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Dialogues: Alice Childress’s Radical Roots by Soyica Diggs Colbert
DIALOGUES ALICE CHILDRESS’S RADICAL ROOTS
SOYICA DIGGS COLBERT
Photograph by Milton Meltzer of Hilda Haynes, James McMahon, Stephanie Elliot [?] and Charles Bettis in rehearsal for the 1955 off-Broadway premiere of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind at the Greenwich Mews. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Permalink.
Twice in her lifetime, Broadway producers optioned Alice Childress’s work, first in the 1950s and again in the 1960s. But it wasn’t until 2021 that her play Trouble in Mind made it to the Great White Way. As I wrote in “The Debut of ‘Trouble in Mind’ Reveals Progress—and Enduring Racism—On Broadway,” that 2021 Roundabout Theater production reflected contemporary racial struggles, speaking to the past and present and showing the prescient nature of Childress’s work. That it resonated in the midtwentieth century and continues to do so today marks Childress as one of those U.S. theatre artists whose vision is crucial, in the words of James Baldwin, to “mak[ing] America what America must become.” The resurgence of Childress’s theatrical oeuvre on New York stages—and the demonstration of its lasting salience—continues with Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Wedding Band: a Love/Hate Story in Black and White. A play that reflects the enduring impact of Childress’s personal history and her early education on the left on her art, Wedding Band brings lessons she began learning in the 1940s into a play first produced in 1966.
Childress, like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, had the good fortune of a long career. Writing in the wake of World War II, in the midst of the Cold War, during the burgeoning and classical phases of the Civil Rights
Movement and the Black Arts Movement, Childress’s work presents the political, social, and artistic challenges of being an intersectionalist, Black feminist artist well before third-wave feminism.
As a playwright, she benefited from working with the American Negro Theater (ANT) in the 1940s. Founded by Frederick O’Neal and Abram Hill, the ANT began as a cooperative in the basement of the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A people’s theatre rather than a commercial one, the young group of ambitious Black, leftist artists included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Harry Belafonte, working together to create art that told the truth about Black people.
The emphasis of Childress’s plays shifted overtime, but throughout the 1950s and 1960s, her drama remained focused on providing Black women a stage to counter what institutions (Jim Crow, the American theatre, the family) demanded of them. La Vinia Delois Jennings’s biography Alice Childress argues Childress’s woman-centered theatre distinguishes her from her contemporaries. In the introduction to Childress’s selected plays, Kathy Perkins makes a similar point, saying, “Childress’s plays concentrate on the struggles and triumphs of the black poor and working classes. She called herself a ‘liberation writer’ and created strong, compassionate, often militant female characters who resisted socioeconomic conditions.”
Childress’s dramas of the 1950s—Florence (1949), Gold Through the Trees (1952) and Trouble in Mind (1955)— explore the possibilities and limitations of post-World War II American democracy. Untempered enthusiasm for American democracy and its propogation abroad was a difficult proposition for Childress, with her keen awareness of the uneven distribution of resources in the U.S. In The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, Distinguished University Professor of Maryland, Emerita, Mary Helen Washington offers a corrective to interpretations of mid-twentiethcentury Black writers that do not account for their class politics and involvement with the Communist Party. Washington makes the case that leftist organizations supported Childress’s drama and influenced her thought. The settings of her plays draw attention to her characters as workers and their experience of the public sphere, divided along class, race and gender lines.
In addition to struggling with the limitations of a commercial theatre rooted in capitalism, Childress’s work also took up the contemporary social context of the Civil Rights Movement’s critique of American democracy. Most historians bookend the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, following a march in Greenwood, Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), gave a speech that featured the term “Black power” and shifted the emphasis of SNCC from integration to self-determination.
Wedding Band, set in South Carolina against the backdrop of World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, follows protagonist Julia Augustine (played by Ruby Dee in the original 1966 and 1972 productions) on an ideological journey similar to the young activists of the 1960s. Always ahead of her time, Childress understood the necessity of self-determination from her training with ANT in the 1940s. Wedding Band mirrors the shift from the hope for interracial coalition during the Civil Rights Movement period to a new focus on defining and cultivating the Black community and family.
Wedding Band depicts a small community upended by the interracial relationship between Julia and a white man, Herman. The couple come together to celebrate their 10th anniversary but political, social, and cultural concerns invade the domestic sphere. The pressure of racism upends Julia’s relationship and tears at her neighbors. Columbia University Professor Brent Hayes Edwards describes how, as World War I came to a close, “the color line was all the more indispensable in the wake of a series of earthshaking events in the second decade of the century.” As elder statesman and one of the architects of the Harlem Renaissance W.E.B. Du Bois clarifies in “World War and the Color Line” (1914), “Many colored persons, and persons interested in them, may easily make the mistake of supposing that the present war is far removed from the color problem of America . . . This attitude is a mistake.” Du Bois saw the war as a global manifestation of race prejudice and a result of a history of imperialism. He argued, “The Negro problem in America
Brittany Bradford (Julia Augustine) and Rosalyn Coleman (Lula Green). Photo by Henry Grossman.
is but a local phase of a world problem.” Wedding Band tells the story of the global manifesting a small Southern community.
The play references racial violence and the prospect of migration to the North. The threat of lynching and other forms of systematic violence often motivated African Americans to move north in the early part of the twentieth century to survive. But women often did not have the capacity to leave. Focusing on the ingenuity of women, the play provides communal possibilities for protection from racial violence.
Childress’s Wedding Band offers the distinct perspectives of four different Black women living in the same community. The play attends to the position of her characters in terms of gender, race, and class. It also highlights the many different forms family takes. The depiction of what we may now call chosen family also nods to Childress’s experiences with political organizers who functioned as surrogate kin. Her plays pull from her early experiences and anticipate contemporary contexts, including the still-present necessity of carving out space for Black women to speak a true word concerning themselves. In Childress’s drama, Black women take center stage. •
SOYICA DIGGS COLBERT is the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. Colbert’s most recent book, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry is described as "A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind," according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. Colbert’swriting has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Public Books, Metrograph and American Theatre. She is also an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
