government summaries of the Reconstruction events contained in Freedmen’s Bureau reports and Union Army communications in the New York Library. He then manipulated the information for narrative purposes. Ward would later insist that the play was entirely factual, and grew out of his effort to understand the persistence of racist ideology and stereotypes after Emancipation. His research demonstrated to him that many African Americans had understood that land ownership was crucial for economic and political advancement, and some had fought with arms to defend the property to which they thought they had a right. It was this ultimate disempowerment of Blacks during Reconstruction, and the need for the dominant culture to rationalize continued subjugation, that substantially explained the unremitting character of white supremacism over the centuries. By implication, African Americans could finally defeat anti-Black racism through a recontinuation of economic struggle to attain material resources.
With the advent of World War II, Ward went to Washington, D.C. There he unsuccessfully attempted to write plays for the Writers War Board, the goal of which was to promote the war effort. He had already written a play called “Deliver the Goods,” produced at Greenwich House in New York, favoring national defense preparation. Now he proposed to dramatize the life of Frederick Douglass to boost the morale of Black troops. The Board, however, seemed to want only escapist entertainment, and Ward suspected that it especially feared any Civil War themes that might antagonize Southern soldiers.
For a while Ward shined shoes, and then he left for the countryside to spend time painting water colors. Finally he returned to Chicago and opened a shoe-shine parlor in the hopes of writing in his spare time. When he found that, in fact, all his energy was absorbed by the business, he sold the parlor. He then worked as an inspector of automotive products while he tried to find backers for a production of Our Lan.’
Failing in his theatrical entrepreneurial efforts, Ward returned to New York in 1945. There he was able to write some scripts for overseas broadcasts of the Office of War Information (OWI). When the OWI was abolished by Congress, Ward shifted into sales until the Theater Guild gave him a National Theater Conference Fellowship. Subsequently Ward organized a group of antifascist writers into Associated Playwrights: Edmund B. Hennefeld, Nicholas J. Biel, Harry Granick, Haug Monoogian, Samuel Kaiser, Don Huddleston, and Daniel Rudston. Our Lan’ was one of three plays selected by the group for production at the Henry Street Playhouse.
The first series of performances of Our Lan’ was such a success that it attracted the attention of Eddie Dowling, who had produced Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. Dowling, along with Louis J. Singer, was determined to bring the play to Broadway. Much of the cast was retained, including William Veasy and Muriel Smith in starring roles, and Julie Hayden as the Yankee schoolmis-tress. However, Dowling decided that Our Lan’ should be rewritten as a musical, “floodlighted as would be scenes in a Ziegfeld extravaganza,” according to Phylon reviewer Miles Jefferson. The result was a clash between the serious theme and the diversionary entertainment that was catastrophic in regard to the critical response. The same reviewers who had once praised Our Lan’ now condemned it, and the audience disappeared.
Ward’s plot of ten scenes concerns the betrayal of Union Army General Sherman’s promise of “forty acres and a mule” to the newly freed African Americans. Following Emancipation, a population of Blacks migrate, under the Moseslike leadership of Joshua Tain, to an island off the coast of Georgia. Their aim is to farm collectively the land that they believe was given to them by the Union Army. When the workers find themselves betrayed, it is Joshua who leads them into battle against the Union soldiers who have come to restore the property to the former slavemaster.
As in Big White Fog, Ward features a subplot involving a young woman, Delphine, manipulated into a sexual encounter with a more powerful man, Ollie Webster. Webster is described in the list of characters as “a young pre–Civil War Mulatto Freedman,” and Webster originally hoped to make money off Joshua and his followers. As the fortunes of the newly emancipated African Americans fall, Webster switches sides. When Joshua, in love with Delphine, learns that she is pregnant with Webster’s child, Joshua is enraged. Yet he forgives Delphine just before he is killed during the armed resistance.
As a thoughtful drama of Civil War history from an African American standpoint, Our Lan’ is a unique achievement for its time in U.S. theater. Owen E. Bady’s brilliant 1984 analysis of the drafts of the play reveal the evolution of Ward’s thought as he negotiated a variety of strategies to move the narrative from melodrama to tragedy.6 The play essentially combines the story of the U.S. government’s betrayal of a community, with the more personal story of a love affair between a humble but charismatic leader and a woman trapped among contending pressures. Characters in the background provide a panorama of types from the period—Bady identifies them as representatives of the free Black community, Northern liberals, racist property owners, small businessmen, former Confederate soldiers turned into poor workers, and so forth. Continuity among episodes was provided by African American spirituals, which communicated “coded messages of resistance and rebellion.”7 Ultimately, though, Ward was using African American history analogically in the fashion of many of his contemporaries, such as the novelist Arna Bontemps and the painter Jacob Lawrence. Ward’s primary aim was to address the current, post–World War II dilemma of African Americans by disclosing the root causes of their oppression and dramatizing possible role models for sustaining the battle for liberation from racial and economic oppression.
In early drafts, as Brady discloses, Ward assembled his basic raw material for the events but relied on political oratory combined with sensational events. No doubt Ward was trying to adapt the formula he had seen for popular plays that reached out to the broadest audience of a liberal middle class, both white and Black. Among other features, the end of the early draft featured the martyrdom of Delphine, the young woman Joshua loves who has been seduced by the unscrupulous Ollie Webster. Delphine throws herself between Joshua and the guns of the Union soldiers. Stunned by this turn of events the soldiers cease fire. All action comes to a halt as Joshua lifts Delphine’s lifeless body and starts to sing “Deep River.”
Ward’s 1945 revision of the play, carried out in a New York City seminar run by University of Michigan Drama Professor Kenneth Thorpe, was monumental in terms of Our Lan’s structure. Ward conflated four sprawling acts into two tight ones. He toned down sensational features, eliminated folksy wit and other aspects of the early draft that suggested stereotypes of Black culture, and transformed the climax. Moreover, young Ollie Webster has become a more complex prefiguration of the Black middle class. Instead of the classical villain of melodrama, he is depicted as torn between personal opportunism and sympathy for the freedom struggle. There is a change in the development of Delphine as well. In the original version she was seduced and impregnated by Ollie through the gimmick of his slipping her a love potion. Now it is suggested that Delphine possibly succumbed to Ollie due to a preliminary confusion about where her long-term personal interests lay. On the one hand, she had to support financially her sister, and Webster was of a superior economic status. Yet she would clearly be dependent on Webster, whereas life with Joshua could offer her a kind of equality in the new, apparently classless, society that he and his community were building.
Still, the ending of the new version of Our Lan’ remained uncertain, and the matter was never fully resolved. At first Ward reversed the fatal scenario; instead of Delphine sacrificing herself for Joshua, Ward switched to having Joshua die in a failed effort to protect Delphine from the Union army. However, for the experimental Henry Street production, Ward decided to simply end with the final assault of the Union soldiers; the deaths of Joshua and Delphine are implied but not shown. In fact, even the soldiers who carry out the assault are kept off stage, suggesting that a larger system of destruction is responsible for this tragedy than simply malign individuals. As Joshua and Delphine face the army singing “Deep River” together, a chorus joins them. Finally, Ward decided on an experiment devised just as the production moved to the Henry Street stage. The last sound to be heard was powerful cannon shot, one that broke any sense of closure or tragic resolution. Moreover, the shot suggested the continuing threat of violence and oppression into the present.
Yet when Our Lan’ moved uptown to Broadway, following the original enthusiastic reviews, the new producer Dowling feared the possible audience reaction to the explosive cannon. He felt it might terrify middle class white women in the audience, and that it would certainly clash with his decision to stage the spirituals in an operatic fashion. Thus the cannon blast was eliminated. A decade later, when Kenneth Rowe published a version of Our Lan’ with commentary in 1960, the disturbing cannon blast was still absent. Only eleven years later, in 1971, was it restored to the text in the edition prepared by Darwin Turner.
In 1948, Ward was the first African American dramatist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. His hope was to complete a major work on John Brown, tentatively called “Of Human Grandeur.” The intensification of the Cold War, however, limited Ward’s opportunities for theatrical work, and he struggled to find further time and support to bring the play to fruition. In 1950 a preliminary version, “John Brown,” was produced by a left-wing Theater Company in New York, People’s Drama. The focus of the action was three moments in Brown’s antislavery campaign. These include the immediate aftermath to Brown’s attack on slavers at Pottawatomie; the sojourn in the Adirondacks where Brown prepares for Harper’s Ferry; and the night of Brown’s momentous raid against the arsenal. The director of the production was Gene Frankel, and Irving Pakewitz played the part of Brown. “John Brown,” however, received negative notice in the mainstream press. Even in Communist publications the play was called courageous but a failure in relation to explaining Brown’s motivation and those of his followers.8
In the late 1940s, Ward wrote yet another play with radical themes. This was “Shout Hallelujah,” a slice-of-life drama projected against the background of a famous working-class tragedy. The setting was in the late 1920s, in Gawley Bridge, West Virginia. At that time thousands of Black and white tunnel construction workers had contracted silicosis, which eventually led to their agonizing deaths.
In 1951, while temporarily in Chicago, Ward wrote “Throwback,” a remarkable one-act play. This time he made more central his recurring theme of the poor Black woman pressed into illicit sexual relations with a wealthy white man. A production was staged at the 11th Street Theater in New York but received no attention. As was often the case in relation to source material, Ward developed the play from an incident that had been reported to him, this time from the Deep South. The “throwback” of the play is a light-skinned child born to a poor African American couple. The Black husband assumes that the child must be light because of a light grandparent, thus it is a “throwback.” However, he learns from his aunt that his wife, Callie, has been sleeping with his white boss on the farm.
Like Wanda in Big White Fog and Delphine in Our Lan,’ Callie had been caught in complicated economic circumstances that set the stage for her victimization. A primary factor is that her husband, Seth, is desperate to earn overtime by working extra hours in the evening. Seth’s goal is to eventually own property and imitate his boss, Coffee. Of course, Coffee is glad to oblige, because he is obsessed with Callie and now has extra time to devote to seduction. Due to the neglect of her husband, as well as a desire to protect Seth from Coffee’s jealous and violent wrath, Callie succumbs. When the truth comes out, Seth goes into a bitter rage. Yet, faced with a sense of his own guilt and her refusal to abandon the “throwback,” Seth forgives Callie and agrees to raise the child as his own. Seth and the aunt then collaborate in hog-tying Coffee so that Seth and Callie can make their getaway from the region.
A second play that Ward composed in Chicago, “Whole Hog or Nothing,” addressed aspects of World War II in the Pacific. Structured through episodes, the drama was partly based on a story that Ward heard from a young Black officer who had fought in the U.S. Army against the Japanese. Ward learned from him that, while in training camp in New Jersey, the officer had undergone considerable racist harassment. As an officer, he couldn’t technically be barred from the dining room at the base, but the commander arranged to have a screen put around him while he ate. Memories of this incident later produced an illness while the officer was serving in the Pacific.
In another episode of wartime racism in “Whole Hog or Nothing,” Ward depicts an incident in New Guinea about which he had heard. There a group of Black engineers failed to get the artillery support they needed, and most were wiped out. The survivors had to find their way back to the coast through the jungle. En route they encountered a group of surviving white soldiers, but this resulted a crisis because the highest ranking officer was Black.
In 1953, Ward wrote a play called “The Daubers,” which would wait twenty years before production. In the early 1960s, Ward attempted two musicals. One was “Charity: A Play with Music” (1961), in which the book and lyrics were by Ward, the music by Irving Schlein, and the idea was suggested by Mildred Stock. Another was “Big Money: A Negro Musical” (1961), for which Ward wrote the book and collaborated on words and music with Frank Fields. Both of them were never published and there is no record of production. Another play, “Black Wizard of the Keyboard: A Musical Play for Television,” is undated. The music was by Frank Fields, and it was also derived from an idea suggested by Mildred Stock. Other undated and apparently unproduced plays of the post–World War II decades include “The Creole,” “Skin Deep,” “Falcon of Adowa,” “The Life of Harriet Tubman,” and “John the Conqueror.”
Although Ward’s sympathy for Communism and the Soviet Union date from the mid-1930s, he was organizationally at arm’s length until the end of World War II. In 1938 Ward did join the Communist-led League of American Writers and attended some public events, but he was never as prominent in the organization as his friends Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. At the time of the publication of Native Son, Ward followed the discussion within the Communist movement closely and seemed to have access to the internal discussions of Party members and leaders. For some years after that, his main preoccupation appears to have been finding time to write his plays and the resources to produce them. However, in early 1944 Ward wrote to Langston Hughes about his enthusiasm for the new political orientation of the Communist Party under the leadership of Earl Browder. He believed that the change was in harmony with and would assist his present writing. Ward’s letter, announcing that he would support Browder’s report urging cooperation with liberal capitalists in the final years of World War II and the postwar era, is based more on a belief in the superior abilities of the Communist leadership than in the capacity of capitalism to actually cooperate. Moreover, Ward’s strong statement of support for the Party seems to have been partly a reaction to Richard Wright’s disaffection, announced a few months before in a shocking essay in Atlantic Monthly called “I Tried to Be a Communist.”9
It is conceivable that, despite his tactical support to Browder’s policies, Ward still considered himself on the left wing of the Communist movement. Browder was deposed for his deviations to the Right only a year later and expelled from the Communist Party in early 1946. Yet, in 1947, with the Party shifting dramatically to the Left, Ward was among a group of distinguished founding editors of a Communist literary journal, Mainstream. This publication was in part a replacement for the Party’s New Masses, a weekly that combined cultural and political work, which had fallen victim to the hard times of the Cold War. In Mainstream Ward published an extraordinary literary essay, “Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat,” with his pro-Soviet views and hopes for the Communist movement clearly expressed. Ward also disclosed considerable skills as a critic, as he treats fiction by Frank Yerby, Chester Himes, Carl Offord, William Attaway, and Ann Petry. Nevertheless, the judgments are subordinated to a sectarian view, substantially fueled by his animosity toward his ex-friend Richard Wright.
Although Mainstream folded after four issues, Ward remained on the editorial board of its successor, Masses & Mainstream, up until the near-collapse of the U.S. Communist Party in 1956. At that time the Communist movement throughout the world was profoundly divided over the secret report of Nikita Khrushchev to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev acknowledged many of Stalin’s crimes and yet a few months later ordered Soviet tanks to stage a brutal crackdown against a rebellion in neighboring Hungary. The precise impact of these events on Ward is not known, but he had published sections from his work-in-progress in Masses & Mainstream during the years when he was listed as an editor. After the magazine was reorganized, assuming the name Mainstream again, Ward was absent from its pages for some few years but then commenced to contribute episodically in the early 1960s.
In 1964, Ward returned to Chicago where he founded the South Side Center of the Performing Arts. There he served as executive director and taught playwriting classes for children. The Center expressed the desire for a Black Community Theater, but funding and an institutional base remained an uncertainty. In the early spring of 1966, the Center produced Alice Childress’s play “Florence,” followed by Ward’s “Whole Hog or Nothing.” The performances were followed by animated discussion from the audience. However, these discussions gave rise to a debate among the theater sponsors as to whether the time was really right for a major Black community theater, as opposed to an integrated little theater. When playwright Douglas Turner Ward, himself a veteran of the Communist movement and later the founder of the Negro Ensemble Company of New York, arrived in Chicago for a visit in the mid-1960s, Theodore Ward expected to find an ally. Instead, in meetings held to discuss the future of the theater, he felt that Douglas Ward was actually supporting his integrationist antagonists.
A complete collapse of the Center was averted in 1967. At that time a white Chicagoan gave the Center $5,000 for the purpose of pursing Ward’s aims. With the additional support of Black-owned businessmen, Ward launched a new production of Our Lan’ on October 26, 1967. Notwithstanding, Ward found himself unable to move forward with his additional projects, because the only theater facilities that he could locate were inferior and unattractive to the kind of Black middle-class audience that might provide long-term support.
Still, in 1967 Ward wrote “Candle in the Wind,” and in 1973 “The Daubers” was finally produced. In 1978 Ward was invited to serve as Writer-in-Residence at the Free Southern Theater in New Orleans. After returning to Chicago, he received local recognition in 1982 as a recipient of the DuSable Writers’ Seminar and Poetry Festival Award for Excellence in Drama. That same year, Ward died of a heart attack at age eighty-one in the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. Earlier, in the 1960s, Ward’s contributions to Black theater were discussed in scholarly books by Loften Mitchell and Doris Abramson. In the decade of Ward’s death and just after, in the 1980s and 1990s, his relation to the Federal Theatre was treated in books by E. Quita Craig and Rena Fraden. Nonetheless, a collection of his plays has never been published, and the vast majority of his writing remains unknown to scholars in American literature.
1. Most useful for reconstructing Ward’s biography in this essay are Dennis Gobbins, “The Education of Theodore Ward,” New Masses 25, 3 (October 28, 1947): 10–14; letters from Ward to Constance Webb Pearlstein, November 7, 1966, and January 10, 1967, Schomburg Library, New York; letter from Ward to Langston Hughes, August 29, 1939, Beinecke Rare Book Room, Yale University; and oral history of Ward in Hatch-Billops Collection, New York City.
2. See E. Quita Craig, Black Drama of the Federal Theater Era: Beyond the Formal Horizons (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and Rena Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater 1935–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3. This description of the play is based on the oral history of Ward in the Hatch-Billops Collection, op. cit., 9–10.
4. See the history of the South Side Writers Group in Alan M. Wald, Exiles From a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 267–76.
5. Ward, Theodore. “Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat.” Mainstream 1, 1 (Winter 1947): 100–110.
6. Bady, Owen E. “Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’: From the Slavery of Melodrama to the Freedom of Tragedy.” Callaloo 7, 21 (Spring–Summer 1984): 40–56.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Schneider, Isidor. “‘Longitude 49’ and ‘John Brown.’” Masses & Mainstream 3 (June 1950): 91–95.
9. Ward to Langston Hughes, January 24, 1944, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. See also Richard Wright, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” Atlantic Monthly 174 (August 1940): 61–70, and (September 1944): 48–56.
Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theater, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
An Anthology. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1971, 73–145.
Anonymous. “Five New People’s Plays Open in 1950,” Daily Worker, January 3, 1951, 11.
“Big Money: A Negro Musical,” 1961.
Big White Fog. London: Nick Hern Books, 2008; also in Black Theater USA, edited by James V. Hatch. New York: Free Press, 1974, 278–319.
“Black Wizard of the Keyboard: A Musical Play for Television.”
Brown, Fahamisha Patricia. “Theodore Ward.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 76: Afro-American Writers, 1940–1955, edited by Trudier Harris. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Bruccoli Clark Layman Books, 1988.
Brown, John Mason. “The Uphill Road.” Saturday Review of Literature (October 18, 1947): 24–27.
“Charity: A Play with Music,” 1960.
“Excerpt from ‘John Brown’.” Masses & Mainstream 2 (October 1949): 36–47.
“Excerpt from ‘Shout Hallelujah.’” Masses & Mainstream 1 (May 1948): 8–18.
“Five Negro Novelists: Revolt and Retreat.” Mainstream 1, 1 (Winter 1947): 100–110.
Fraser, C. Gerald. “Theodore Ward, Playwright Who Focused on Blacks, Dies,” New York Times, May 5, 1983, D23.
Hatch, James V. “Theodore Ward: Black American Playwright.” Freedomways 15 (1975): 37–41.
Hill, Errol. The Theater of Black Americans, Volume II. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Jefferson, Miles. “The Negro on Broadway.” Phylon 9, 2 (Second Quarter 1948): 99–107.
Letter from Theodore Ward to Keneth Kinnamon, July 8, 1965, Kinnamon Papers, University of Arkansas.
Lovel, John. “New Curtains Going Up.” The Crisis 54 (October 1947): 305–7, 315–316.
Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967.
Nathan, George Jean. “Memoranda on Four Play Categories.” American Mercury 66 (January 1948): 37–41.
“Of Human Grandeur: A John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Play,” 1949–64.
Our Lan’. In Darwin T. Turner., ed., Black Drama in America: “Challenge: A One Act Play on John Brown.” Mainstream 15 (February 1962): 40–59; and (March 1962): 39–52.
Rowe, Kenneth. A Theater in Your Head. New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1960.
“Scene from ‘The Daubers.’” In Alice Childress, ed., Black Scenes. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971, 77–89.
Schneider, Isidor. “Our Lan’: A Triumph.” New Masses 25, 3 (October 14, 1947): 12–13.
———. “Theatre.” Masses & Mainstream 3 (June 1950): 91–95.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. This includes manuscripts of plays.
“Songs.” Mainstream 15 (September 1962): 38–41.
“The South Side Center of the Performing Arts.” Black Theatre 2 (1969): 3–4.
“Throwback: A Negro Play in One Act,” 1951.
See the Hatch-Billops Collection, New York City. Included are manuscripts of plays and a lengthy oral history.