Chicago’s black cultural life in the 1930s and 1940s was as vital as New York’s during the Harlem Renaissance. Literature, art, music, theater, and other creative activities thrived and developed into what has recently been referred to as the Chicago Renaissance. The migration of African Americans during the twenty years before the Depression had contributed to the development of a spirited Black community. By 1930 it was estimated that Chicago’s black population reached 230,000 people, and many of these migrants were generally segregated to the South Side or what became known as “Bronzeville.”
Chicago boasted of many organizations that added to the vitality of the African American communities. Rena Fraden notes in her book, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–1939, that there were “167 churches, 47 college clubs, 97 fraternal orders, and over 18 local and national college fraternities and sororities in existence in 1927.”1 In addition to women’s clubs, service organizations, and social networks, there were also business and professional clubs in which Blacks participated and supported. Theater, too, with its vaudeville, minstrels, comedies, dramas, and musical shows represented a rich tradition in African American culture in Chicago.
Theater was part of the strong cultural tradition among blacks in Chicago. In 1861, the first stock theater was founded. Robert T. Motts who had traveled in England and seen theater presentations, returned to Chicago to initiate a comparable program. According to Fraden, after opening the Pekin Theater in 1905, which seated twelve hundred people, Mott was successful until 1911, when he found himself in competition with white theaters doing vaudeville.
There were, however, other achievements in Chicago’s black theater history. Tony Langston, an actor, was dramatic editor of the historic Chicago Defender. Billy King not only produced shows, but wrote hundreds of plays and sketches, and the list of actors included Evelyn Preer, who began her career with the Lafayette Players in Chicago, and Clarence Muse, another member of the Lafayette Players.2 Given the city’s background in black theater, with performers, technicians, and artistic activists, the creative energy that permeated the South Side during the thirties and forties suggested great possibilities for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP).
The Federal Theatre Project was one of the four arts projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) developed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the high unemployment among creative artists during the Great Depression. Along with the other arts projects—writing, art, and music—theater suffered greatly during the 1930s. Although it had been in decline prior to the thirties, with the introduction of the motion picture industry and other cheaper forms of entertainment, actors, designers, stagehands, writers, and craftsmen now had little choice but to go on relief. Fraden asserts that the Federal Theatre Project not only intended for these artists to acquire employment, allowing them to continue to develop their skills, it also suggested that theater was an integral part of American culture and should not be allowed to die.
As the Federal Theatre sought to provide employment for theater professionals, additional goals became important when Hallie Flanagan became director of the Project. President Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, deputy administrator of New York’s Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) and later head of the WPA, recruited her from Vassar, where she had been involved in noncommercial theater. Flanagan had revolutionary ideas about the Federal Theatre Project. She wanted the FTP to provide employment opportunities for people with theater experience and to encourage them to expand their talents. Moreover, she wanted the project to bring theater to the people, to use local talent and exercise local control, and to include issues in the plays that exemplified diversity and social significance. In his essay, “The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre,” Ronald Ross points out that Flanagan “wanted the forgotten man … to be a major concern of the Federal Theatre Project.”3
Flanagan’s commitment to a theater of and for the people led her and Rose McClendon, one of the major black actresses of the time, to come together in 1935 to talk about the establishment of separate units for blacks. McClendon and Flanagan both believed that the only way to achieve equality of opportunity and racial parity was to establish autonomous separate black units. McClendon was highly concerned that as these units acquire autonomy, they also portray Black life realistically. She had been working with Dick Campbell, a singer-actor, to organize a Negro People’s Theater, but after her death, many of the theater employees gravitated to the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre.4 Loften Mitchell asserts that in keeping with Flanagan’s goal to bring theater to the people, some of the New York groups presented productions at the YMCA, African American churches, “ballrooms and halls,” and other social arenas.5
These Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project provided significant opportunities for African Americans. In Chicago, identified by Flanagan as “one of the five great regions,” she supported the Negro unit and wanted to see it succeed.6 Swing Mikado, the most successful production of the Chicago Negro Unit, gave blacks many opportunities for creative work. Lafayette Theater in Harlem, another example, provided the people a burst of enthusiasm about the possibilities of a theater where blacks could determine their own creative direction. Meeting nightly to discuss directions for the theater, share ideas, and examine possible plays, the Negro Units were encouraged by the support garnered from the Federal Theatre.
In addition to employment, some theater scholars have noted that the Federal Theatre was partly responsible for helping black playwrights develop their skills and write about black life. Fraden, however, informs us that John Houseman, a white producer Rose McClendon asked to run the Negro Unit in Harlem, pointed out that his major problem in the role was no “performable Negro scripts.”7 Apparently, Houseman was either unaware of or misinformed about the existence of significant plays such as Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.’s On the Fields of France (1921), May Miller’s The Bog Guide (1925) or Scratches (1929), and Willis Richardson’s Rooms for Rent (1926).
Although these plays existed, many of the Negro units performed white plays adapted for a black cast. For example, the voodoo Macbeth was performed at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem in 1936 and Swing Mikado, an adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, was staged in Chicago in 1938. Though each of these plays were commercially successful and later moved to the commercial stage, W. E. B. DuBois, Theophilus Lewis, Alain Locke, and other black critics wanted the Negro units to move toward a realistic portrayal of black life and experiences, such as those found in Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog, which initially opened in Chicago. White directors and producers, however, sought out white scripts, because they were more readily available. Blacks were now more responsible for the kind of drama they wanted to produce, but they needed to develop their skills.
The objective of the FTP to help black playwrights develop their skills was slow in coming to fruition. The Negro Dramatists’ Laboratory, organized in New York by George Zorn and lasting from November 1936 to February 1937 is just one program instituted by the Federal Theatre Project to develop and train Black playwrights. Ronald Ross points to the intense lectures and workshops on “script forms, research techniques, technical requirements, and copyright laws,” and credits the Negro Dramatists’ Laboratory as invaluable to helping Black writers compete as artists in American culture.8 In providing training opportunities for Black playwrights, this program fulfilled one of the objectives of the FTP.
While the Negro Dramatists’ Laboratory was part of the New York scene, and many of the preliminary theater initiatives occurred there, New York was not the only vibrant area where Negro units existed. Among the many units throughout the country were those in Seattle, Boston, New Jersey, Dallas, Los Angeles, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Durham, and Chicago. The Chicago Unit of the FTP was one of the largest, boasting of three successful original productions—Swing Mikado, Big White Fog, and Little Black Sambo. With government support, Blacks, who had already been interested and involved in theater, had some assurance they would have a chance to use their talents. Moreover, since Chicago had a memorable Black theater history, there was no problem finding talented technicians, stagehands, and performers such as Herman Green, Maurice Cooper, and William Franklin, who were capable of performing a variety of entertainment from musicals to realistic drama.
Since realistic drama was less accessible and therefore, less popular during the Chicago Renaissance, some white directors turned to musicals, classical plays, and even minstrels. Flanagan praised Shirley Graham’s adaptation of Charlotte Chorpenning’s Little Black Sambo, for its “skill and understanding of its direction and the vivid jungle quality of its sets and music.”9 Shirley Graham, later Shirley Graham Dubois, had amassed impressive credentials in music and theater. Under the auspices of the Federal Summer Theatre, convening at Vassar in the mid-1930s, she participated in a gathering of theater professionals, studying and working for six weeks. She returned to work in Chicago and later received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to study at Yale. According to Flanagan, Graham wanted to devote her talents to “the development of Negro theater in this country.”10
It is not certain if Little Black Sambo met this objective or was designed for this purpose. It is, nonetheless, the story of an African boy who must outwit tigers to get home. Flanagan notes that the show, “designed, composed, and directed” by Graham, was well-received by both critics and audiences. The jungle motif, which Flanagan referred to, obviously did not influence the reception of the show since the Negro unit performed before healthcare facilities, schools, parks, Boy Scouts, and other youth groups. While the FTP advocated the abolition of black stereotypes and did not support negative images that permeated much of black theater, the Negro unit in Chicago also performed Little Black Sambo, as part of Puppet Theater, to audiences of children.11 Although Blacks were not limited to the theatrical forms that helped to keep black stereotypes alive, they nevertheless found the show entertaining.
When the Chicago unit abandoned much of the minstrel form, they, like other units across the country, began to focus on white plays, such as Androcles and the Lion, The Taming of the Shrew, and of course, Macbeth and The Mikado, adapted for black performers. When black casts performed European plays revamped for them, critics responded enthusiastically because blacks demonstrated their abilities to work in categories usually relegated to white actors. Voodoo Macbeth, one of the major successes of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, is one such example. In Fraden’s discussion of the response to Voodoo Macbeth, she notes that there were a variety of comments, “critical and appreciative.” One Black reviewer had high expectations that this production would “define a black audience.” Roi Ottley wrote that the production was “spectacular” and proved the importance of the FTP and black actors. Moreover, he believed the performance was characteristically Harlem, which suggests that the performance represented the people.
The most successful play in Chicago, though, was the 1938 production of Swing Mikado, a musical comedy adapted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 Mikado. Although there have been many adaptations of The Mikado, the Chicago unit’s version was the most commercially successful. Attracting many black professional actors with a history in the business, Swing Mikado showcased the talents of several outstanding vaudevillians, such as Herman Green, who played the role of Ko-Ko, the tailor in the musical; Maurice Cooper, the lead character; and William Franklin, who was experienced in opera. The musical ran in Chicago for “five months to 250,000 people and made $35,000; in the weeks before Christmas, it grossed between $5,000 and $5,500 a week.”12 Receiving high marks from both black and white reviewers, Swing Mikado showed that blacks could do Gilbert and Sullivan and bring something special to it. While most of the white reviewers wanted more of the “exotic and primitive,” the production so excited the theater industry that New York tried to buy Swing Mikado from the Chicago Theater.
Swing Mikado was directed by Harry Minturn, who, in 1937, was the white acting assistant director to Hallie Flanagan, charged with the responsibility of finding a play for the Chicago Negro Unit. With a background primarily in “vaudeville and popular shows as theatrical manager and producer, actor and director,” he had no particular cultural or New Deal mission.13 Less interested in making a political statement about the importance of blacks in the FTP, Minturn was more interested in showcasing his talents and those of the performers. Minturn chose to present an adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan success, The Mikado, a comic opera about a young girl, Yum-Yum, who falls in love with the Mikado’s son, but is promised to an older man, Ko-Ko. The Mikado, however, has sworn that anyone who is unmarried and eyes or flirts with another will be beheaded. Ko-Ko has been condemned to death for “such crimes to humanity.” Nevertheless, the people release him because the next person to be decapitated “Cannot cut off another’s head / Until he’s cut his own off.”14
While The Mikado focuses on bizarre situations, Swing Mikado showcases both the actors’ talents and the director’s. Minturn changed the setting from Japan, which had been controversial, to the South Pacific. He also catered to some of the actors’ dancing skills and singing talents by rearranging three of the songs to swing versions and by keeping other songs true to the original script, respectively.
The show opened in the fall of 1938 as part of the new season, and received enthusiastic reviews from both white and black audiences. Black reviewers believed the success of this musical comedy would bring people to the theater in Chicago and throughout the nation with eager anticipation to see such a great production. Although most white reviewers wanted a more stereotyped black presentation and more swing, they were nevertheless impressed with the performance and gave it high marks. The production demonstrated the gifts of the black cast and showed that black casts could do wonders with an exceptional play, such as the one by Gilbert and Sullivan.
The successful production of Swing Mikado fulfilled the needs of several groups, as Fraden clearly notes. Minturn was pleased with his ability to direct successfully a black cast without making too many changes and still appeal to the black audience. The cast was pleased with the opportunity to perform in a musical comedy with the reputation of The Mikado. The FTP director applauded the performance’s bringing theater to a number who, without the government’s help, would be unable to experience theater. The FTP was especially pleased with the jobs provided for blacks with theatrical skill and the unit’s helping people to build and maintain their skills.
The Chicago unit’s success with Swing Mikado and other white productions tailored to black casts generally eclipsed the work of the black playwright. Though producers and directors were still calling for better plays by blacks, and one of the objectives of the FTP was to develop black playwrights, there were few opportunities in Chicago for writers to master the discipline and skills to write good plays, as in the case of the Negro Dramatists’ Laboratory in New York. Theodore Ward, the black playwright and author of Big White Fog, however, had collaborated with Richard Wright and learned from him and the group of writers with whom Wright associated. When Wright worked for a while with the Chicago Negro unit, he tried to assist playwrights and actors, but his ideas were not readily accepted, particularly by the actors who objected to what they perceived as Wright’s radical form of theater.
Flanagan had the idea of uplift as the focus of the Negro units and was not opposed to rejecting some of the plays, especially if she deemed them too violent or potentially upsetting for the audience. Although she rejected Hughes Allison’s Panyared, a play about miscegenation and the violence of slavery, black playwrights continued to submit material to the FTP. While the FTP wanted opportunities and self-determination for blacks in the units, the federal administration was not beyond censorship.
With some censorship but greater opportunities under the government-sponsored program, black playwrights were willing to take their chance with the FTP. Among the list were Hall Johnson, Frank Wilson, Hughes Allison, John Silvera, Abram Hill, Augustus Smith, Paul Morrell, Rudolph Fisher, Theodore Brown, and Theodore Ward. While the reviewers looked at the plays with a cautious eye, and sometimes allowed FTP politics and confusion to obstruct their critical vision, some of the plays were produced by one or more Negro units of the FTP. The most popular play written for the FTP and initially produced by the Chicago unit is Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog, a striking example of dramatic realism, which first appeared in 1938. Set in Chicago during the years between 1922 and 1932, the play was Ward’s attempt to create a realistic portrayal of African American life. Unlike some of the plays submitted to the FTP, which did not always get a favorable response from the administration, Big White Fog was one of the plays Flanagan strongly supported. It was also a play that dealt with racism and injustice in the urban north, something absent in many of the plays produced by the FTP. Ward’s play made money during its ten-week run in Chicago, and gave the city a strong presence in the revival of black theater.
Theodore Ward’s experiences were fodder for his creativity. Louisiana-born, he left at the age of thirteen and traveled throughout the United States. Working odd jobs, he eventually settled in Chicago, after attending the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin. In Chicago, he met Richard Wright, joined the John Reed Club, and began working for the WPA. In a short while, Ward had become an active part of the creative and cultural group of the South Side of Chicago, or Bronzeville.
Keenly aware of the racism and Jim Crow practices that existed not just in small southern towns, but in big northern cities as well, Ward believed in a coalition of working-class blacks and whites as an effective way of dealing with the racial and class injustices with which he was familiar. One of his goals as a playwright was to write about the injustices confronting the black family, and how the family can be devastated by racism and capitalism. Ward’s journey from the South to the industrialized North represents an important chapter in black social history, and as Fraden asserts, Big White Fog dramatizes “what happens to their dreams once they hit the big northern city.”15
Big White Fog is a play reflecting the life of an African American family living in Chicago in the twenties. Through Victor Mason, the patriarch, his wife and children—particularly his son, Les, and daughter, Wanda—his in-laws, and Les’s Jewish friend, Pizer, the play reveals the ideological, political, and economical struggle of the Mason family as they wander in a “big white fog.” A three-act play, Big White Fog describes Victor Mason and his family during the years blacks were rapidly immigrating to Chicago from the south. Vic Mason, a single-minded Garveyite, demonstrates the commitment of some blacks to Marcus Garvey’s self-help, independence, and back-to-Africa program, which had a branch in Chicago.
The play opens in 1922, in the living room of the Mason home on Dearborn Street, Chicago, the setting of the entire play. Like many African Americans who had migrated to the cities during WWI, Vic uproots his family from the Mississippi cotton fields in search of a dream, only to find it illusive. Spending his time “carrying a hod by day and wrestling in the movement all night,” Vic is determined to follow through on the promises he made to his family. Like others, he dreams of a place where his children can be educated, his wife can live without being victimized by prejudice, and he can experience self-worth as a black man.
Instead of realizing his dream, Victor Mason watches his family endure economic and social inequalities. His older son is rejected for a scholarship, for which he is qualified, because blacks are ineligible. His older daughter drops out of school, takes a job, and ends up supporting the family, sometimes by questionable means. Vic, himself, foolishly invests the family’s $1500 in Garvey’s Black Star Line, leaving his wife unable to take care of the younger children. Finally, reaching the breaking point, the Mason family unravels under the pressures, which in the end reveal themselves in domestic hostilities, self-hatred, and acrimonious insults.
While Garveyism does not save Victor, he remains a loyal follower until the Depression hits and the family faces eviction. When his son encourages him to join hands with the resistance forces that have organized to fight the powerful bosses, Vic is unwilling. But when the bailiff calls for the policeman to enforce the eviction notice, Vic stands his ground. He does not, however, acknowledge the value of the resistance struggle until he lay dying, the victim of a policeman’s bullet.
The act of resistance by a coalition of left-wing blacks and whites at the conclusion of Big White Fog seems to be Ward’s answer to the economic and social injustices faced by blacks in Chicago and throughout the country. The play took a position on political and social issues facing those who left de facto slavery seeking the mythic north. Ward’s re-creation of this part of black life reflected what W. E. B. DuBois, Sterling Brown, and Richard Wright outlined in their discussions about the need for more realistic portrayals. Exploring issues common to black families in a racially and economically hostile environment was categorically different from anything about blacks that had been produced in Chicago by the FTP.
In spite of its originality and promise, Big White Fog had a rather tumultuous journey to the stage. Harry Minturn, who was then acting director of the Chicago Project in 1937, agreed with the position of W. E. B. DuBois that the play should be presented somewhere on the South Side. Though Ward wanted his play presented before a broader audience, Minturn asked Shirley Graham to find a theater in the Black community. Fraden notes that part of Shirley Graham’s responsibility was to find out what the black community was thinking, to interpret it for Minturn, and to garner their support. Graham, who knew the tastes of black Chicago audiences, recognized the problems the play presented to some of the people. According to Graham, issues addressed in the play—coalition among blacks and whites, which they interpreted as Communism, black women taking money from white men, blacks’ support of their own businesses exclusively, and even the Garvey failure would be troublesome to black audiences.
There were other concerns about Big White Fog. Blacks were not a homogeneous audience. Some wanted the re-creation of material socially and politically relevant, while others preferred to be entertained with singing, dancing, jokes, and considerable artifice. Some members of the audience didn’t want to be reminded of the struggle, while others wanted it reinforced in the theater. These differences, along with Graham’s commitment to racial uplift, did not imbue her with enthusiasm for the play. Moreover, she was disappointed with Chicago blacks whom she believed lacked interest in culture. When the play was previewed at the YWCA on the South Side, the reception was polite, but not enthusiastic, and responses later collected were unfavorable. After Graham reread the play, she decided it should not be produced. Big White Fog did finally reach the stage, the political controversies notwithstanding. Fraden suspects the Chicago city administration put pressure on the WPA, and the play was produced at the Great Northern theatre, the setting of many of the FTP’s experimental plays. Flanagan had urged the FTP to produce the play, and so had a well-known African American woman who told the downtown bureaucrats Blacks wanted to see Big White Fog. After the successful run in Chicago to a mixed audience, the play went to locations in the Bronzeville area. When the government cut the funds of the WPA and the FTP ended, Big White Fog went to New York and was revived by the Negro Theater Company.
The Federal Theatre Project ended on June 30, 1939, by an Act of Congress. Flanagan writes that the Federal Theatre ended because of political issues. She also notes that she had read in a New York paper that the Federal Theatre was “dominated by Communists and that you had to belong to the Workers’ Alliance in order to get on the project.”16 Members of Congress were not willing to put their careers on the line for the Federal Theatre, the budget of which they had been shaving for two years. Eventually the FTP became the victim of Congressional legislation.
The Federal Theatre Project, like the other three arts projects of the WPA, was created out of the need to respond to the high unemployment among creative artists. By the early 1930s African Americans who had migrated to Chicago had established a culturally vital community, which they tried to maintain in spite of the economic climate. A significant part of this culture was the theater, which had begun to decline in the late 1920s with the arrival of cheaper forms of entertainment and the onset of the Depression. The Chicago Negro Unit of the FTP became invaluable to Chicago’s black theater and helped to shape it into one of the most important creative outlets of the Chicago Renaissance.
The Black Chicago Renaissance benefited significantly from the activities of the Negro unit. The unit assured Blacks employment opportunities in the theater, while it helped them to hone and conserve their skills. Black technicians, stagehands, actors, designers, and writers were able to participate in the productions supported by the government. Little Black Sambo, Swing Mikado, and Big White Fog were three of the most successful productions of the Chicago Negro unit, bringing attention to black Chicago and its theater tradition. The success of both Swing Mikado and Big White Fog, principally, helped to shape the cultural and artistic achievement of Chicago during the thirties and forties, and all who contributed to the accomplishments are now part of the history of the FTP and the Chicago Renaissance.
1. Flanagan, Rena. ARENA: The History of the Federal Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965, 111.
2. Ibid., 111.
3. Ross, Ronald. “The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre, 1935–39.” In The Theater of Black Americans Vol. II: in The Presenters/the Participators, edited by Errol Hill. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980, 35.
4. Fraden, Rena. Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–39. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 3.
5. Mitchell, Loften. “The Depression Year: Propaganda Plays, the Federal Theatre, Efforts Toward a New Harlem Theater.” In Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967, 100.
6. Flanagan, ARENA: The History of the Federal Theatre, 21.
7. Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–39, 96.
8. Ross, “The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre, 1935–39,” 45–46.
9. Flanagan, ARENA: The History of the Federal Theatre, 144.
10. Ibid., 215.
11. Ibid.
12. Fraden, Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre, 1935–39, 189.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 187.
15. Ibid., 117.
16. Flanagan, 335.
Abramson, Doris E. “The Thirties: The Job We Never Had,” and “The Forties: Did Somebody Die?” In her Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, 44–164.
Brown, Lorraine and the Staff of the Fenwick Library, George Mason University. The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Brown, Lorraine. “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest and Genius.” Journal of the Library of Congress 36, 1 (Winter 1979): 18–37.
Brown, Sterling. “Realistic and Problem Drama.” In his Negro Poetry and Drama and the Negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1972, 124–42.
Chicago Renaissance 1932–1950, Chicago Public Library Digital Collections. http://www.chipublib.org/digital/chiren/introduction.html.
http://www.chipublib.org/digital/chiren/artpage.html; http://www.chipublib.org/digital/chiren/institutions.html; http://www.chipublib.org/digital/chiren/literature.html.
Fraden, Rena. “A National Negro Theater That Never Was: A History of African American Theater Production, Performance and Drama in the US—Includes a Directory of National and Regional African American Theater Companies.” American Visions (October–November 1994). http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_mi_m1546/isn5_v9/ai15875048/print.
Hamalian, Leo and James V. Hatch. Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance: 1920–1940. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966.
Hatch, James V. and Omanii Abdullah, comp. and eds. Black Playwrights, 1823–1977: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977.
The Living Newspaper. http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/pdf/fedtheatre/Living_Newspaper.pdf.
Mitchell, Loften. “The Depression Year: Propaganda Plays, the Federal Theatre, Efforts toward a New Harlem Theatre.” In his Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967, 91–110.
Ponce, Pedro. “An Hour upon the Stage: The Brief Life of the Federal Theatre.” http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2003–07/federaltheatre.html.
Reardon, Patrick T. “Can Bronzeville Reclaim Its Soul? After Redevelopment, the Name May Be All That’s Left of the Community’s Rich Heritage,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2000. http://www.palmtavern.bizland.com/palmtavern/000521Can_Bronzeville_Reclaim_Its_Soul_full. http://www.chfestival.org/education.cfm?Action=EdLessons.
Ross, Ronald. “The Role of Blacks in the Federal Theatre, 1935–1939.” In The Theater of Black Americans Vol. II: The Presenters/the Participators, edited by Errol Hill. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980, 33–48.
Trumbull, Eric W. “The Federal Theatre Project” (1998–2001). http://www.novaonline.nv.cc.va.us/eli/spd130et/federaltheatre.htm.