Art versus Propaganda?: Georgia Douglas Johnson and Eulalie Spence as Figures who Fostered Community in the Midst of Debate

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Caroline Roberta Hill, B.A.

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University 2019

Thesis Committee:

Jennifer Schlueter, Adviser

Beth Kattelman

Copyright by

Caroline Roberta Hill

2019

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement is a well-documented period in which artistic output by the black community in Harlem, New York, and beyond, surged. On the heels of Reconstruction, a generation of black artists and intellectuals—often the first in their families born after the thirteenth amendment—spearheaded the movement. Using art as a means by which to comprehend and to reclaim aspects of their identity which had been stolen during the

Middle Passage, these artists were also living in a time marked by the resurgence of the Ku Klux

Klan and segregation. It stands to reason, then, that the work that has survived from this period is often rife with political and personal motivations. Male figureheads of the movement are often remembered for their divisive debate as to whether or not black art should be politically charged.

The public debates between men like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke often overshadow the actual artistic outputs, many of which are relegated to relative obscurity. Black female artists in particular are overshadowed by their male peers despite their significant interventions. Two pioneers of this period, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966) and Eulalie

Spence (1894-1981), will be the subject of my thesis. Both artists, whose work is in close conversation, were innovators in their field.

In this thesis I will argue that black women like Johnson and Spence were true innovators during the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement despite the fact that men like Locke and

Du Bois are often seen as its figureheads. Johnson and Spence are salient examples for two key reasons. First, their work represents a false dichotomy—art vs. propaganda—which I will endeavor to refute. Second, their work, despite its differences, engages with many of the same themes related to feminism and intersectionality.

ii While there has been an influx of research into the lives and work of such women as

Johnson and Spence in recent years, my aim is to further contribute to such important work and further contextualize it as an integral part of the Western canon through a more explicitly feminist lens. This thesis will be an addition to the ongoing research that is beginning to fill this gap in scholarship.

iii Acknowledgements

I would like to thank to my adviser, Dr. Jennifer Schlueter, for her continued encouragement and guidance throughout my writing process. Without her support and insights, this project would not have been possible, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with her.

I would also like to thank Dr. Beth Kattelman for providing invaluable resources which laid the groundwork for much of my research, as well as engaging and thought-provoking discussions throughout our independent study.

Finally, I cannot express enough thanks for my parents for their unwavering love and support, and without whom I would not be where I am today.

iv Vita

June 2011 ……………………………………...….…. Hoover High School

December 2013 ……………………………………… B.A. History, Miami University

August 2017 to present ……………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Theatre, The Ohio State University

Publications

Hill, Caroline. “Rage Against Miscegenation: The Controversy of Eugene O’Neill’s All

God’s Chillun’ Got Wings.” Laconics 9, (2014).

Fields of Study

Major Field: Theatre

Minor Field: Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

v

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………...… ii

Acknowledgements…..…..…………………………………...... iv

Vita………………………………………………….………..…... v

Chapter 1: Introduction.………………………………………….. 1

Chapter 2: Women and the Harlem Renaissance.………………. 11

Chapter 3: Common Themes…………………..……...... …..….. 26

Chapter 4: Art versus Propaganda versus Patriarchy..………….. 46

Chapter 5: Conclusion…………………………………………... 62

References………………………………………………………. 67

Appendix A: Chronology…………………...... ………………… 72

vi Chapter 1: Introduction

Following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and concurrent with the rise of

Jim Crow in the United States, black female artists began to assert their cultural presence, the results of which laid the foundation for future generations. The first black female playwright in the United States, Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) paved the way in creating a space for black female playwrights. Though she is more known for her novels, Hopkins wrote musicals in the

1870s and several were staged by the Hyers Sisters—two African American sisters who travelled and performed across the country.1 The Underground Railroad (1879) is her most complete extant script today, but there is evidence of other plays by Hopkins, including Aristocracy (1877) and Urlina African Princess (date unknown). Hopkins was no doubt confined by the conventions of the day, which relegated black characters to harmful stereotypes which were performed in minstrel shows. However, her plays illustrate an attempt to upend the minstrel tradition while keeping audiences engaged. Although on the surface, Hopkins’s plays follow a very similar formula to that of a minstrel show, Carol Allen notes several significant differences between them: “no one wears burnt cork; women take roughly half the key roles; the scenes, except for the first, migrate out from the plantation; and dialect, while employed as the drama advances, is abandoned by curtain fall.”2 Furthermore, Hopkins’s play replaces the simple, “childlike” music of minstrel shows with music that contains more uplifting messaging.3 Although her musicals are certainly dated when viewed through a contemporary lens, her work opened the door for her successors in the twentieth century.

1 Carol Allen, Peculiar Passages (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 34. 2 Ibid., 33. 3 Ibid. 1 Angelina Weld Grimké is the most prominent black female playwright to have emerged following Hopkins’s venture into the world of musical theatre. She began circulating drafts of her play Rachel in 1914.4 Considered the first lynching drama, Rachel helped to inspire an outpouring of art by black women writers. Also referred to as “anti-lynching dramas,” lynching dramas are short plays which examine the disastrous effects of lynching on communities and families. Often, as was the case with Rachel, lynching dramas were written with white audiences in mind, as a means by which to garner sympathy. Others were most commonly distributed in periodicals like the Crisis to be read in church groups and other community gatherings. Lynching dramas never present the act of lynching onstage, instead focusing on its effects on the characters; further, they commonly rely on a strong female presence and perspective. More broadly, “problem play” may be used to denote a play with political intent, whether or not a lynching occurs. Furthermore, Rachel helped catalyze an earnest interest in fostering playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance. Following Grimké were dramatists Mary P. Burrill, Zora Neale

Hurston, May Miller, Marita Bonner, Shirley Graham, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia

Douglas Johnson, Eulalie Spence, and myriad other black women inspired to create snapshots of their lives, experiences, and communities to disseminate across the nation. Because of the realities of being a black female playwright in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, production was not likely and a great deal of these artists’ outputs can be classified as closet dramas. Originating in Early Modern Europe, closet dramas are plays written without the intention of performance or production.5 Harlem Renaissance writers were not the first black

4 While there is no consensus as to when Rachel was first written, Koritha Mitchell has traced the play in some form back to 1914 in Living with Lynching. 5 Catherine Burroughs, “Introduction,” in Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form, ed. Catherine Burroughs (New York: Routledge, 2019), 1. 2 Americans to utilize the closet drama however, as William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or The

Leap for Freedom (1858) was an early closet drama with political intentions; an abolitionist lecturer, Brown read his play aloud across the nation as a means by which to advance anti- slavery activism.6 Black playwrights during the Harlem Renaissance often relied on magazines like Opportunity and Crisis to publish their closet dramas, thus opening them to an audience nationwide.

While there were certainly political motivations behind lynching dramas, these playwrights were also creating profound portraits reflecting their values and feelings. Given the circumstances of the period, these dramatists were not likely to make a comfortable living by writing alone. As Allen notes, “So, this period is typified by an odd phenomenon: While actual playwriting by African American women increased, the financial compensation for these works decreased as did the dramatists’ expectations that they could make a living from their art.”7

Allen’s observation of an “odd phenomenon” is evidence of the white supremacist patriarchal system in which these women were writing. Just as theatre in the United States was becoming a more respected and lucrative industry, the black women who took part found themselves in the shadows of white men, their work effectively worthless in the eyes of the general public. For example, white male playwrights Marc Connelly (1890-1980) and Paul Green (1894-1981) won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for their plays In Abraham’s Bosom (1927) and The Green Pastures

(1930), respectively, both of which were poor imitations of black life, a step above minstrel shows in their depiction of black American speech, behavior, and community.

6 Ibid., 7. 7 Allen, 24. 3 As a community, black female playwrights in the 1920s and 1930s were instrumental in developing a portfolio of drama to articulate their beliefs. Allen succinctly summarizes their invaluable contribution to the world:

From Hopkins’s bold stab at diverting minstrelsy to Grimké’s quirky insertion of

children’s rhymes in her problem play, to the Harlem Renaissance when a group

of highly educated “teachers” transformed the data that they collected about black

culture from West Africa to the Caribbean to the southern American states and its

urban cities, the black female dramatic tradition labored to define the rituals of

black people beyond the reductive cultural ghettos supplied by dominant venues.8

Two prolific dramatists from this era, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966) and Eulalie

Spence (1894-1981), will be the subject of my thesis. Although they are two of many subjects worthy of further study, I have chosen Johnson and Spence to serve as examples of the larger movement within which they existed. Further, each artist was unique in at least one element of their work and thus their legacies warrant further investigation. Though both women have been anthologized several times, no full-length biography exists for either. Judith L. Stephens’s anthology of Johnson’s work includes an extensive introduction. Stephens and Kathy A.

Perkins’s anthology of black female playwrights also include biographical sketches of both women. More recent scholarship like Carol Allen’s Peculiar Passages (2006), Koritha

Mitchell’s Living with Lynching (2011), and Treva B. Lindsey’s Colored No More (2017)—to name a few—has ignited curiosity in black female playwrights of this time period, and my thesis is a contribution to this important endeavor.

8 Ibid., 124. 4 I have chosen Johnson and Spence for two key reasons. First, their work troubles the dichotomy, art versus propaganda, which I will endeavor to refute. Second, their work, despite its differences, engages with many of the same themes related to feminism and intersectionality.

Georgia Douglas Johnson is most well-known for her poetry, but she is also the most prolific lynching dramatist of the Harlem Renaissance. As Stephens notes: “Although other

African American women such as Pauline Hopkins, Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman,

Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary P. Burrill, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote plays before Johnson, none were as prolific, as widely produced, nor as practiced in the dramatist’s craft.”9 Born and raised in between Rome and Atlanta, Georgia, Johnson finished her education at Atlanta

University’s Normal School in 1896 and taught for several years before going to the Oberlin

Conservatory of Music. After finishing school, she returned to Atlanta and married Henry

Lincoln Johnson; the couple had two sons and the family moved to Washington, D. C. where

Henry practiced law before being appointed Recorder of Deeds under President Taft.10 During this time Johnson published her first book of poetry, The Heart of a Woman (1918). Johnson’s husband died suddenly in 1925, leaving her to care for her sons alone; she supported her children by substitute teaching. Johnson continued to write poetry and dramas and compose music for the rest of her life, despite becoming the sole provider for her family from her husband’s death onward.

In addition to her own art, Johnson is known for supporting her peers in producing and refining their own projects at her home in Washington, D. C. Known as the S Street Salon,

9 Judith L. Stephens, “Introduction,” in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, ed. Judith L. Stephens, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 1. 10 Kathy A. Perkins, “Georgia Douglas Johnson,” in Black Female Playwrights, ed. Kathy A. Perkins, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 21. 5 Johnson’s weekly gatherings for her peers provided a space to share and discuss work. Inspired by the salons of Renaissance Europe, dozens of intellectuals and dramatists frequented the S

Street Salon, including Mary Burrill, Alain Locke, Marita Bonner, Willis Richardson, May

Miller, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and many more.11 Examined at length by Treva B.

Lindsey, these gatherings were invaluable in helping black female authors inspire “each other to articulate their unique experiences through theater and propelled the outburst of cultural production in the nation’s capital in the form of plays.”12

According to Stephens, Johnson’s archives include notes or scripts for a total of 28 plays, but only three have production records: Blue Blood (1926), Plumes (1927), and Frederick

Douglass (1935).13 Her extant letters, notes, and scripts, most of which are housed in the Georgia

Douglas Johnson Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, reveal that she was a dedicated playwright for most of her adult life.14 She often solicited the advice and opinions of Alain Locke, submitted at least five plays to the Federal Theatre Project

(1935-1939), spent a decade attempting to publish a book of plays, and as late as 1955, solicited the help of Langston Hughes in writing and producing a drama.15 As Stephens notes of Johnson’s career trajectory, she “provides an important link in the history of black women playwrights; from the 1920s to the 1950s, she persevered in her craft and carried the ‘little theatre’ spirit of the New Negro Renaissance to the brink of the civil rights movement.”16 Of Johnson’s extant scripts, lynching dramas are the greatest in number. According to Perkins, “As an active

11 Ibid. 12 Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 114. 13 Perkins, “Georgia Douglas Johnson,” 22. 14 Stephens, 2. 15 Ibid., 4-5. 16 Ibid., 5. 6 participant in the anti-lynching campaign during the 1920s, Johnson became aware of the impact drama could have on effecting social change.”17 Johnson’s lynching dramas are devastating portraits of lives destroyed by the inhumanity of lynching. Furthermore, her lynching dramas are from a decidedly female perspective, with maternal figures playing a significant role in most of her problem plays.

In addition to her lynching dramas, Johnson wrote several other dramas centered on black life in the United States. She organized her other plays into three categories: “Radio Plays,”

“Primitive Life Plays,” and “Plays of Average Negro Life.”18 The dramas in each category include intimate portrayals of black life in the United States which have transcended their setting and time period and have remained relevant nearly 100 years after they were written. As

Stephens asserts, “Like many playwrights who wrote for community venues across the nation,

Johnson attempted to capture the idioms, patterns, and rhythms of speech common to black families living in a particular location, time period, or community.”19 This goal was one she shared with her contemporary, Eulalie Spence.

Spence was born in the West Indies and her family immigrated to the United States in

1902 after natural disaster left them in financial ruin. Thus, her family came to New York City with almost nothing, and Spence quickly became aware of the prejudice attached to her background when she observed “the difficulty her father had obtaining work because he was

West Indian.”20 Her family struggled financially throughout her childhood. Despite her family’s socioeconomic status in the United States, though, Spence possessed a great deal of

17 Perkins, “Georgia Douglas Johnson,” 22. 18 Stephens, 3. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 Kathy A. Perkins, “Eulalie Spence,” in Black Female Playwrights, ed. Kathy A. Perkins, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 105. 7 independence and dignity, unconcerned with material possessions, thanks to her mother’s strong influence.21 She attended the New York Training School for Teachers then received a B.A. from

New York University in 1937 as well as an M.A. from Columbia University in 1939.22 Before, during, and after finishing college, Spence taught in the New York public school system and taught at the Eastern District High School in Brooklyn from 1927 until she retired in 1958.23

Spence referred to her father as a “very quiet man who left most decisions up to her mother,” and

“indicated that perhaps the female characters in her plays were very strong personalities as compared with the weak male figures because of her upbringing.”24

In addition to dedicating her life to teaching, Spence was passionate about writing.

Foreign Mail, one of her first plays, won second place in the Crisis playwriting competition. The following year, Spence was awarded with several accolades for her work, including winning second place and tying for third in the Opportunity playwriting contest for The Hunch and The

Starter, respectively. Her plays Foreign Mail and Fool’s Errand also won the $200 Samuel

French prize in the David Belasco Little Theatre Tournament.25 As a member of the Krigwa

Players, Spence saw the production of Fool’s Errand and Her before she left the group following a disagreement with its founder, DuBois; he did not give Spence or any of the actors prize money from the Little Theatre Tournament, instead using it to reimburse production costs. The Krigwa

Players disbanded altogether shortly after Spence’s departure.26 Spence and DuBois’s disagreements went beyond the scope of the Krigwa Players, however. As Spence made clear in

21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 106. 26 James V. Hatch and Errol Hill, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 223. 8 her 1928 essay for Opportunity magazine, “A Criticism of the Negro Drama,” she did not believe in the efficacy of creating art for the purpose of propaganda—something for which DuBois was a strong advocate. In her essay, Spence asserts, “Many a serious aspirant for dramatic honors has fallen by the wayside because he would insist on his lynchings or his rape. The white man is cold and unresponsive to this subject and the Negro, himself, is hurt and humiliated by it.”27 Spence’s essay takes a strong stand against the idea that black writers must exploit their trauma in order to create meaningful art; further, she calls on other artists to do the same because the white supremacist system does not have the capacity for pity or empathy.

Perhaps Spence’s most overt political stand was in her use of dialect for which she was criticized by her peers and beyond. Adrienne C. Macki notes, “at a time when black authors and artists were encouraged to think in terms of racial uplift…the use of black dialect onstage was at once a bold and a dangerous choice.”28 Spence wrote during a time when minstrelsy was still a popular form of entertainment, causing some black intellectuals to condemn her use of dialect on the grounds that it was demeaning.29 Despite the criticism of the past, however, scholars like

Macki have begun to reify Spence’s place as an innovative and technically brilliant writer; white imitations of African American vernacular pale in comparison to Spence’s expertly crafted dialect.

Despite Spence’s outspoken stance against propaganda in her art, her work inevitably includes commentary about the injustice of being a black woman in the United States in the

1920s. As Elizabeth Brown-Guillory notes, “Eulalie Spence’s Undertow is a decidedly feminist

27 Eulalie Spence, “A Criticism of Negro Drama,” in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 466. 28 Adrienne C. Macki, “Talking B(l)ack,” Theatre Studies 27 (2007), 86-7. 29 Ibid., 95. 9 play…. Deeply feminine and deeply human, Grimké, Miller, and Spence depicted black women as loving and supportive of their men but also as strong, willful women demanding to be treated equitably.”30 The messaging in Spence’s plays cannot be divorced from her politics, despite her call to fellow artists to avoid the problem play. Allen contends, “Spence’s…pieces embrace modern modalities but do not constantly gesture toward horrific conditions; racism merely surrounds the characters who are more interested in wending their way through the pitfalls of relationships with family, friends, and neighbors.”31 That is, Spence does not ignore the realities of being black in the United States, but instead looks for ways to show that life, love, and family will persist in spite of it all.

The following chapters will contextualize the experiences and work of Johnson and

Spence through an explicitly feminist lens; this contextualization will support my argument that they were true innovators and leaders during the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement despite their relative obscurity compared to men like Du Bois. I will examine black women’s roles in the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement in broad strokes as well as the societal expectations and double standards placed on the black female body. Next, I will provide a close reading of a selection of both Johnson and Spence’s work. Then, I will argue that the similarities in their plays and other contextual evidence represent a fissure in the narrative of the Art vs.

Propaganda debate as a divisive force. I will conclude by arguing for the value of further study of

Johnson and Spence as well as their many peers who have been obscured by the white supremacist patriarchal society in which they were born.

30 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage (New York: Praeger, 1990), 19. 31 Allen, 88. 10 Chapter 2: Women and the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement1 was a period of great transition and cultural significance for the black community in the early twentieth century United States, the effects of which are still felt today. David Krasner contends that the Harlem Renaissance began with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Crisis (1910-present) magazine, both of which began in 1910, and ended with World

War II.2 Others place its beginnings in the midst of World War I and ending around 1930.

Scholars have previously theorized that Ridgely Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theatre

(1917) had a ripple effect that ultimately motivated black Americans to write drama. Elizabeth

Brown-Guillory notes, “[Torrence’s] interest in blacks as subject matter on the American stage opened the floodgates, and the Negro became popular material….”3 Brown-Guillory further contends that this surge of white-authored stories about black Americans perpetuated harmful stereotypes and often relied on exoticism, thus instigating an outpouring of black-authored plays to combat the inaccuracies. However, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, drafts of which are dated as early as 1914, demands that the chronology be adjusted. Furthermore, Koritha Mitchell contends that Rachel inspired Du Bois to create the NAACP Drama Committee to help foster and mentor black playwrights by producing their work, which subsequently inspired Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory to create a theatre antithetical to Du Bois’s calls for propaganda:

Grimké circulated her manuscript before Du Bois formed the drama committee,

so her work was not a response to his call for black-authored plays but likely an

1 Alain Locke popularized the term, “New Negro Renaissance” to describe the period of the Harlem Renaissance; the term refers to the concerted effort by the black community to reject push to change the injustices of Jim Crow and racialized oppression. The cultural explosion was later given the moniker, “Harlem Renaissance.” 2 David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 7. 3 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage (New York, Praeger, 1990), 2. 11 inspiration for it. Then, once the committee decided to sponsor its debut,

Grimké’s text helped others to identify their own artistic mission. Alain Locke

(often called “the architect of the New Negro Movement”) and his Howard

University colleague Montgomery Gregory objected to the NAACP’s

“propagandist platform,” which they believed was exemplified by the

organization’s presentation of Rachel. They therefore vowed to create a space in

which “purely artistic” concerns reigned.4

Thus, Grimké’s drama was not only revolutionary in its subject matter, but in its role in invigorating others to begin writing. Mitchell notes, “Because Willis Richardson’s Chip

Woman’s Fortune became the first black-authored play produced on Broadway in 1923, and

Langston Hughes’s The Mulatto began an unprecedented two-year run on Broadway in 1935, these men are often seen as the fathers of black drama. Yet Richardson admitted that it was

Grimké’s Rachel that prompted him to become a playwright.” 5 As Mitchell suggests, while scholarship has often centered on the work of men like Richardson and Hughes, Grimké’s

Rachel marks a significant shift in the history of black theatre in the United States. Carol Allen’s analysis goes even further, arguing, “[Rachel] epitomized…the paradoxical strands that would characterize the Harlem Renaissance: artists’ demands for aesthetic and thematic freedom bounded by an expanded popular market that benefited from exotic demonstrations of blackness, both tensions thrown against a jostling contest for ascendency by would-be race leaders.”6 As Du

Bois, Locke, and Gregory publicly argued about the dissemination and appropriate

4 Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 12. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Carol Allen, Peculiar Pasasges (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 83. 12 methodologies of black art, Grimké and the women who came after her were creating invaluable cultural outputs.

The founding of the NAACP and its magazine, Crisis, in 1910 is significant to the

Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement because it created a way to disseminate art, essays, news, and other information to black Americans around the United States. Brown-

Guillory notes of the Crisis, “This maiden magazine served to create a networking of black authors across the country, particularly in New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington

D. C., many of whom were playwrights desperately in need of an audience. Crisis served as a laboratory for novice playwrights.”7 In addition to the promise of a wider audience, magazines like the Crisis, The Messenger (1917-1928), and Opportunity (1923-1949) featured playwriting competitions with cash prizes to incentivize submissions. As Allen suggests, “In tandem with these goals [of racial uplift], Crisis and Opportunity magazines held contests that encouraged black artistry in several fields, spurring on a renaissance in play composition by black writers that was already underfoot at the Dunbar School in Washington, D.C., and across the nation at various black colleges and universities and at public libraries and social clubs.”8 Thus, such competitions were successful in encouraging a new generation of dramatists to emerge. Allen notes of the period between 1900 and World War II: “During this period, play construction by

African American women was fairly prolific. Sunday school teachers, drama and elocution coaches, uplift intellectuals, anthropologists, community activists, clubwomen and musicologists heeded the call and seized the pen to elevate the race through cultural/educational intervention.”9

This generation of black female playwrights, many of whom came from careers in education,

7 Brown-Guillory, 2. 8 Allen, 14. 9 Ibid. 13 activism, and academia, points to a link between performative arts and a political consciousness.

Kathy Perkins also points to these efforts to educate through drama, stating, “Some of America's greatest black female educators and civil rights activists wrote plays and pageants as a means of educating the race.”10 The desire to create work which is both representative of their experiences and educational is one which has an inextricable link to activism, which bell hooks traces to poetry and oration in the early nineteenth century: “In a number of narratives relating slave experience, African-Americans cite learning to read and recite as crucial to their development of a liberatory consciousness.”11 She further asserts, “African-American performance artists have always played a primary role in the process of collective black political self-recovery, in both the process of decolonization and the imagining and construction of liberatory identities.”12 Her statement epitomizes the work of the black female playwrights of the early twentieth century, whose dramas were a means by which to create a dialogue by and for their peers about their everyday lives and experiences as well as a tool with which to theorize.

While publications like the Crisis, the Messenger, Opportunity, and the Amsterdam News

(1909-present) were accessible to wide audiences, including middle- and lower-class black

Americans, it is essential to note that their content was largely produced by upper-class and well- educated black Americans in the north. Adrienne Macki contends, “Class consciousness characterized immigrant as well as American blacks, and such concerns created hierarchies of power that cut across ethnic lines.”13 Such hierarchies were reflected in the pages of these

10 Kathy A. Perkins, “Introduction,” in Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14. 11 bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 212. 12 Ibid., 220. 13 Adrienne C. Macki, “(Re)Constructing Community and Identity: Harlem Experimental Theatre and Social Protest,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 111. 14 publications. In addition to poetry, drama, and other creative work, they included society pages, advice columns, and advertisements, all of which dictated how the black community should behave and present themselves. Further, as Jane Rhodes notes, “The act of purchasing and reading a newspaper, attending a theatrical production, or discussing the latest race movie could be a performance of respectability—a way to signal literacy, disposable income, and a measure of sophistication.”14 The purchase of such a publication alone allowed for the possibility—or fantasy—of advancing one’s socioeconomic position. The elite class of black Americans responsible for these publications were often children of the Victorian era, thus retaining many of its rationalities. Rhodes contends black reformers responsible for disseminating the politics of respectability “promulgated Victorian notions of cleanliness, refinement, highbrow culture, self- respect, and sexual restraint.”15 Further, “elite women…such as Nancy Burroughs and Mary

Church Terrell regularly wrote columns and articles extolling the core precepts of hard work, piety, cleanliness, sexual purity, and temperance, in periodicals like the Crisis or the National

Baptist Union newspaper.”16 Rhodes does note, however, that some female columnists wrote against the grain, notably Alice Dunbar-Nelson, whose weekly column “simultaneously inscribed and undermined notions of respectability”17 by advocating for female advancement while maintaining the importance for education and propriety. Despite their education and performed propriety, however, elite black Americans still found themselves victims of racialized violence and oppression. Often, as Rhodes notes, “It was the newly arrived black working class

14 Jane Rhodes, “Pedagogies of Respectability: Race, Media and Black Womanhood in the Early 20th Century,” Souls 18, nos. 2-4 (April-December 2016): 202. 15 Ibid., 204. 16 Ibid., 205. 17 Ibid., 208. 15 [to the north] who reformers viewed as needing indoctrination and social control”18 as a means by which to uplift the race as a whole—a politics of respectability.

Respectability politics is a “highly gendered project” in that “women were presented as

African Americans’ moral standard-bearers and thus ultimately responsible for racial progress.”19 Black women, considered ultimately responsible for the image and treatment of their race, were thus exposed to the constant presence of respectability politics and maternal duties throughout the same publications in which black female playwrights were examining and critiquing these ideals. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, in her study of the effect of respectability politics on free black Americans prior to the Civil War, succinctly explicates the origins of a gendered respectability politics in the black community:

Free African Americans mobilized the “politics of respectability” as a

counterargument to negative conceptions of Black raciality in the nineteenth

century, treating respectability as an apparent or observable phenomenon

determined through behavior. Free Black people gendered respectability by

measuring women’s virtue through marriage, chastity, and activism, and Black

men’s respectability in “thrift, temperance, cleanliness and sexual continence.”

These ideals distinguished respectable women from the unsavory by judging their

conduct for how it raised, or depressed, the social status of all African

descendants.20

18 Ibid., 202. 19 Ibid., 203. 20 Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 74. 16 Though the subject of Cobb’s analysis predates the Harlem Renaissance, the respectability politics at play during the movement remained gendered in the same ways. Rhodes goes further in her analysis of the gendered nature of respectability: “black women were responsible for the care and nurturing of children and for modeling appropriate behavior while disreputable male conduct was to be expected and even tolerated.”21 Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, black women had become responsible for not only themselves and their children, but for men and the race as a whole. Furthermore, men like W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that black women should be permitted an education for the purposes of advancing the race as a whole. Rhodes notes, “[Du Bois] declared that ‘the pure and noble-minded women’ were needed

‘to fight an army of devils that disgraces our manhood and womanhood’”22 while, at the same time, telling them “their core responsibility was the Victorian ideal of motherhood—to transmit culture and knowledge to the next generation.”23 Although Du Bois’s calls for women’s access to education seem admirable, he was nonetheless in pursuit of upholding the patriarchy. Cobb also notes two issues that were exacerbated by respectability politics. First, she contends,

“Respectability fractured any idea of a cohesive Black womanhood by holding lower-class Black people accountable for mainstream conceptions of black raciality.”24 Secondly, “The women’s historian Deborah Gray White explains that hostility was ‘the price Black women paid for their feminism’ as their public roles ignited distaste among Black men who regarded ‘female leadership with suspicion and resentment.’”25 Black women were thus met with varied levels of resistance, suspicion, or vitriol depending on their level of education, socioeconomic status, and

21 Rhodes, 208. 22 Ibid., 205. 23 Ibid. 24 Cobb, 74. 25 Ibid., 78. 17 interest in activism as the United States entered the twentieth century and the Harlem

Renaissance took root.

Those who did have the proclivity to write drama, despite their educational or class status, were also faced with the realities of their racialized and gendered reception as artists.

Black female playwrights could not rely on their work to sustain them, as exemplified by

Johnson and Spence, both of whom could not sustain careers in theatre without working for supplemental income. According to Allen, “African American female playwrights could anticipate recompense from only a few limited sources including donations or patronage, a modest admission fee, and/or payment from literary prize contests sponsored by journals like the

Crisis and Opportunity. This state of affairs explains why there were only six fairly well- publicized productions of works by African American women between 1918 and 1929.”26

Additionally, Perkins notes, “Many of these women, such as the propagandist playwrights, wrote plays not expecting ever to see them staged…. The few plays that were performed were usually put on by libraries, churches, schools, or clubs within the black community.”27 This lack of financial support was, according to Krasner, one of the major reasons that black audiences— especially critics—were unhappy with the development of a black American theatre; unable to rely on work in theatre as a lucrative career, black artists were unable to attract a “large-scale groundswell of support” for their work.28 Furthermore, Krasner asserts, “Practicing playwrights needed actors and theatres; yet without financial support for rehearsals and tryouts, and an audience to test the plays, playwrights were denied the required experience” to improve.29 That

26 Allen, 24. 27 Perkins, 16. 28 Krasner, 212. 29 Ibid., 214. 18 said, gatherings like Johnson’s S Street Salon were a way for artists to contend with their inability to see their work produced with any regularity; while these salons did not involve full- scale productions of their plays, those present did share and discuss their work, offering opportunities for them to improve their craft. As hooks suggests, “Whenever we choose performance as a site to build communities of resistance we must be able to shift the paradigms and styles of performance in a manner that centralizes the decolonization of black minds and imaginations.”30 Salons like Johnson’s are examples of such a shift in the processes normalized by white theatre artists; despite their economic setbacks, black theatre artists continued to write and seek new avenues through which they could share their work. Without the promise of economic stability or even a production of their work, black female playwrights nonetheless continued to produce drama throughout the first decades of the twentieth century that, until recently, has been largely dismissed by scholarship as underdeveloped and unpopular.

Including Grimké, Brown-Guillory contends that between 1916 and 1935, “nine black women playwrights captured the lives of black people as no white or black playwright could.”31

The other eight playwrights she names are: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson,

May Miller, Mary Burrill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, and

Marita Bonner. Additionally, Brown-Guillory asserts that the nine women “were all original voices that were unwelcome in the commercial theater of the period.”32 While Brown-Guillory goes on to discuss each woman individually, she also discusses the idea of “raceless” plays written by black playwrights during the same time period. “Raceless” plays refer to plays written by black authors that purposefully lack racial overtones; such plays were an attempt by their

30 hooks, 219. 31 Brown-Guillory, 4. 32 Ibid. 19 authors to share a common language with their white audiences by “deemphasizing” black culture.33 Playwrights who employed this technique include Countee Cullen, William Stanley

Braithwaite, and Claude McKay.34 Brown-Guillory also defines the similar “best-foot-forward” style in which playwrights only emphasized the “best and the positive” about their subject, who was generally middle class.35 Black female playwrights during this time period, however, did not fall into these tropes, as Brown-Guillory notes: “Like white women playwrights of the period…black women turned to writing about women whose lives had been blighted by society….black women playwrights were writing serious drama, characterized most frequently by racial and social protest.”36 In fact, scholars such as Margaret Wilkerson and Mance Williams assert that most early black drama is protest in nature, and female-authored plays specifically critiqued the inconsistencies in society in the United States.37 Additionally, black women playwrights attempted to represent black people across the United States, not just in the urban metropolises of Harlem and Washington, D.C. Kathy Perkins notes, “While many of the male playwrights wrote about life in Harlem and other major cities, black women were more diverse in their geographic location, providing a greater sense of the black community on a national level by setting the action in rural communities throughout the country as well as in large cities.”38

Despite coming from primarily middle- and upper-class backgrounds, the prominent black female playwrights nonetheless displayed an understanding that they did not exist in a vacuum and made efforts to acknowledge that. Furthermore, whereas white-authored plays about rural

33 Ibid., 11. 34 The New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology, ed. Arthur P. Davis and Michael W. Peplow (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), viii. 35 Brown-Guillory, 11. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Ibid., 5. 38 Perkins, 2. 20 black Americans of the time were still holding on to echoes of minstrelsy, utilizing harmful stereotypes and inaccurate dialect, the oeuvre of the black female playwrights of the Harlem

Renaissance consists of respectful portraits of diverse communities throughout the country, with a focus on several key themes.

According to Brown-Guillory, four major subjects are critiqued across the works of black female playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance: the hypocrisy of white Christianity, the disrespect for black veterans of World War I, racial economic disparities, and miscegenation.39

These elements appear throughout the work of the black female playwrights mentioned, regardless of genre, illustrating the overt feminism in their work. Brown-Guillory further contends, “Just as many of the early plays by black women are dominated by elements of racial protest, so do a number of them focus on women’s rights.”40 That such topics dominated the work of black female playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance is no coincidence given the messages about respectability being disseminated throughout the nation. Rhodes contends, “For

African Americans who enjoyed the entertainments of ‘the stroll’ on Chicago’s south side, or on

Harlem’s 125th street, or in numerous other American cities, the symbols and messages about respectability were everywhere, sustained by a popular media that saw their efforts as part of the public good.”41 Such messaging works to render its intended recipients invisible, both by their contemporaries and by their successors. Of course, it is important to note that black periodicals of the period also exhibit “new practices and aesthetic discourses with an unprecedented sense of possibility for self-determination and autonomy.”42 Despite an inevitable attachment to standards

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 18. 41 Rhodes, 213. 42 Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 53. 21 imposed by the hegemonic class, black artists utilized periodicals as a means by which to become visible. As Audre Lorde stresses decades later, invisibility is a device used to perpetuate fear and divisions, an exploit that must be challenged: “But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”43 The work of Johnson and Spence represents a concerted effort in challenging the systems which rendered them invisible. Although it is important to acknowledge that the notable female playwrights of this period were well-educated and, for the most part, middle- to upper- class—thus only representing a small percentage of the black population—their work nonetheless illustrates feminist intervention and commentary about their lived experiences and the consequences of impropriety, perceived or otherwise.

A primary convention with which to present this commentary was realism. Patricia

Schroeder asserts that the majority of black female playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance relied on realism to help galvanize their audiences. She suggests, “Realism, with its ability to present coherent and developing characters who are shaped by and respond to their environments, offered these dramatists a built-in opportunity to assert the creativity and humanity of black women.”44 Such a claim is corroborated by Perkins’ concise assessment of the plays written by black women during the Harlem Renaissance:

43 Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 42. 44 Patricia R. Schroeder, “Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realists of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, ed. William W. Demastes (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996), 93. 22 The main characters in plays by black women were usually female. These women

were often placed in major roles. In many instances the husband was dead, or

absent from the household—perhaps working in another town. The central focus

in these women's plays was usually on the children, with the mother being overly

protective because of the times in which they lived. The action for the most part

occurred in a domestic setting—the kitchen, dining room, or living room, and the

play usually opened with a woman sewing, cooking, cleaning, or praying—rarely

outside or far from the home.45

In these commonalities can be found a focus on women as characters and womanhood as a theme, both inextricably tied to respectability politics. As Perkins notes, men are often absent or secondary characters while the protagonist is generally female; the commonly used domestic setting further articulates a focus on womanhood, as the home was considered women’s terrain.

Regularly depicting domestic activities like sewing not only points to realism, but to an effort to present characters who can be seen as role models; women who work in their homes, providing for their families, are the type of respectable, upstanding citizens like those Du Bois described.

As Schroeder notes, “…examples abound of female playwrights turning to realism to protest racial discrimination, to correct degrading stereotypes, and to reclaim something of African-

American’ women’s unrecorded history.”46 Schroeder analyzes such examples of this work, which include Grimké’s Rachel, Mary P. Burrill’s They That Sit in Darkness (1919), and May

Miller’s Harriet Tubman (1935), further contending “realism was clearly a valuable instrument for protesting conditions as they were and for recording and acknowledging alternative versions

45 Perkins, 2. 46 Schroeder, 94. 23 of history…borrowing realism’s referential power to document abuse, to dispute degrading stereotypes, and to resurrect and preserve a facet of herstory that had been disremembered and unaccounted for.”47 Burrill’s play is also an example of the history plays written during this time period, which Schroeder asserts were an effort to “reclaim African-American women’s history in a general way, by depicting the conditions of those women about whom specific facts are unknown, unrecorded, or simply repressed as unspeakable.”48 As Schroeder asserts throughout her analysis, utilizing realism was a method by which to articulate agency; this new generation of black female playwrights created a body of work that is both informative and an educational tool.

In the dissemination of their work—via publications, productions, or reading groups— can be found a space which hooks describes as a place “where communities of resistance are forged to sustain us, a place where we know we are not alone.”49 Salons, church groups, and social clubs acted as sites for communities of resistance; the act of writing about their experiences as black women in the United States galvanized the communities with whom they shared their work. Regardless of monetary gain and production records, the work of black female playwrights during the Harlem Renaissance was a means by which to make connections and build relationships. Lorde, speaking about her own drive to write, asserts that regardless of material effects, the act of articulating one’s truth is in itself essential:

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every

real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for

which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we

examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our

47 Ibid., 103. 48 Ibid., 98. 49 hooks, 220. 24 differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me

strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.50

This speaks to the concerted effort by artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance to challenge stereotypes and assert agency. Black female playwrights of this period were pioneers in their craft who cannot be defined within the art versus propaganda binary that men like Du

Bois and Locke were so eager to maintain. In exploring the thematic similarities between

Johnson and Spence, the false dichotomy becomes more pronounced.

50 Lorde, 41. 25 Chapter 3: Common Themes

From their introduction to this continent, black female bodies have been subject to an acute degree of monitoring, policing, and disrespect; black women exist at one of two ends of the spectrum, either possessing animalistic sexuality, or represented as entirely sexless. Centuries of structural and institutionalized racism inevitably develop into internal racism which helps explicate the reasons well-educated and wealthier members of black society began to police their peers.1 The insidious nature of internalized racism allowed for a schism within black communities, as poor and uneducated black Americans were blamed for the status of their better- off peers. While poor black society was deemed responsible for the effects of structural racism, black women especially were held accountable for any perceived missteps.

To understand the context in which Eulalie Spence and Georgia Douglas Johnson were writing, examining their commentary about respectability politics and gendered body policing alongside their depictions of faith and womanhood is critical. The feminist interventions within their work has often been overlooked in favor of more universal—i.e., male-centered—political commentary. Both Spence and Johnson crafted intricate and diverse portraits of black American women in the 1920s and 1930s, which is an intervention in itself when compared to the commercial depictions to which they were subject.

Elizabeth Brown-Guillory describes the work of black female playwrights of the Harlem

Renaissance as “mainly one-act plays about middle class and common folk, about passion and

1 See e.g. Nishaun T. Battle, “From Slavery to Jane Crow to Say Her Name: An Intersectional Examination of Black Women and Punishment,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 15, no. 1 (2016): 109-36.; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected (New York: Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, 2015).; Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (New York: Center for Intersectionality and Policy Studies, 2015); Jane Rhodes, “Pedagogies of Respectability: Race, Media and Black Womanhood in the Early 20th Century,” Souls 18, nos. 2-4 (April-December 2016): 201-14. 26 apathy, love and hate, life and death, hope and despair, self-effacement and race pride, oppression and equality of the races and sexes.”2 Despite their common themes and subjects, early black female playwrights wrote with a wide audience in mind, and as Brown-Guillory suggests, “they wrote with intensity to reach the hearts of black people across the nation.”3

Enmeshed with the themes Brown-Guillory has listed, Johnson and Spence used drama to explore their complicated relationships with the world; respectability politics, consequences of faith, and womanhood are all dominant themes across both artists’ catalogues.

Faith:

A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) is one of Johnson’s most well-known dramas and consists of two versions, listed separately in her catalogue: a “white church version” and “black church version,” labeled to signify the different settings in each play.4 These versions diverge where the characters’ relationship with local churches are concerned. In both versions, the play opens on Sue Jones preparing breakfast for her grandsons, Tom and Bossie, on Sunday morning;

Sue’s friend, Liza, arrives and shares news that the police are searching for the alleged rapist of a white girl, for which Tom is quickly arrested. Tom’s exit with the police officers is the last time he is seen in the script, and the rest of the play details Sue’s desperate—and ultimately futile— search for help in exonerating her grandson.

In the white church version, which is comprised of two scenes, Sue, Bossie, and Liza witness a lynch mob following Tom and the police; Sue and Bossie rush to a local white church

2 Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage (New York: Praeger, 1990), 4. 3 Ibid. 4 Judith L. Stephens, “Introduction,” in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, ed. Judith L. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 58 n. 128. 27 to seek help from a judge, who, baffled at Sue’s desperation, claims, “But it’s Sunday morning.

Nobody’s going to do anything to your grandson today.”5 Of course, the judge is grossly naïve, as Tom has been lynched during their conversation. Two members of the lynch mob walk by Sue and Bossie while they await the Judge, discussing the lynching; one says to the other, “Well we strung him up all right. But when he kept hollering, ‘Granny, Granny,’ it kinder made me sick in the belly.”6 Upon hearing this news, Sue collapses and dies, leaving Bossie crying beside her, surrounded by hostility and indifference. In this version, the judge, having no understanding of the dangers of being a black man in the southern United States, cannot fathom that such a gruesome crime as lynching could occur on Sunday, during church services. Although the judge is depicted as sympathetic to Sue’s frantic pleas for help, he condescends to her, suggesting she’s

“foolish to worry so,”7 and wastes time retrieving his hat from inside the church. Johnson uses the judge to showcase ignorance and naivety on the part of white “allies,” but, more importantly, the judge illustrates their collusion in racialized violence. Though he is seemingly an acquaintance or ally to Sue, the judge easily dismisses her claims that Tom’s life is in danger, delaying any chance that he may be saved. When he does agree to come with Sue, it is clear he is only humoring her. He is willfully ignorant about the real, imminent danger to Tom’s life because it does not affect him.

In the black church version of Sunday Morning, Johnson reduces the action to one scene only and replaces the white characters with an additional black friend, Matilda, who enters to tell

Sue, Bossie, and Liza she saw the lynch mob following Tom. While the interior of Sue’s home

5 Georgia Douglas Johnson, A Sunday Morning in the South in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, ed. Judith L. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 135. 6 Ibid., 136 7 Ibid., 135. 28 does not change, its location does; Sue lives next to her local black church in the black church version, from which music can be heard for the majority of the action.8 When Sue learns that a lynch mob is pursuing Tom, Matilda offers to enlist the help of Miss Vilet, who Sue took care of as a child and whose father is a local judge; Bossie and Matilda exit. While Sue and Liza anxiously await Matilda’s return, they discuss Tom’s fate, frequently calling upon a higher power to help him. Liza suggests, “That’s all, that’s all we kin do jes tell Jesus! Jesus please bow down your ear!” before reassuring a desperate Sue that Tom will be okay: “I spects Tom’ll be coming back too any minit now. Everybody knows he ain’t done no harm.”9 Music emanating from the church continues throughout this dialogue, sometimes distracting the women’s prayers.

When Matilda returns with the news that Tom has already been lynched, Sue collapses and dies.

Unlike the white church version, however, in the black church version she is surrounded by friends and family: community. In the black church version, Johnson reveals a complicated relationship with the church; her work highlights the community that can be found through religion, as Sue’s friends immediately come to her aid, both when Tom is arrested and when his fate is revealed. Sue and Liza rely on the music emanating from the black church to remain hopeful that Tom may be saved; they pray together for his safety. Despite the tragic ending of this version, Sue and Liza seek comfort and strength through their faith.

In one of her last lynching dramas, And Yet They Paused (1938), Johnson also depends on the church as a central location for the action. A play in four scenes, the first and third take

8 Johnson’s catalogue includes handwritten arrangements of several songs to accompany each version of A Sunday Morning in the South, which Stephens has published alongside the scripts in her anthology of Johnson’s work. Accompanying the white church version are “O Poor Sinner” and “Going Home”; accompanying the black church version are “Eugh-eu-eugh,” “Amazing Grace,” “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed,” “I Must Tell Jesus,” and “Lord Have Mercy.” 9 Johnson, Sunday Morning, 147. 29 place in a church in Mississippi while the other two take place on Capitol Hill. As church members prepare for Sunday services, they discuss both the anti-lynching legislation making its way through Congress as well as the lynch mob outside their congregation searching for an accused thief. The reverend urges his congregation to remain calm, however, asserting that the legislation going through Congress will protect them: “Don’t you know these white folks won’t make no move to stir up trouble while Congress is sittin’ right now, trying to put a stop to this very thing!”10 However, in the third scene, the lynch mob has found their target and the congregation watches in horror as he is tortured. And Yet They Paused depicts an overall failure in the legal system of protecting black bodies; as Congress continues to deliberate over the anti- lynching legislation, a messenger brings news of the lynching in Mississippi which, of course, has no effect on the outcome of the legislation.

And Yet They Paused is one of two versions of this story that Johnson wrote. The second,

A Bill to Be Passed (1938), is a version of the story in which the House of Representatives is debating the anti-lynching legislation, instead of the Senate of And Yet They Paused. Johnson wrote both at the request of the NAACP.11 In Stephens’ anthology of Johnson’s work, A Bill to be Passed is accompanied by Kill That Bill!, written by Robert E. Williams of the Cleveland

Chapter of the NAACP; Kill That Bill! is a dramatization of the six-week Senate filibuster that defeated the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching bill in 1938.12 According to Stephens, hundreds of anti-lynching bills were introduced to Congress, all of which were defeated; the U.S. government did not acknowledge this injustice until 2005, when the Senate issued a formal

10 Georgia Douglas Johnson, And Yet They Paused… in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, ed. Judith L. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 170. 11 Judith Stephens, “‘And Yet They Paused’ and ‘A Bill to Be Passed’: Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johns,” African American Review 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 520. 12 Stephens, The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, 37. 30 apology to lynching victims and their families for its failure to act.13 Understanding the context in which And Yet They Paused was written makes the story even more devastating. While in

Johnson’s version of debates about anti-lynching legislation, there is a sense of hope at the end that Congress will successfully introduce a bill, the reality is that such a law never made it through both chambers. And Yet They Paused, unlike A Sunday Morning in the South, is not a study in the aftermath of a lynching as much as it is a condemnation of the lawmakers who failed to act in the face of violence toward the African American community. More than that, however, it exemplifies the systematic oppression perpetrated by Congress and United States justice system. Johnson superimposes the depiction of a useless, bickering Congress against the backdrop of a community directly affected by the activity of the government. As the Mississippi congregation must bear witness to yet another murder, Congress stands idly, calling a recess to avoid a vote. This depiction, which reflects the injustices committed by the United States legislature, is also a reminder to the black community that the legal system is not to be trusted.

However, Johnson is again employing faith as a source of comfort and community for the black characters in Mississippi; Reverend Jackson placates the congregation and encourages them to be optimistic, leading them in song and prayer to help ease the anxiety. After the lynching occurs, the reverend begins a prayer again, seeking to comfort them in the wake of the violence they have just witnessed. Despite the horrors outside the church, the congregation can seek refuge within its walls.

Johnson returns to faith in her tragedy, Plumes (1927), which centers on Charity Brown, whose daughter Emmerline is dying from an undisclosed illness. As the play progresses,

13 U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation, 109th Cong., 1st sess., 2005, S. Res. 39, https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-resolution/39/text. 31 Emmerline’s condition continues to deteriorate, and Charity laments the inefficacy of doctors as her friend, Tildy commiserates and helps her with jobs around the house. Emmerline never appears onstage, but her presence is felt throughout the play, and Charity goes offstage to tend to her several times. While Sunday Morning places the church front and center, Plumes depicts faith in a less obvious way. For instance, as Charity laments being unable to afford better coffins for her husband and daughter whose deaths preceded Emmerline’s illness, Tildy replies, “Do hush, sister Charity. You done the best you could. Poor folks got to make the best of it. The Lord understands—.”14 Later, as Charity and a doctor discuss Emmerline’s condition, Tildy tries to calm her down, claiming, “Don’t take on so, sister Charity—The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh.”15 In another attempt to assist her, Tildy offers to read Charity’s coffee grounds for her; when she does, she sees what appears to be a funeral in Charity’s future, which Charity relays to the doctor. To this, he exclaims, “Why, my good woman, don’t you believe in such senseless things! That cup of grounds can’t show you anything. Wash them out and forget it.”16 This outburst reflects the doctor’s attitude about non-Western/non-Christian faith practices, easily dismissing this as “senseless,” despite knowing little about it. These depictions of faith across

Johnson’s work as a source of comfort and community for her characters in the face of tragedy, giving them strength to continue despite their circumstances.

While Johnson’s work often employs faith when dealing with tragedy, Spence’s play,

Fool’s Errand (1927), sheds light on the unsavory side of organized religion. In Fool’s Errand, a teenage girl, Maza, is exposed to the vitriol of the church council when her aunt Cassie finds evidence to indicate that Maza is pregnant out of wedlock. The pastor and church council waste

14 Georgia Douglas Johnson, Plumes (Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 2003), 5. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 14. 32 no time in presuming Maza’s guilt and attempting to force her to marry the father of her child, who they believe is her friend Freddie; Maza’s previously absent mother enters at the last minute and reveals that she is the one who is pregnant, not Maza. Spence utilizes humor throughout the play to retain a light tone—for instance, her description of Cassie as a “shriveled, ugly little woman”17 in the beginning of the play indicates how Cassie should be understood by the audience: as a meddlesome and disruptive presence to Maza and her family. A presence, though entertaining to the reader, whose actions carry the threat of material consequences on Maza’s bodily autonomy.

The arrival of the church council, compounded with Cassie’s meddling, presents a real danger to Maza. Portrayed as a powerful governing body, the council acts as judge, jury, and executioner within its community. Despite the fact that Maza’s family is not friendly with the church council—her father Doug is depicted as a godless alcoholic—they have the power to dictate her fate and condemn her. Furthermore, Spence portrays the council as a group of mindless followers whose opinions are easily swayed by those in power or with perceived authority—like Cassie and the pastor—regardless of Maza’s increasingly frantic emotional state.

Just as her characterization of Cassie marks her as an antagonist, Spence’s depiction of the council as a hive mind implies a sense of distrust when it comes to organized religion. As the pastor pontificates to the council, they grow increasingly fervent and excited, responding to him frequently with soundbites like “Amen!” and “Yes, Lawd!”18 The enthusiasm with which they persecute Maza is outlandish, unwarranted, and self-serving, despite the guise of religious conviction. When the pastor learns of his error, he is deeply embarrassed and offers his apologies

17 Eulalie Spence, “Fool’s Errand,” in Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 120. 18 Spence, 128. 33 to Maza’s mother, but says nothing to Maza or Freddie, who had been the objects of his contempt moments before, before leaving with his head hung low. His inability to properly atone for his mistake is indicative of the egotism with which he conducts himself. Spence’s work, though critical of organized religion, nevertheless illustrates the sense of community that can be found through it.

Though Johnson and Spence may employ and portray faith differently in their work, it remains a presence in both authors’ catalogues, reflective of the diverse communities for whom they were writing.

Respectability Politics:

Perhaps most apparent throughout Fool’s Errand is its depiction of respectability politics.

Maza’s treatment throughout Fool’s Errand is a reminder of the dangers of stepping out of line for young black American women. A teenage pregnancy out of wedlock would not only cast a pall over Maza, but the entire community, which is why the pastor and church council have no qualms reprimanding her. Further, Maza’s word is worthless in front of the Church Council, as

Cassie’s evidence is more than enough to prompt them to force Maza to marry. However, Spence uses cheeky stage directions and dialogue to make clear that Cassie’s meddling is the real embarrassment. In the opening conversation between Cassie and the pastor’s wife, the latter remarks, “Ef sech doin’s keeps on, reckon our young people’ll be jes’ as brazen’s white folks”19 in response to the news that young girls were smoking cigarettes at a church picnic. This comment, which Spence slips with a clear sense of irony, also further demonstrates the social status of the play’s characters; even in all their talk of propriety, they are still aware of their

19 Ibid., 121. 34 second-class citizenship and look to those in younger generations, like Maza, for blame. Though

Spence is clear that Cassie is the de facto villain in Fool’s Errand, her concerns are valid. As

Jane Rhodes attests, “The politics of respectability were a response to the racist representations of and routine attacks on black female sexuality, character, and intellect.”20 Although Rhodes is speaking primarily of middle- to upper-class black Americans, this politics of respectability permeated throughout the African American community, with harsher expectations falling on the most marginalized members of the community. Kevin Gaines, quoted in Rhodes’ essay, further explicates this idea: “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority.”21 Spence depicts Maza as she is stripped of any respect or agency in pursuit of upholding respectability; despite Maza’s innocence, even perceived impropriety puts her in danger. This portrayal makes clear that Cassie and her peers were aware of and keen to uphold the expectations placed upon them by wealthier and more educated black Americans.

Spence depicts a similar divide between young and old in The Starter (1926) when she opens on a young couple in a park in Harlem as two older women police them from afar. After arguing with the young man, T. J., the women encounter his date, Georgia, as they angrily walk away. The stage directions read:

A pretty brown girl in a light dress comes along the path from the direction in

which the women are walking. She merely glances at their angry faces and passes

on. They stop and look back at her. As she approaches T. J. Kelly, he rises, makes

20 Jane Rhodes, “Pedagogies of Respectability: Race, Media and Black Womanhood in the Early 20th Century,” Souls 18, nos. 2-4 (April-December 2016): 202. 21 Ibid. 35 an elaborate bow and sweeps his belongings to one side. Then T. J. Kelly kisses

the girl, Valentino-fashion. The women stand and stare.22

The next lines come from the two women, as they call her “Brazen!” and a “Hussy!” before moving on.23 Despite their negative encounter with T. J., there is no reason for the women to display such contempt for Georgia other than her willingness to kiss him in public—a kiss, it is important to note, that T. J. initiates. As in Fool’s Errand, there is a clear divide among generations about the ways they should present themselves. In addition to a generational divide, a gender divide is also present. While the women disapprove of T. J. overall, they become most irate at Georgia’s display of sexuality. As the women walk away, Georgia, “with her very first breath,” says “Say T. J. did yuh see them ole hens stare?”24 While T. J. laughs off the behavior of the two women, Georgia is obviously concerned about their remarks, asking T. J., “Say yuh doan’ hate yuhself, do you?”25 The contrast between T. J. and Georgia’s reactions to the women’s comments exemplifies how the intersections of race, age, and gender account for differing experiences of the same situation. Though Georgia does not dwell on the women’s remarks for long, her questions are indicative of an insecurity that T. J. cannot understand, fueled by the messaging of respectability politics.

Like Spence’s Fool’s Errand and The Starter, Johnson’s Starting Point (1938) showcases the ways in which respectability politics can create a generational divide. Johnson juxtaposes young and old in the form of an aging couple and their son, who has unexpectedly brought home a wife. Belle and Tom burst into Henry and Martha Robinson’s home and life, leaving them

22 Eulalie Spence, The Starter (Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 1926), 3. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 4. 25 Ibid. 36 shocked and bewildered. The second scene begins with Belle’s voice heard from offstage, singing a “rowdy” blues song that causes Henry and Martha to “look askance at each other.”26

While the Robinson’s had previously believed their son was studying to be a doctor, his unexpected arrival and seemingly unsavory wife are cause for concern. Tom tries to talk his way out of trouble after revealing he is no longer in school, but Belle calls him out on his “cock and bull story,”27 and forces him to relay the truth: he has gotten involved in illegal gambling and been chased out of town. Tom’s parents are quick to judge Belle because of her appearance and a sense of impropriety even though they know little about her. Despite their judgement, however,

Belle understands the danger of Tom’s situation—perhaps more than he does—and does not allow him to maintain a false story. Johnson’s characterization of Belle challenges the rules of propriety imposed upon young black women.

Respectability politics return in Spence’s play, Episode (1928), a story about a young affluent couple—Jim and Mamie Jackson. The Jacksons live in “The Rutherford,” “an expensive apartment house in Harlem,”28 indicating wealth and, likely formal education. Throughout the play, Jim pays Mamie no attention, leaves her alone for long periods of time, and displays little regard for her emotions. In the first scene, Jim leaves Mamie alone at home so he can go out with his friends, angrily exclaiming, “Aw, shut up an’ go ter bed. Yuh naggin’d drive any man crazy!”29 as he slams the door behind him. Mamie becomes increasingly unhappy in her marriage to Jim Jackson, to the point that her final words to him are: “’Sposin Ah doan never

26 Georgia Douglas Johnson, Starting Point, in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, ed. Judith L. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 121. 27 Ibid. 28 Eulalie Spence, Episode (Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 1928), 2. 29 Ibid., 5. 37 come back, Jim? What then?”30 as she leaves the apartment and the curtain falls. While Jim is seemingly free to go out whenever and with whomever he chooses, Mamie does not have the same privilege. Spence includes dialogue highlighting the inequity in the way men and women are expected to behave. As Mamie bemoans Jim’s inattention, she complains that similar behavior from her would anger him. When her neighbors Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Robinson, suggest that Mamie find some new friends with whom to occupy herself, she exclaims, “Why, ef

Ah had half's many men friends as some women has, he'd kill me.”31 Similarly, in scene two, when Jim’s friend Harry tells her she does too much for him and asks her to come out, she says,

“Jim’s awful jealous. He’d be sore ef Ah went out with yuh.”32 These comments and Jim’s disrespectful language toward her point again to the effects of respectability politics. While Jim has no qualms regularly leaving the house to drink and gamble with his friends, Mamie understands the negative consequences she may face for acting in a similar way. What’s more, though, is a clear sense that Jim makes no effort in empathizing or sympathizing with his wife throughout the play, instead only focusing on his own desires. This disregard for Mamie’s emotional health is indicative of the patriarchal structures of her environment. Audre Lorde aptly describes this kind of emotional detachment as a mechanism of power: “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”33 Jim’s indifference to Mamie and her resulting distress depicts the damaging effects of respectability politics regardless of class and education.

30 Ibid., 21. 31 Ibid., 6. 32 Ibid., 17. 33 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 113. 38 While Johnson and Spence both critique the effects of respectability politics on young black women, Spence also critiques their effects on middle-aged black women in her tragedy,

Undertow (1927). The play centers on an unhappy marriage disrupted by a former flame; Hattie and Dan, in a loveless marriage, are proprietors of a boarding house in Harlem. When Dan runs into a former love, Clem, the two resume their romance and beg Hattie to divorce Dan so they can marry. Hattie and Clem both face impossible situations throughout the play, as the former faces the embarrassment and shame of abandonment while the latter makes the difficult choice between love and propriety. When Hattie steadfastly refuses to divorce Dan, he throws her into a table in a fit of rage, causing her to hit her head and die. Undertow again exemplifies the strict confines within which black women were expected to exist. Hattie, who has nothing but contempt for her husband, cannot accept the prospect of being alone; she calls Clem a prostitute and berates her for stealing her husband, bitterly antagonizing both of them until her death.

Despite Hattie’s overt depiction as the antagonist, her actions are also indicative of her feelings about marriage. Her insistence that she will not divorce Dan, but that he can leave of his own accord—without a divorce—suggests that she considers the institution to be of great importance.

Of course, this also puts Dan in the difficult position of either remaining with Hattie, or leaving her “dishonestly,” thus destroying Clem’s reputation. Regardless, Hattie’s strong will and stubbornness—marks of a “difficult” woman—ultimately result in her death. Her fate exemplifies, to the extreme, the dangers of acting against a man’s wishes.

While Dan ultimately ends their conversation, it is Clem who arrives first to ask Hattie to divorce him. She pleads with Hattie, explaining that she had given birth to Dan’s child—now an adult—and did everything in her power to provide for her, despite not having help:

39 Ah’s wuked hard tuh git her de chances Ah didn’t have. She’s bin tuh school—

she’s got an’ eddication. An’ now she’s goin’ tuh git married tuh a fine feller

whut’ll be able tuh take care uv her. Now yuh see dat Ah kain’t jes’ go off wid

Dan. It’s got tuh be proper—a divo’ce an’ all. Yuh see, doan’ yuh, Hattie?34

Hattie reaches her limit when she learns of Dan’s extramarital child, threatening to find her and tell her about her mother’s impropriety, asking, “Wonder how she'll feel when she hears whut a good woman yuh is?”35 She then exclaims, “Ef it takes de rest uh mah life, Ah’ll fine her. It’s too good—tuh keep. How she’ll stare when she knows her ma was a prostitute an’ her dad—”36

Clem is not only worried about herself, but her daughter’s reputation, when she tries to reason with Hattie. Despite being able to give her daughter opportunities and the education she never had, if Hattie carries out her threat, she could effectively reverse all of Clem’s efforts, soiling her daughter’s reputation.

Respectability politics permeated the lives of Johnson, Spence, and their contemporaries, so its ubiquity in their work comes as no surprise. However demeaning the politics of respectability may be though, Johnson and Spence’s work features many female characters who maintain a strong sense of agency in the face of it.

Womanhood:

In addition to their portrayals of the negative effects of respectability politics, Johnson and Spence also include poignant portraits of black womanhood, both creating characters who do

34 Eulalie Spence, “Undertow,” in Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 115. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 116. 40 not easily fold in the face of difficulty. In Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South, Sue is consistently disrespected by the white men with whom she interacts; in addition to her interactions with the judge in the white church version, the police officers who arrest Tom treat her with disdain. In both versions, one of the officers sharply cuts her off, stating, “Shut up, your word’s nothing,”37 in the white church version and “You keep quiet old woman,”38 in the black church version. These blatant displays of disrespect point to the ways her age, disability, race, and gender shape her experiences, and thus, the action of the play. Brandon Hutchinson asserts,

“their unwanted entry is both a psychological and physical violation that leaves behind only an illusion of protection, since she cannot really offer it.”39 Contrarily, she is also a resilient matriarch, providing for her grandsons who are implied orphans. Her home is a refuge for people like her friend Liza, filled with the scent of “light rolls and coffee”40 as well as engaging conversation. Though Sunday Morning ends tragically, Sue does everything she can to help Tom, regardless of the obstacles.

In Plumes, Charity wrestles with her dream to give her daughter a respectful burial and her desire to try anything possible to save her—despite there being little hope that Emmerline will survive. However, like Sue, Charity does her best to remain strong and active until

Emmerline’s last breath. She is determined to finish her daughter’s dress to her specifications and does everything she can to make Emmerline comfortable. Charity’s opposition is a much more insidious type of violence than the lynch mob, though. While in Sunday Morning, Tom is

37 Georgia Douglas Johnson, Sunday Morning, 132. 38 Ibid., 143. 39 Brandon L. A. Hutchinson, “‘Where is that “Ark uv Safty’? Tracing the Role of the Black Woman as Protector in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Plays,” in The Harlem Renaissance, ed. Christopher A. Varlack (Ipswich: Grey House, 2015), 206. 40 Johnson, Sunday Morning, 141. 41 violently ripped from his family and lynched in a matter of minutes, the violence done to Charity and her family indicates an intricate web of oppression. Johnson’s stage directions denote that

Charity lives in a low-income area; as the play progresses, dialogue indicates that Charity has been struck with tragedy in the past, having already buried two family members before the play begins. In addition to the grief of losing her husband and children, Charity also lost her savings twice before Emmerline’s illness and will no doubt lose her savings again to pay for

Emmerline’s funeral. Poverty is an ever-present force in her life, as she is unable to keep her savings long enough to make any real changes to her life. Additionally, Charity and Tildy make several remarks disparaging the doctors who treat them, suggesting they do little more than take their money; however, they have no other recourse given their economic and societal situation.

Furthermore, the characters’ interest in the plumes used in the funeral procession they witness— which refers to the play’s title—emphasizes the characters’ hope for a better life. That said,

Johnson depicts an unwavering female bond between Charity and Tildy; though they may have experienced great loss, they love and support each other in whatever way they can.

Throughout Spence’s catalogue are varied and complex female characters, all of whom grapple with their place in society. While Cassie and Sister Williams are generally the antagonists in Fool’s Errand, they nonetheless represent a varied community. When Cassie wakes Doug to tell him that the council is coming, she exhibits a great deal of strength and authority: “Fine example you shows Maza! Fine care yuh’s took uv her sence her ma’s bin off wid dem white folks!”41 Cassie understands that in order to get anything accomplished, she must take the lead over men like Doug, who is more concerned with his next drink than raising his daughter. Similarly, throughout Undertow, Hattie and Clem are representative of countless

41 Eulalie Spence, Fool’s Errand, 123. 42 women. On one hand, Hattie is a hardworking matriarch who is responsible for her family’s wellbeing; despite her negative characterization, Hattie maintains the boarding house as a means to provide for her family and herself. On the other hand, Clem has worked tirelessly to ensure that her daughter will have a better life than she did; instead of lamenting her lot in life, she does everything she can to improve her daughter’s. Across her work, Spence takes care to write multifaceted characters, avoiding falling into stereotypes or archetypes, working hard to represent the communities to whom she was speaking.

Conclusion:

Across all of the works discussed is expertly crafted dialect, and poignant, realistic portraits of everyday black Americans. A unifying element in the work of Johnson, Spence, and their many peers is a dedication to realism. Patricia Schroeder contends:

While stereotypes of mammy and whore dominated representations of black

women, the reality of African American women’s lives before the twentieth

century had been all but erased from American history. There are, of course,

multiple reasons for such oversight, ranging from poor record keeping by slave

owners to a widespread politics of silence among black women determined to

protect their privacy and middle-class status. Given this secrecy and silence

surrounding African American women’s shared and individual histories, writing

plays to reconstruct their lives was both challenging and important.42

42 Patricia R. Schroeder, “Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realist of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, ed. William W. Demastes (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996), 93. 43 Regardless of the arguments amongst male figureheads about the purposes of their art, Johnson and Spence were, above all, attempting to create portraits of their lived experiences.

Although the work of Johnson and Spence contains many differences, these recurring themes across their work are worthy of note. All of the above plays are from a distinctly female perspective. As Schroeder asserts, “For these women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance, therefore, a crucial first step in claiming the stage for a black feminist vision was to discover and depict the historical and cultural facts that black women had repressed or to which they had been denied access.”43 Further, there is a strong sense of community across all of the plays discussed, albeit in varying degrees—Fool’s Errand includes a depiction of community which may be more meddlesome than helpful, for instance. Above all, both authors weave rich stories that focus on ordinary people navigating their society.

The overall tone of each author’s work helps illustrate their divisions; while Spence made pointed commentary, she did so with a sense of joviality and humor. Her work is a celebration of the diversity within her world and her tone is a reflection of that. Johnson, however, employs a darker tone throughout much of her work to elicit empathy from her audience. Despite the difference in tone, though, Johnson has created many complex characters to move her stories along. Each author depends on characterization to drive their stories. Tom’s determination to go to school to help others and better his position makes his eventual murder even more difficult to swallow. Clem’s picture of the love she shares with Dan elicits sympathy from an audience who may otherwise condemn her. Even in Spence’s most lighthearted work, characters are complex and unique. In a similar—though darker—vein, Johnson successfully retells the horror of the lynch mob from a new angle in each of a half dozen different settings. The character-driven

43 Ibid. 44 narratives employed by both display their commitment to representing their communities above all else.

45 Chapter 4: Art versus Propaganda versus Patriarchy

As quickly as the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement began to take hold in the United States, male figureheads were intent on confining its artistic outputs within specific boundaries to advance their agendas. Specifically, much of the scholarship about the Harlem

Renaissance highlights the “art versus propaganda” debate that circulated amongst men like

W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Montgomery Gregory. This creates and sustains a narrative of divisiveness and conflict among African American artists, who are often categorized within the boundaries of the art versus propaganda debate. While it is certainly true—and well- documented—that Du Bois, Locke, and others publicly debated about the purpose of black art, their war of words can (and does) overshadow the actual art created, exemplified by the ubiquity with which it is used in theatre scholarship of the period. And this issue is amplified when we turn our attention to art created by black American women. This is to say: black female playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance had to contend with gender as an added intersection to their marginalization. While male figureheads like Du Bois and Locke flaunted their intellectual prowess by publicly debating the simple validity of folk art and propaganda, women like

Johnson and Spence were creating snapshots of their lived experience as black women in the

United States as a means of survival and healing, a point Koritha Mitchell makes, asserting, that black American communities “also needed individuals who could provide tools for surviving”1 which could be found in drama. Their work transcends and moves across the art/propaganda divide; in many ways, the fact that they do so may render the Du Bois/ Locke debate moot.

Undoubtedly, it indicates the patriarchal hegemony within which black American women were writing.

1 Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 31. 46 The interdependency between white supremacy and patriarchy—and, more specifically, heteropatriarchy—has been critiqued by feminists of color for several decades, beginning with women like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde in the 1960s and 1970s. It is crucial to understand this link and its influence on the male thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro

Movement to help explicate the fallacy of the art versus propaganda debate. As Audre Lorde famously stated, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. [sic]”2 This sentiment points to the idea that in upholding patriarchy, black American men effectively halt progress. Lorde goes on to note: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of the same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”3 This line of thinking, though specific to the conference at which she was speaking, is applicable to countless situations in which intersectionality is not thoroughly considered. For instance, while Johnson and Spence certainly disagreed about the use of propaganda in their work, the common themes across their plays is indicative of a shared experience when intersectionality is considered. While Lorde’s speech was written decades after the Harlem Renaissance, it is nonetheless a useful lens through which to view it.

The object of Lorde’s criticism, of course, existed well before her speech. In her book

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks has traced the dependence by black

American men on the heteropatriarchy to nineteenth century thinkers including Frederick

Douglass. She contends of black male figureheads, “They were in fact adamant in their support of patriarchal rule. Like white male liberals in the 19th century, black male leaders were not against granting women political rights as long as men remained the acknowledged superior

2 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 112. 3 Ibid., 110. 47 authorities.”4 She further examines the foundations of the nineteenth century “black liberation movement” as one that “reflected a patriarchal bias.”5 This reliance on the patriarchy was implicit in speeches and events for the movement: “At public appearances, rallies, luncheons, and dinners black male leaders spoke in support of patriarchal rule. They did not talk directly about discriminating against women. Their sexism was shrouded in romantic visions of black men lifting black women to pedestals.”6 hooks asserts that such dependence on the patriarchy lies in an eagerness “to gain access to” the “white male power structure.”7 Furthermore, hooks notes, “Exaggerated emphasis on the impact of racism on black men has evoked an image of the black male as effete, emasculated, crippled….people are absolutely unwilling to admit that the damaging effects of racism on black men neither prevents them from being sexist oppressors nor excuses or justifies their sexist oppression of black women.”8 In a similar way, Lorde’s biting critique in response to an essay by Robert Staples makes plain the consequences of ignoring the inherent sexism of white supremacy:

It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we

will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a

meaningful life. If Black men continue to define ‘femininity’ instead of their own

desires, and to do it in archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each

other’s energies. Freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing the

dominant white male disease of sexism.9

4 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 127. 5 Ibid., 124. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 131. 8 Ibid., 123. 9 Audre Lorde, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984), 63. 48 Lorde further argues that intersectionality is crucial to the fight for racial equality, contending

“the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia.”10 Lorde is fiercely critical of the historic practices by black men to promote patriarchal ideals—thus helping to uphold white supremacy— and points to the vitality of community in dismantling such practices. She asserts, “As a people, we most certainly must work together. It would be shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege.”11

Furthermore, she alleges that “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.”12 The efficacy of such practices can be seen in the work of women of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro

Movement; for example, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s weekly meetings at her home in

Washington, D. C. Treva B. Lindsey contends that despite the sporadic presence of men, the “S

Street Salon functioned as a black-women-centered site of friendship, love, and artistic nurturing.”13 Additionally, Lindsey suggests that the women writers who came to the S Street

Salon “influenced and inspired each other to articulate their unique experiences through theater and propelled the outburst of cultural production in the nation’s capital in the form of plays.”14

The legacy of the community-building practices behind the S Street Salon is proof of the efficacy of Lorde’s assertions. As she notes, “For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.

10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 111. 13 Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 113. 14 Ibid., 114. 49 It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world.”15 Johnson and her peers worked to nurture each other in ways that their male counterparts could not, the chronology of which both predates and succeeds the Harlem Renaissance.

While hooks begins her analysis with nineteenth century black male figureheads, she also jumps forward to the leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s like

Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcom X, thus suggesting a linkage between the movements. Although she does not discuss the Harlem Renaissance specifically, hooks’ critique of Booker T. Washington, for example, alludes to patriarchal attitudes prevalent during that period. Hazel V. Carby aptly describes the ways men like Washington displayed distaste for and overshadowed the legacy of black female activists like Ida B. Wells:

[Wells] has been measured by historians and declared a dwarf in relation to the

giants of Du Bois and Washington; subject to such comparison, her political

ideas, strategies, tactics, and analyses have been totally subordinated to and

understood only in relation to the achievements of these men. Wells did not

entirely agree with the political philosophy of Washington or Du Bois and should

not be considered an imitator of either. No men found her easy to work with, for

she was a woman who refused to adopt the ‘ladylike’ attitudes of compromise and

silence.16

Wells’ disregard for the mandate of femininity was a sour point for the male figureheads of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exemplifying a male fixation on upholding patriarchal values. Although Du Bois was often an advocate for equal rights for black women, he

15 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 111. 16 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 108. 50 remained tied to patriarchal values as exemplified in his 1920 essay, “The Damnation of

Women;” despite his intentions in this piece, he asserts hope for “a world with woman's freedom and married motherhood inextricably wed,”17 contending that until such a “freedom” is achieved,

“I see more of future promise in the betrayed girl-mothers of the black belt than in the childless wives of the white North, and I have more respect for the colored servant who yields to her frank longing for motherhood than for her white sister who offers up children for clothes.”18 The idea that marriage and motherhood were the ultimate “freedom” for black women remains rooted in patriarchal practices. That notion, however, is challenged in the work of Johnson and Spence who complicate such ideas about motherhood. Johnson, for example, illustrates the heartbreak associated with motherhood in Plumes and A Sunday Morning in the South, both of which depict the results of a child’s death on the matriarch.

Du Bois’s ties to a patriarchal understanding of racialization can also be seen in his idea of “double consciousness,” a phrase he coined in 1903 to describe his understanding that there is an ever-present white gaze on the black body. He explains, “One ever feels his twoness—an

American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”19 However, this description of the black American experience fails to account for the additional gendered oppression of black women, thus leaving a blind spot within Du Bois’s theorizing. While theorists like Paul Gilroy have built upon Du Bois’s ideas of double consciousness to discuss the process of black modernity,20 these later theorists remain confined within patriarchal ideals.

17 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women,” in Darkwater (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2005). 18 Ibid. 19 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (Urbana: Project Gutenberg, 2008). 20 Treva B. Lindsey, Colored No More (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 53. 51 María Lugones summarizes the fallacy in this binary, asserting, “It is only when we perceive gender and races as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color.”21

Du Bois failed to realize the work of black female writers was inescapably political because of their gendered experience as black Americans. As Barbara Christian argues, “My major objection to the race for theory, as some readers have probably guessed by now, really hinges on the question, ‘For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?’”22 Male figureheads who could not see past their own positionality answered this question with inextricable links to their identities as men in a heteropatriarchy. With that in mind, I turn to triple consciousness theory (TCT) to help make up for the failure of double consciousness to account for gendered marginalization. Nahum Welang’s article, “Triple

Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American

Culture,” develops this theory as an extension of the work of women like Bonnie Thornton,

Alice Walker, and Frances Beale whose writing has analyzed the “triple perspectives of black women.”23 He contends that the focus of TCT is “the uniquely American and culturally specific psychological process of confronting and unpacking the messy contradictions of conflicting identities in order to produce new liberated identities.”24 He further defines the “triple” lens through which black American women experience the world: “America (represented by the hegemony of white patriarchy), blackness (a racial space that prioritizes the interests of black men) and womanhood (a hierarchal gendered identity with white women at the top and black

21 María Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 4. 22 Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 77. 23 Nahum Waleng, “Triple Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American Culture,” Open Cultural Studies 2 (2018): 298. 24 Ibid. 52 women at the bottom).”25 While Welang applies TCT to contemporary black American art, it is through this lens that the false dichotomy of the art versus propaganda debate becomes clearer.

In 1926, when the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement was well underway,

Du Bois asserted at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s

(NAACP) annual conference: “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy.”26 This statement, which he later published in the Crisis magazine, was by no means the beginning of the

“art versus propaganda” debate, but it aptly exemplifies Du Bois’s opinions about black art. His speech combines both imagined stories of black Americans blocked from pursuing artistic endeavors because of their race and anecdotal evidence to support his conclusion that black art must also be propaganda.

Prior to Du Bois’s speech, Locke wrote, “Such drama will leave the race problem precisely where it stood or stands; it is not the business of plays to solve problems or to reform society.”27 While it may be true that plays cannot reform society alone, the ways black women playwrights were disseminating and sharing their work during the Harlem Renaissance is without question a significant community-building and healing practice. Locke subsequently published his essay, “Enter the New Negro,” in Survey Graphic in March 1925, in which he summarizes the necessity of art for and by black Americans. In the essay, Locke demands a new era for his community in which their agency is not determined by white supremacy, positing, “With this

25 Ibid. 26 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” (speech, Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chicago, IL, June 1926). 27 Alain Locke, “Goat Alley Review,” Opportunity, February 1923, 30. 53 renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions without.”28 He goes on to allege, “Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not.”29 These sentiments exemplify Locke’s insistence that black art must be representative of its subjects, undeterred by the white gaze. As David

Krasner notes, Locke did not believe in the efficacy of a propaganda play, and instead believed the “folk play” was “really the promising path,”30 as it would serve as a realistic portrayal of black life in the United States. As he concludes “Enter the New Negro,” Locke states:

…for the present, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and

black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural

contributions, past and prospective. It must be increasingly recognized that the

Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art,

music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though

humbler and less acknowledged ways.31

Locke’s determination that black life in the United States be accurately represented through “folk art” did not, however, prevent him from engaging with white playwrights. In 1927, Locke edited and published Plays of Negro Life, an anthology of early twentieth century drama about black life, about half of which is comprised of white-authored work. While this may be seen as a sign of allyship between white and black theatre artists, it nonetheless demonstrates engagement with

28 Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic (March 1925). 29 Ibid. 30 David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 139. 31 Locke, “Enter the New Negro.” 54 white supremacist ideals in the pursuit of his ultimate cause. White-authored dramas in the anthology include Eugene O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid, Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom, and several plays by Ridgely Torrence, all of which are offensive failed attempts at mimicking black

American culture. Locke’s introduction seems to contradict the contents, suggesting black

American artists were trying to create a community, as he ponders the development of African

American theatre as a lens through which artists could grasp a “firmer grip upon the actualities of

American life”32 and goes on to assert, “For if the first decade of intensive effort can have given us several of the most noteworthy and representative American plays that have ever been written, and can have suddenly raised the general level of plays of this subject matter from vaudeville and farce,” the future holds boundless potential for the advancement of theatre centered on black life in America.33 The anthology’s contents exemplify the influence of the white supremacist heteropatriarchy within which Locke was attempting to operate.

Locke later penned “Art or Propaganda?” for Harlem magazine in 1928, doubling down on his distaste for propaganda: “My chief objection to propaganda, apart from its besetting sin of monotony and disproportion, is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it.”34 This summation fails to account for the work of women like Johnson, whose problem plays do more than send a political message. As seen in A Sunday Morning in the South, for instance, not only does Johnson critique myriad aspects of society throughout the text, but her female characters are varied and layered; Johnson may have sought a specific reaction to her lynching dramas, but that does not negate her artistry. Contrarily, Locke’s opinion also suggests his inability to see the political nature of the work of women like Spence. While Spence does not

32 Plays of Negro Life, ed. Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1927), xiv. 33 Ibid. 34 Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” Harlem 1, no. 1 (November 1928). 55 write about lynching, she nonetheless includes commentary about black womanhood, faith, and respectability politics; as a black woman in America, Spence could not divorce the realities of her experiences from politics, a fact that Locke perhaps could not understand. That said, Spence was outspoken about her distaste for the propaganda play, despite the messages in her own work.

In “A Criticism of the Negro Drama,” she asserts, “We go to the theatre for entertainment, not to have old fires and hates rekindled.”35 She continues with a mandate to black American dramatists: “Let him portray the life of his people, their foibles, if he will, and their sorrows and ambition and defeats. Oh yes, let us have all of these, told with tenderness and skill and a knowledge of the theatre and the technique of the times.”36 Spence specifically criticizes black playwrights who seek to persuade white audiences of their cause as a fruitless pursuit; such specificity denotes Spence’s dissatisfaction with the white supremacist patriarchy in which she lived. Spence did not trust white audiences to be sympathetic to her experiences, and thus advocated against exhibiting trauma in her work. However, when the propaganda play is understood as a feminist practice for community-building and survival, these criticisms are less relevant. Furthermore, despite Spence’s admonishment of propaganda plays, her words could easily describe Johnson’s lynching dramas, illustrating their shared experiences as black women.

Like Locke, Du Bois aligned himself with playwrights such as O’Neill and his theatre company, The Provincetown Players. Du Bois’s essay, “The Negro and Our Stage,” was included in a program for the Players’ production of O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings

(1924), which, like O’Neill’s contribution to Locke’s anthology, is a poorly executed and harmful imitation of black American life. In his essay, Du Bois sets the stage for a new

35 Eulalie Spence, “A Criticism of Negro Drama,” in Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 466. 36 Ibid. 56 movement of black artists, declaring the emergence of a “Negro world” that “during its whole conscious life…has been maligned and caricatured and lied about to an extent inconceivable to those who do not know…. [The Negro] is afraid to be painted as he is, lest his human foibles and shortcomings be seized by his enemies for the purposes of the ancient and hateful propaganda.”37

In addition to his contribution to the Provincetown Players, Du Bois once wrote to playwright

Ridgely Torrence, “My Dear Mr. Torrence: Now, that the skirmish is over, I want to express to you again my deep appreciation of your work and perseverance in beginning the Negro theatre despite all discouragements.”38 Du Bois’s essay and letter, along with Locke’s anthology point to a reliance on Victorian ideals among upper-class black Americans, and thus their continued reliance on methods created by the hegemonic class. In addition to upholding patriarchal ideals, intellectual leaders of the Harlem Renaissance not only tolerated, but promoted the exclusion of the majority in favor of empowering a bourgeoisie minority.

Du Bois, a ranking member of this minority, encouraged the emergence of a “Talented

Tenth,” which he argues “must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”39 Not only do his words reinforce his belief in the patriarchy—specifying that racial uplift can only be achieved by men—but he also emphasizes his support of a class divide. Education, which Du Bois contends is a crucial step to becoming a member of the “Talented Tenth,” is not universally accessible nor

37 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Our Stage,” transcription from Provincetown Players 1923-1924 season playbill, Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O'Neill Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College. 38 Correspondence from W. E. B. Du Bois to Ridgely Torrence, 9 May 1917, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers MS312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 39 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem (New York: James Pott and Company). 57 is it universally defined. While Du Bois includes examples of self-educated black Americans in his explication of the “Talented Tenth,”40 the overall sentiment of his essay is that of elitism. He also asserts, “Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life.”41 Although his intentions may be in the pursuit of racial equality for all black Americans, these words suggest a mandated of division within the community, as he argues, “…it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”42 Evidence of such a division has not been lost on scholars, as Adrienne Macki points out, “It is important to note that Harlem’s black community was simultaneously united and divided at this time. In fact, one of the most contentious social ills facing Harlem was internal racial strife, which split the black population in terms of class and ethnicity.”43 In a similar vein, James Hatch notes, “The black Little Theatre Movement originated not among the folk but with urban intellectuals…all of them labeled, interpreted, and promoted folk culture. Locke along with Jean Toomer designated southern blacks as ‘peasants,’ unspoiled by urban sophistication.”44 All of these scholars identify the undeniable elitism as a commonality between those who have been remembered from the

Harlem Renaissance, which must be acknowledged when considering their work. Johnson and

Spence were well-educated and—despite undeniable financial strain—were middle-class for much of their lives. These privileges are not only an advantage, but a blind spot.

40 W. E. B. Du Bois includes mention of self-educated former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth as exemplary members of the race, thus deserving induction into the “Talented Tenth.” 41 Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth.” 42 Ibid. 43 Adrienne C. Macki, “(Re)Constructing Community and Identity: Harlem Experimental Theatre and Social Protest,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 110-111 44 James Hatch and Errol Hill, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 216. 58 That said, Johnson and Spence wrote varied, complex characters and represented regions around the country, not just Washington, D. C. or Harlem. What’s more, their characters represent not just the bourgeoisie, but lower class and less educated black Americans while largely avoiding harmful the stereotypes found in minstrel traditions and the work of white playwrights. While both Johnson and Spence wrote in dialect, Spence in particular was criticized for it by her peers as well as later scholars. It is only recently that her impeccable dialect has been reconsidered as worthy of attention. Furthermore, as Adrienne Macki notes, “Spence’s inclusion of dialect functions not only as a representation of African American identity but also as an act of resistance.”45 The inclusion of dialect was a political choice for Spence, regardless of her feelings about propaganda plays; having come from the West Indies and been raised in New

York, Spence’s dialect is the result of careful study. Unlike her white contemporaries, her dialect was well-crafted and accurate, avoiding offensive parody.

In addition to their shared use of dialect, the themes found across the work of Johnson and Spence help illuminate the false binary under which their work has been sorted. While it is true that Johnson wrote lynching dramas, in part as political tools, her work encompasses so much more than that. The themes of respectability politics, black womanhood, and faith seen in both of their work is exemplary of their shared experiences as black women in the United States.

Lindsey asserts, “Black women playwrights used African American drama as a means to make visible the experiences of black women, building on tradition already well established in poetry and fiction. New Negro women playwrights focused on black women’s perspectives, struggles, and triumphs.”46 Lindsey’s analysis echoes the sentiments Spence shared in her essay ninety

45 Adrienne C. Macki, “Talking B(l)ack,” Theatre Studies 27 (2007), 86. 46 Lindsey, 113. 59 years earlier, further illustrating the commonalities among the black women writers of the

Harlem Renaissance. The work of women like Johnson and Spence has been divided along the lines established by a patriarchal system, thus obscuring their shared experiences. Regardless of the disagreements stoked by men like Du Bois and Locke, Johnson and Spence wrote work that was true to their experience.

In addition to her own work, Johnson’s S Street Salon was a vital space for fostering the work of others. Additionally, the S Street Salon represents another bridge across the art versus propaganda dichotomy; intellectuals and artists of both stations visited Johnson’s home. Lindsey explains, “Saturday nights at the S Street Salon gave black women in Washington a space in which they could think collectively about how to present and represent black experiences.”47 She lists Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary Burrill, May Miller, Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence,

Shirley Graham, and Marita Bonner among the attendees of the gatherings,48 which became an important community-building space. Furthermore, Lindsey notes, “At the S Street Salon,

Johnson emphasized collaboration, rigorous intellectual exchange, and the development of

African American women’s creative and politically active voices.”49 Johnson’s meetings not only fostered community amongst those who attended, but it was also significant in their development as artists and activists. Johnson opened her doors to any and all, thus creating an environment of mutual respect.

In her seminal work, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” bell hooks argues,

“African American performance has always been a space where folks come together and experience the fusion of pleasure and critical pedagogies, a space that aims to subvert and

47 Ibid., 115. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 125. 60 challenge white supremacy as a system of institutionalized domination, along with class elitism, and more lately, sexism.”50 These practices can be found in the work of Johnson and Spence, as well as in the ways their work was disseminated. Both hoped to reach a wide audience via publication in magazines like Crisis and Opportunity; such publications promised that their work would likely be read aloud in gatherings like the S Street Salon in churches and homes throughout the country. hooks asserts, “The spoken word, transformed into a performed act, remains a democratic cultural terrain. When and where institutional structures were not available for individual black folks, we used, and still use, street corners, barbershops, beauty parlors, basketball courts and hosts of other locations in order to be in on the live act.”51 This sentiment extends to spaces like the churches and salons in which the work of black female playwrights would have been read. The act of coming together to consume art as a community speaks to hooks idea of a “democratic cultural terrain.”

Despite the prevalence of literature about the art versus propaganda debate, understanding the time period through a feminist lens begins to unfurl the false dichotomy of the debate in question. Understanding the debate as rooted in a patriarchal hegemony complicates the agendas of men like Du Bois and Locke, which often obscures the female perspective or renders it invisible. In reality, the work of Johnson and Spence exemplifies a shared black female experience that transcends the confines of the art versus propaganda binary.

50 bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle, Bay Press, 1995), 219-220. 51 Ibid., 211-212. 61 Chapter 5: Conclusion

As exemplified in the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Eulalie Spence, the plays written by black women in the United States during the Harlem Renaissance cannot be confined by the art versus propaganda binary imposed upon them by male figureheads like W. E. B. Du

Bois and Alain Locke. Furthermore, such debates not only overshadow the art created, but they also encourage the division of two movements with similar goals. The methods that male figureheads employed to assert their opinions—whether or not they were solicited—exemplify their dependence on the structures of the white supremacist patriarchy.

Entrenched across the work of Johnson and Spence is commentary about faith, black womanhood, and respectability politics that marks them as early black feminists. As I have argued, the process of dramatizing their lived experiences as black women in the United States is an act of resistance in itself, demanding visibility where it had previously been denied. The effects of such efforts may be exhibited by Audre Lorde, who speaks to the ability of language as a catalyst for transformation. In a paper first given at an MLA Conference, she asserts:

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to

language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language

which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into

language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or

examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital

within that transformation.1

The work of Johnson and Spence exemplifies this power of language, not only because of its content, but because of the ways it was distributed and consumed. Despite the limited production

1 Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in Sister, Outsider (), 43. 62 history of their work, it remains a remnant of the methods by which black female artists could share their experiences and demand agency; by making their plays widely accessible, they not only gained visibility, but contributed to a wider project of community-building and cultural exchange amongst black Americans. Such practices validate bell hooks’ claims in “Performance

Practice as a Sight of Opposition,” in which she suggests, “From times of slavery to the present day, the act of claiming voice, of asserting both one’s right to speak as well as saying what one wants to say, has been a challenge to those forms of domestic colonization that seek to over- determine the speech of those who are exploited and/or oppressed.”2 The wide dissemination of the work of black female playwrights exemplifies efforts to challenge the hegemonic class under which they lived. Although Johnson and Spence both sought the production of their plays, their publication in periodicals illustrates hooks’ declaration that “performance has been crucial in the struggle of liberation precisely because it has not required the material resources demanded by other artforms.”3 Although hooks is speaking specifically about oral tradition, it can also be applied to the alternative materials—like periodicals—that black women turned to when production was not a possibility.

As the most prolific lynching dramatist of her time, Johnson made no secret of her belief in the propaganda play. That said, her work did not suffer for its inclusion of propaganda, a fate that Locke believed would plague the propaganda play format. The act of lynching reverberates throughout a family and community, the true subject of Johnson’s lynching dramas. Johnson’s attention to language, detail, and characterization remains consistent across her portfolio. In addition to explicit themes surrounding the violence of lynching, Johnson’s work exhibits

2 bell hooks, “Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition,” in Let’s Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle, Bay Press, 1995), 212. 3 Ibid., 211. 63 commentary relevant to her and her contemporaries; motherhood, respectability politics, and womanhood in general are prevalent themes throughout her work, which, when viewed in tandem with the work of Spence further illustrate the false dichotomy of the art versus propaganda debate.

Unlike Johnson, Spence was adamantly against the propaganda play, a sentiment she shared in Opportunity magazine in her 1928 essay, “A Criticism of Negro Drama.” Spence rejected the idea that black artists should expend their energy trying to persuade audiences at the expense of their art. That said, the feminist commentary throughout her work can be seen as an act of resistance nonetheless; like Johnson, Spence explores the consequences of respectability politics, the diverse experiences of black women in the United States, and experiments with dialect as an effort to be more representative.

The work of Johnson, Spence, and their peers can thus be understood not only as important contributions to our canon, but powerful educational tools which can still be utilized today to encourage dialogue and education. She, Too, Sings America, my October 2018 production of Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South and Spence’s Fool’s Errand, followed by a salon-style discussion with black feminist scholar Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, is one example of these tools in action. Supported by the inaugural Sally Bingham grant awarded by History

Matters/Back to the Future, this production, which I co-directed, epitomizes the importance of integrating these pieces into a canon that is dominated by the white, male perspective. An evocation of Johnson’s weekly gatherings, our black box was transformed into a Victorian-style parlor, including refreshments for the audience. The play space, an oblong adaptation of theatre- in-the-round, was a means by which to immerse the audience further, making them de facto set pieces as the actors moved between settings and scripts. In addition to the layout of the space, the

64 production was in the format of a staged reading in an attempt to remain true to the salon-style production.

After staged readings of both Johnson and Spence’s plays, Dr. Lindsey opened the post- show conversation with a contextualization of the time period in which they wrote, discussing issues of respectability politics, as well as the significance of spaces like Johnson’s S Street

Salon in fostering community. The discussion that followed was both engaging and fruitful for everyone involved, standing as a testament to the continued relevance of Johnson and Spence’s work nearly one hundred years later.

In addition to the invaluable perspectives and context they offer to theatre scholarship, the work of black female playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance remains an underutilized tool for artists, educators, and activists today. Ruled by a white supremacist patriarchy, the contributions of black women in the United States have been inevitably obscured by history.

Lorde articulates the necessity of reversing this historical trend, announcing, “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”4 Johnson and Spence represent a fraction of the feminist work of black female playwrights in the Harlem Renaissance and continued research in this subject area can only produce a more comprehensive portrait of their lives and legacies.

Johnson and Spence were not only contemporaries, but their work was produced by the same company in the same year; in 1927 the Krigwa Players staged Johnson’s Blue Blood as well as Spence’s Her, Foreign Mail, and Fool’s Errand. Furthermore, Johnson’s Plumes and

4 Lorde, 43. 65 Spence’s The Hunch and The Starter won prizes in Opportunity’s playwriting competition. The year 1927 was a significant year for both artists in terms of both production and recognition of their work, which warrants further investigation. In addition, Johnson’s writing style and process is worthy of additional study, as she displays a seemingly pragmatic process; both lynching dramas discussed in this thesis, A Sunday Morning in the South and And Yet They Paused, include two different versions. In both cases, the duplicates are very similar to the originals in dialogue and action but have different settings which change the tone and reception. Finally,

Spence’s use of dialect was the source of criticism from both her peers and her audiences.

However, more recent scholarship has suggested her dialect was innovative and well-executed and is an additional route through which to better understand Spence and her work.

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71 Appendix A: Chronology of Important Dates

1877: Georgia Douglas Johnson is 1879: Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins born on September 10 in Atlanta, writes the musical Slaves’ Escape: or Georgia KEY the Underground Railroad July 1880: The Hopkins’ Colored Life Events 1880 Troubadours stage Slaves’ Escape in Productions Boston Publications Contests

1890 June 11, 1894: Eulalie Spence is born 1896: Georgia Douglas Johnson in the British West Indies graduates from Atlanta University’s Normal School 1900 1902: Eulalie Spence migrates to the 1903: W. E. B. introduces the term, United States with her family “double consciousness,” in The Souls of Black Folk

1902: Georgia Douglas Johnson begins studying at the Oberlin 1905: Georgia Douglas Johnson Conservatory of Music in Ohio 1903: Georgia Douglas Johnson publishes her first poem in The Voice marries Henry Lincoln Johnson; Feb. 1909: The National Association of the Negro Johnson died in 1925 for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is Founded 1910: Georgia Douglas Johnson moves to Washington, D.C. with her 1910 husband and two sons

1914: Early drafts of Angelina Weld 1910: Crisis magazine is founded Grimké’s Rachel begin circulating 1918: Georgia Douglas Johnson publishes her first book of poetry, 1915: The NAACP forms its Drama The Heart of a Woman Committee Mar. 1916: Rachel is produced by the NAACP’s Drama Committee in Washington, D.C. 1918: Eulalie Spence begins her 40- 1920: Georgia Douglas Johnson year teaching career in New York 1920 1921: Montgomery Gregory begins hosting weekly meetings at City organizes the Department of her home, later known as the S Dramatic Arts at Howard University Street Salon Aug. 1924: Opportunity announces its national literary contest; Crisis 1923: The National Urban League responds by announcing its own publishes its first issue of contest in October* Opportunity Oct. 1924: Eulalie Spence’s On Being Forty is staged by the Ethiopian Art 1926: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Blue Theatre in Harlem Blood wins honorable mention in the 1925: Alain Locke publishes his 1927: Eulalie Spence’s The Hunch Opportunity playwriting contest and is anthology, The New Negro wins second place in the Opportunity published by Appleton-Century drama contest and The Starter ties for third place 1926: Eulalie Spence’s Foreign Mail 1927: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 1928: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s wins second place in the Krigwa Plumes wins first place in Plumes is published by Samuel Playwriting Contest and Her wins Opportunity’s playwriting contest French second place in the Opportunity drama contest June 1929: The Harlem 1927: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Experimental Theatre stages June 1928: Eulalie Spence’s essay, “A Criticism of the Negro Drama” is Blue Blood is staged by the Krigwa Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Players in Harlem; Plumes is staged Plumes published in Opportunity at the Cube Theatre in Chicago 1933: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 1930 Blue Blood is staged by the Jan. 1927: The Krigwa Players stage 1937: Eulalie Spence Krigwa Players of Baltimore and Eulalie Spence’s Her and Foreign completes a B.A. at New the Howard Players in Mail in Harlem York University Washington, D.C. May 1927: The Krigwa Players’ 1939: Eulalie Spence production of Eulalie Spence’s Fool’s 1935: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s completes an M.A. in Errand wins second place at the Frederick Douglass and William Speech from Teacher’s 1940 National Little Theatre Tournament and Ellen Craft are published in College, Columbia in New York City; Spence directs the anthology, Negro History in University Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast Thirteen Plays 1974: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s and Alice Brown’s Joint Owners in May 15, 1966: Georgia Douglas 1938: Georgia Douglas Johnson A Sunday Morning in the South Spain with the Dunbar Garden Johnson dies in Washington, writes And Yet They Paused and (black church version) is Players in Harlem D.C. A Bill To Be Passed at the published for the first time in request of the NAACP Mar. 7, 1981: Eulalie Spence the anthology, Black Theatre, dies in Gettysburg, PA U.S.A.

2000 2006: Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (white church version, black church version) is published for the first time in *Opportunity and Crisis ended their literature contests after 1927 full in The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson

1934: Eulalie Spence writes her only full-length play, The 72