Caricatured, Marginalized, and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia's Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939

In July 1937, Federal Theatre Project (FTP) leadership engineered what they hoped would be a distinct course correction for the project's Negro Unit in Philadelphia. The Unit's two earlier productions—variety shows titled Truckin' Along and So What?, mounted at the Drexel Hill Playhouse, in a suburb ten miles west of the city—had not lived up to the ambitions of the FTP. As Arthur R. Jarvis recounts, these performances were "crowd-pleasing effort[s] that made effective use of African-American talent" but amounted to little more than "buffoonery and low comedy"¹ that hearkened back to the legacy of the minstrel stage. In contrast, Negro Units in other cities were conducting substantive theatrical experiments by developing new dramas by African American writers (such as Frank Wilson's Walk Together, Chillun in New York, Theodore Ward's Big White Fog in Chicago, and Theodore Browne's Natural Man in Seattle) or by reviving classical plays with African American casts (New York's "voodoo Macbeth" being the most familiar example). So Hallie Flanagan—the FTP's idealistic national director—took action. She brought James Light, preeminent stage director and alumnus of the groundbreaking Provincetown Players, from New York to Philadelphia to be the Unit's new leader.

White leadership for African American companies was nothing new for the FTP's Negro Units. Actor John Houseman had helped led the New York Unit to prominence,² as did husband-and-wife team Burton and Florence James in Seattle. Elsewhere, white-led Negro "little theatres" had flourished in Chicago and Cleveland. Those precedents, along with Light's own artistic history, positioned the new director as a kind of "white savior" figure for African American theatre in Philadelphia. Light's stature as a director had been cemented through several high-profile collaborations with African American actors. He had directed Eugene O'Neill's race drama All God's Chillun Got Wings, a 1924 revival of The Emperor Jones, and a short-lived 1931 London engagement of The Hairy Ape—all starring Paul Robeson. These and other productions of spoken dramas with Black actors represented a challenge to the era's status quo of minstrel-derived stereotyping and established the young director as an integrationist trailblazer for the stage. Cheryl Black's study of Light's interracial collaborations across two decades—while emphasizing how this director's work with Black actors remained bound by "a theatre grounded in Eurocentric cultural experience"—demonstrates how this white artist's "pioneering efforts in interracial theatrical collaborations" helped foster a more "diverse and democratic" theatre for the United States.³

What would this change of leadership in Philadelphia portend for the artistic practice of the city's Black actors, playwrights, designers, and musicians? What would it mean for audiences and for the future of African American theatre? In this essay, I assess the three productions staged in Philadelphia under Light's directorship—Jericho by H. L. Fishel (1937), a new adaptation of Arthur Arent's "Living Newspaper" play One-Third of a Nation (1938), and the dancedrama Prelude to Swing (1939; staged and choreographed by Malvena Fried, with text by Carleton Moss). These three projects represented a distinct shiftaway from the "buffoonery and low comedy" that had preceded them. Even so, surviving evidence captures the persistence of racial inequities and a pervasive white chauvinism—typical of the wider American theatrical culture of the era—that compromised those efforts. These projects are case studies in how paternalistic white leadership (even if well-intentioned) has historically denigrated, excluded, or erased the African American creative praxis that it ostensibly seeks to serve. Furthermore, the same conditions that hampered the work of the Philadelphia Negro Unit persist in the archive, obscuring the voices and experiences of African American artists from our historiographical view today. While documentary records offer a few enticing glimpses of African American performance artistry, the archive mostly reflects (both in what it preserves and what is absent from it) how Black voices were caricatured, marginalized, and erased by the FTP in Philadelphia.

When Light...