The African American Theatre Directory, 1816-1960: A Comprehensive Guide to Early Black Theatre Organizations, Companies, Theatres, and Performing Groups. “Introduction” in Selected Plays: Alice Childress, Ed. Schomburg Center for Researchin Black Culture. References “Guide to the Jefferson School of Social Science (New York, N.Y.) Records and Indexes TAM.005.” Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and WhiteĪvailable for purchase here, or find it at the New York Public Library here.Īvailable for purchase here and here, or find it at the New York Public Library here.Īvailable for purchase here and here, or find it at the New York Public Library here. Perkins, available for purchase here, or find it at the New York Public Library here. It is also published in Selected Plays: Alice Childress, edited by Kathy A. The individual script is available for purchase here, or find it at the New York Public Library here. Childress herself also died of cancer suddenly in 1994.Īvailable in Selected Plays: Alice Childress, edited by Kathy A. In 1990, Childress was leading a busy life of lecturing and college appearances when her daughter Jean died of cancer. As a self-educated woman without a high school diploma, Childress was proud of this recognition from the academic community. Additionally, she was the subject of multiple biographies, articles, and graduate dissertations. She received an Honorary Degree from the State University New York at Oneonta and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the State University of New York, both in 1990, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre of Higher Education in 1993. Radcliffe College, where she had been an Associate Scholar from 1966 to 1968, awarded her an Alumnae Graduate Society Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1984. In 1979, she received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for A Short Walk, a novel about a Black woman’s life beginning in the 1900s in Charleston and ending in Harlem in the 1940s.Ĭhildress also received scholarly attention in her later life. The book was adapted into a successful 1978 film, for which Childress also wrote the screenplay, starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. Her young-adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which explored the struggle of Black youth in the inner city, received multiple awards: the American Library Association’s Best Young Adult Book, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and a Jane Addams Award. She also turned to fiction writing and received much broader recognition for her novels than her work in the theatre ever provided during her lifetime. While Childress continued writing plays (mostly one-acts) through the 1960s and early ‘70s, her focus shifted away from plays with interracial casts and conflicts, instead focusing on stories about Black life that did not require white actors. While she was ultimately cleared of any association with the Communist Party, Perkins suggests that the FBI surveillance caused Childress to be protective of her biographical information for the rest of her life. Childress’s association with these left-wing organizations put her on the FBI’s surveillance list for many years. Together with her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, Childress founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice: a radical Black women’s civil rights group that fought against lynching, the rape of Black women by white men, Jim Crow, South African apartheid, and sexism. She also taught classes at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Marxist institute for adult education. For Freedom, a progressive Black newspaper founded by actor-activist Paul Robeson, Childress wrote a column using the persona of “Mildred,” a domestic worker who shared her experiences of racism. Childress fought for theatre artists’ rights to receive advances and guaranteed pay for union actors in Off-Broadway productions. She worked with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), a Harlem-based cultural support organization, which co-sponsored some of her early productions. While writing plays, Childress also engaged in real-world political activism. Wanting to stage the racial conflict she saw happening around her, Childress was then one of the few African American playwrights to write for interracial casts. Women such as Wiletta in Trouble in Mind …were rare in the African American drama of the civil rights era since they were among the few black characters to confront white antagonists onstage. called herself a ‘liberation writer’ and created strong, compassionate, often militant female characters who resisted socioeconomic conditions. Perkins, a scholar and also the lighting designer for Roundabout's production of Trouble in Mind, observes:
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