6 - African American women dramatists, 1930–1960

Summary

Writing about the out-of-town premiere of her play A Raisin in the Sun in a letter to her mother, Lorraine Hansberry remarked:

Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people. Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say.

Hansberry’s emphasis on telling the truth and infusing her plays with comedy and pathos equally describes the works of Eulalie Spence and Alice Childress, whose plays blazed a trail for Hansberry with their investment in the overlapping effects of racism and class status within mid-twentieth-century black life. Accordingly, this chapter not only engages class, race, and gender issues; it serves a recuperative purpose that introduces the theatres of two seminal playwrights who inspired, or otherwise forged a path for Hansberry.

The interstices of the Great Depression, World War ii, and the Civil Rights Movement shaped the careers of these three significant African American playwrights. All three nurtured their dramaturgy and activism in New York while working with the social and cultural leaders of their era, each achieved critical acclaim, and each saw her plays published and produced during her lifetime. Though it is challenging to categorize their work, as all three have resisted tidy structuralist groupings, their plays are at once about black life and culture, and about all humanity.