‘For us, about us, near us and by us’: american women playwrights and the making of NAACP-Du bois's edutainment agenda

Abstract

By the time the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was inaugurated in 1909, many of its founding members had been working on platforms aimed at the emancipation and advancement of disenfranchised Americans, particularly the ‘colored’ population, in the USA. At the beginning of the 1900s, African-Americans still bore the brunt of the residues of slavery and the de facto dehumanizing policies of the Jim Crow era. For several decades, the NAACP was the cardinal political and legal silver lining in the cloud that loomed over the general population and the African-American in particular. By taking on landmark court cases, sponsoring public lectures, organizing demonstrations and promoting civil rights awareness, the organization played a vital role in educating the public about Jim Crowism. What is often overlooked or ignored, however, is the association's efforts and strategies which produced a litany of cultural and literary successes. Indispensable to the efforts was W.E.B. Du Bois, whose innovative idea it was to create the association's journal, the Crisis. Although the journal was a crucial and effective propaganda tool, Du Bois explored the performance arts, especially drama, as an additional instrument by which to ‘assail the ears of the nation.’ Interestingly, the most vocal and militant of the NAACP's thespian mouthpieces turned out to be female playwrights, some of whose works constitute the subject of this article. Among them were Angelina Grimké, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Myrtle Smith Livingston and Marita Odette Bonner. Although these women never rocked Broadway (precisely because their remarkable artistic talent and courage stood outside much of the conventional), they nevertheless succeeded in carving a luminous, if ephemeral, space for themselves within the NAACP. This article appraises their accomplishment and ponders its implications for our stage in the twenty-first century