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Theodore Ward
- University of Illinois Press
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theodore Ward (september 15, 1902–May 8, 1983) alan M. Wald A trailblazing author in African American theater, as well a conspicuous leftwing cultural worker in the 1930s and 1940s, Theodore Ward was a principal contributor in dramatic art to the early stages of the Black Chicago Renaissance. In 1935 he was a founding member of the radical Black South Side Writers Group, and in 1938 his Big White Fog: A Negro Tragedy in Three Acts expressed the classic Chicago Renaissance theme of the impact of Northern racism on veterans of the Great Migration. The triumph of Big White Fog launched Ward on a forty-five year career during which his performed plays, a small fraction of his oeuvre, provided vivid renditions of sundry controversial themes and well-researched episodes from African American life and history. Moreover, Ward employed popular forms to address intricate political and social issues without making concessions in his content to popular taste. Although Ward passed much of the 1940s and 1950s in New York City, he returned to Chicago in 1964. There he continued to write and produce plays in relative obscurity for most of the last two decades of his life. Nearly all of available information about the early years of Ward’s life stems from interviews he gave to the Communist press in the late 1940s, and to several academic researchers in correspondence and interviews during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Little of this data has been independently corroborated, nor has any substantial research been carried out in relation to Ward’s private life. The fine points of his association with radical political and cultural organizations are also unascertained. The principal exception has been the controversy surrounding the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) production of Big White Fog in Chicago.2 Even if many of Ward’s anecdotes about his family history and itinerant youth cannot be positively validated, such memories played a pointed role in shaping the literary imagination and political engagement that inform his plays. Furthermore, a general representation of Ward’s personal associations and political commitments can be gleaned from correspondence by and about Ward in various archives. There are especially revealing letters in papers held by the theodore Ward • 321 Schomburg Library in New York and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Besides, there is a small record of some of Ward’s own prose writing on politics and culture that can be consulted, as well as the documentary record of editorial positions Ward assumed on politically affiliated publications. James Theodore Ward, who ceased using his first name when he started writing , was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, the eighth of eleven surviving children. Thibodaux was the seat of Lafourche Parish, forty miles West of New Orleans in a rich sugarcane and truck-farming delta. Ward’s father, Everett Ward, was an upright Christian schoolteacher who peddled religious books and classics along with patent medicine from a horse-drawn wagon. Ward’s paternal grandmother, a former slave, had lost her right hand when her master discovered that she had learned to write. Everett Ward was an enthralling storyteller, and at an early age Ward indulged himself in reading the sample chapters that his father utilized to sell books. However, his father, an admirer of Booker T. Washington, was personally conservative and tried to discourage his children from listening to jazz. Among the books attracting the young Ward was Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Ward was enthralled by the fancy English of the character Mr. Micawber. Often he tried to speak and write letters in this style. Ward’s mother, Mary Louis Pierre Ward, was a housewife. Ward believed that his maternal grandfather was killed while leading a rebellion of hundreds of Lafourche Parish field workers in the post-Emancipation years. Their aim had been to obtain a daily wage increase by requiring planters to come into town to hire their workers. The family legend was that the planters arrived with rifles and sought out Ward’s grandfather, gunning him down in front of his house. Ward’s mother kept the bullet to show to her children, but refused to reveal the planter’s name for fear that they might be tempted to take revenge. When Ward’s mother died in 1915, while giving birth to her eleventh child, the family disintegrated and the thirteen-year-old Ward wandered North. Drawn toward Chicago by the tales of freedom and opportunity that he picked up from Black Pullman porters, Ward ended up in...