"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to Be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Abstract

My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's lost ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress on June 11, 1999, make possible a more thorough study of the six one-acts comprising the body of work Johnson specifically referred to as her lynching or plays on lynching.(1) Since Johnson was the most prolific playwright of drama, such a study can provide a clearer understanding of her contributions to this uniquely American dramatic genre, as well as the conditions of its production and reception. Plays representing the history of in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American dramatic genre, a type of theatre that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage.(2) As the first anthology to address how the horrors of have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Indiana UP, 1998), reveals the historical continuity of the genre and speaks to its prior neglect in theatre history and dramatic criticism. The fact that Johnson is known primarily as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance but has, until recently, remained invisible as the leading playwright of an unrecognized dramatic genre speaks loudly to the genre's status and critical reception, as well as to the precarious position Johnson occupied as a black woman writer in the 1920s and '30s. In her recent review of Strange Fruit, Eileen Cherry's comment that dramas may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself provides insight into why the genre has been neglected in the recorded history of American theatre (224-25). This note describes the conditions surrounding the production of And Yet They Paused and A Bill to be Passed, provides brief synopses of the plays, and locates the texts in relation to Johnson's more familiar and accessible dramas: Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and Blue-Eyed Black Boy. I am indebted to the work of scholars such as James V. Hatch, Ted Shine, Winona L. Fletcher, Margaret Wilkerson, Sandra Richards, Kathy Perkins, Bernard L. Peterson, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hall, Cheryl Wall, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Claudia Tate, whose writing on Johnson brought the importance of her work to my attention. According to correspondence in the NAACP files, in June of 1936 Johnson sent Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, several of her on the subject of lynching, but White returned the in January of 1937 on the grounds that they ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless despite all the courage which was used by the Negro characters.(3) Johnson graciously replied that she understood the point that White was making but added, Yet, it is true that[,] in life, things do not end usually ideally[;] however, it is a point that I shall keep in mind if I write others or perhaps rewrite these.(4) Today Johnson's words are prophetic, since we know that, despite the NAACP's considerable and sustained efforts, the United States Congress never enacted any federal anti-lynching legislation. In her letter to White, Johnson mentioned that her were under consideration for publication by Samuel French, but since her more recent Catalogue of Writings does not list these dramas among her published plays, it seems clear that French rejected them. Winona Fletcher's valuable 1985 article in Theatre Annual documents Johnson's submisson of her dramas to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1939, as well as the result that none were accepted for production in any of the producing units of the FTP. These historical records provide a glimpse into the struggle Johnson faced in seeing her dramas published or produced in her lifetime, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the brutality of was not an uncommon occurrence in society. …