Chapter 5 - The Negro Little Theatre Movement

Summary

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.