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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2019
This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.
1 Adrienne E. Herndon, “Shakespeare at Atlanta University,” Voice of the Negro (hereafter VN), July 1906, 482–86. On the journal see Harlan, Louis R., “Booker T. Washington and the Voice of the Negro, 1904–1907,” Journal of Southern History, 45, 1 (Feb. 1979), 45–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bullock, Penelope L., “Profile of a Periodical: The Voice of the Negro,” Atlanta Historical Bulletin, 21 (Spring 1977), 99–110Google Scholar.
2 Herndon, 482.
3 Ibid., 482, 485.
4 Godshalk, David Ford, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
5 VN, July 1906, 482, 468.
6 On Herndon's life see indispensable, Carole Merritt's The Herndons: An Atlanta Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
7 Hill, Errol, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 84–85Google Scholar.
8 McAllister, Marvin, “Shakespeare Visits the Hilltop: Classical Drama and the Howard College Dramatic Club,” in Kahn, Coppélia, Nathans, Heather S., and Godfrey, Mimi, eds., Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 219–46Google Scholar.
9 VN, July 1906, 482, 484.
10 Ibid., 483.
11 Brooks, Daphne, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Merritt, 92.
13 Quoted in Godshalk, 232.
14 Du Bois, W. E. B, ed., The Negro American Family (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press, 1908)Google Scholar.
15 Mitchell, Koritha, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” in hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990), 41–50, 42Google Scholar. I am grateful to Kim F. Hall for this reference.
17 See Smith, Shawn Michelle, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) 4–6Google Scholar.
18 As cited by David Levering Lewis in Lewis, David Levering and Willis, Deborah, eds., A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: HarperCollins and the Library of Congress, 2003) 30Google Scholar.