Biography: Alice Childress by Arminda Thomas

BIOGRAPHY ALICE CHILDRESS

Alice Childress, author. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Permalink. Alice Childress was born October 12, 1916 in Charleston, S.C. to Alonzo Herndon, a sailor stationed at the Charleston Navy Yard, and Florence (nee White), a local seamstress. Before her first birthday, Childress’ father left to serve in World War I. Her mother soon remarried, and Childress was placed largely in the care of her maternal grandparents.

A series of losses marked Childress’ childhood, including the deaths of a teenaged aunt (from influenza), her maternal grandfather, and her stepfather. In 1925, Childress moved to Harlem, where she lived with her mother and grandmother, Eliza White, whom Childress would later credit as the inspiration for her own artistic ambitions and gifts as a storyteller.

After the death of her mother in 1931, Childress dropped out of high school, taking on an assortment of jobs to support herself and her grandmother. She also began studying with Venzella Jones, director of the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Youth Theatre. During that time, she met and married Jones’ colleague, actor Alvin Childress.

In 1941, Childress joined the American Negro Theatre, an organization whose members included Abram Hill, Fred O’Neal, Hilda Simms, Clarice Taylor, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and others. While she earned high praises as an actor, particularly in ANT’s Broadway production of Anna Lucasta, Childress found herself exasperated by the absence of redeeming plots or characters. The scarcity of fulfilling roles spurred Childress to turn her hand to playwriting. Her first play, Florence (1949), was one of the last produced by the American Negro Theatre.

In 1950, Childress (along with some other former ANT members) joined the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA). Under CNA auspices, Childress and Clarice Taylor started a theater at Club Baron, a Harlem nightclub. Childress’ second play, Just a Little Simple (an adaptation of stories by Langston Hughes) was produced there, as was her 1952 piece, Gold Through the Trees, a dramatic revue highlighting Africans throughout the Diaspora in different eras.

In 1955, Childress had her first full-length production with Trouble in Mind, which appeared off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theater. A success with critics and audiences, the play was set for a Broadway run, but that was short-circuited when Childress refused the many changes demanded by prospective producers.

That experience was repeated with Childress’ next play, Wedding Band. After an initial reading at New Dramatists in 1963, the play was optioned for Broadway, with a scheduled opening for the following fall, but didn’t appear in New York until 1972, when it was produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theater. The play premiered in 1966 at the University of Michigan.

Along with her plays, Childress was a prolific writer of short stories and novels. She is perhaps best remembered for her young adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which she later adapted into a film starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson. Her other plays include Wine in the Wilderness, Mojo, String, Sea Island Song (aka Gullah), and Moms.