The Mumia Project: Theater Activism at Howard University

Abstract

In the wake of August Wilson’s challenge to American theater practitioners in his speech “The Ground on Which I Stand”; and his specific charge to African American theater artists at the Black Theater Summit at Dartmouth University it would seem imperative that the fundamental reasons that African American people first began to create art on these shores be revisited. In essence Wilson has issued a call to arms for African American performance artists to create works to intervene in the face of renewed attacks on our social, political, and economic rights. The very act of creating art itself, apart from expressing beauty, is to speak to some cause, person, or idea either positively or negatively. As John Edgar Wideman says in Hoop Roots, “Art is someone speaking, making a case for survival” (230). Art by its very nature is never neutral. Hence, Dubois’s assertion that all art is propaganda is indeed true. African American performance art, particularly theater, has taken an active role in shaping, rejecting, or clarifying an issue, or point of view. For example, in 1821, the first African American professional theater company, the African Grove Theater, founded by William Henry Brown and James Hewlett, emerged in New York City’s lower Manhattan amidst a hostile political and social climate of hotly debated issues of suffrage, segregation, and censorship. The idea of a company of actors of African descent performing Shakespeare was initially a curiosity for some white theater patrons, but it quickly became a target for those who would continue to promote the idea of African American inferiority.