Richard Berry Harrison: “de Lawd” of the theater By BENJAMIN SANDERFORD
SELMA — The Richard B. Harrison Gymnasium. Old-timers remember that it was once part of a high school of the same name, the highest institution of learning for the black residents of Selma. Few, however, remember the man after whom it was named. Richard Berry Harrison was born in London, Ontario, Canada on Sept. 28, 1864 to parents who had escaped slavery in the United States. His first job was as a newspaper boy for the London Advertiser, the local publication. He developed an interest in theater at an early age, attending plays whenever he had the money and giving recitations at school and in church. Harrison moved with his parents and four siblings to Windsor, across from Detroit, during an upsurge of racism in London. An arsonist set fire to the family home shortly after they left. Harrison’s father died of a stroke a few years later. It was then that Harrison left for Detroit, and he would live the rest of his life in the United States.
Now a teenager, Harrison worked for a time as a bellhop, but, after reading Shakespeare’s “Richard III” to his employer’s guests one New Year’s Eve, began to consider a career in acting. He studied drama at the Detroit Training School of Dramatic Art and gained a private tutor in Edward Weitzel, the British-born actor and drama editor at the Detroit Free Press. It was not easy to be a black aspiring actor. After being rejected for the role of Dr. Faustus in Goethe’s “Faust” on account of his race, Harrison went on tour as a dramatic reader. He impressed audiences by reciting Shakespearean plays and the poems of his best friend, the noted AfricanAmerican writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar whom he met in 1891. Harrison’s journeys took him from Toronto to New Orleans and introduced him to many new acquaintances, such as a young Booker T. Washington and an elderly Frederick Douglass. He continued traveling until 1896. The previous year, he married Gertrude Janet Washington, the first black graduate of the Chicago
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