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Chapter 5 Multiculturalism from Above On August 14, 1966, the New York Times published a guest editorial by Douglas Turner Ward, the African American playwright, director, and actor who had recently become a darling of the New York theater world. Ward’s breakthrough had come thanks not only to his undisputed talent but also to his race in a period when white audiences and critics were hungry for realistic theatrical expression of the “black experience” as a way to understand African Americans’ claims and actions in the black power era. He capitalized on this moment of white attention and the Times’s bully pulpit to make the case for the immediate creation of what he called “a permanent Negro repertory company of at least off-Broadway size and dimension,” which he promised his readers would revitalize the American stage. “[J]ust as the intrusion of lower middle-class and working-class voices reinvigorated polite, effete English drama,” Ward claimed, “so might the Negro, a most potential agent of vitality, infuse life into the moribund corpus of American theater.” However, Ward insisted that this lifegiving force could only succeed through the creation of a separate, all-black company that would play to mixed but majority black audiences; otherwise, Ward felt the refreshing possibilities of black drama would be lost, with the “Negro playwright” doomed as always “to be witnessed and assessed by a majority least equipped to understand his intentions , woefully apathetic or anesthetized to his experience, [and] often prone to distort his purpose.” By contrast, “with Negroes responding all around,” Ward claimed that “white spectators, congenitally uneasy in the presence of Negro satire,” among other genres, “at least can’t fail to get the message.”1 Thus, Ward outlined his claim for black theater based on what African Americans could do for a white-dominated national culture if they were allowed to intervene and join in it on their own terms. Despite framing his argument to appeal to the interests of the white theatrical cognoscenti, Ward’s multicultural vision was a radical one that posited genuine, equitable cultural 170 Chapter 5 and social integration as a precondition to material black equality. Ward was careful to distinguish his “Negro” theater from black power’s dominant strain of cultural separatism. While, Ward hoped, as black nationalists did, for “an all-embracing, all-encompassing theater of Negro identity, organized as an adjunct of some Negro community” as the solution to the “Negro dramatist ’s dilemma,” he insisted that such efforts were doomed to “exotic isolation” as “[s]mall-scale cultural islands in the midst of the ghettoes,” unless they arose “as part of a massive effort to reconstruct the urban ghetto” through a “committed program of social and economic revitalization.” Until then, Ward believed that a theater based on his model would be a first step toward this urban transformation through the effective communication of black life and social vision to mixed audiences. In the meantime, Ward promised, American theater would be transformed.2 The Ford Foundation’s Vice President of Humanities and the Arts, W. McNeil Lowry, received Ward’s article very warmly; within months of its publication, Lowry asked Ward to head up the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). This was the first foray into a new program to establish and fund nonwhite theater as part of McGeorge Bundy’s Foundation-wide social development initiative. As with the case of the Foundation’s school reformers, Lowry found points of intersection with his black theater grantees without having to share their liberationist goals. Lowry loved Ward’s idea of a theater developing and showcasing black artists in the midst of the erstwhile white cultural mainstream, but he did so for its assimilative potential, not to help achieve Ward’s transformative ends. Meanwhile, the Foundation funded director Robert Macbeth’s New Lafayette Theatre (NLT) in Harlem, an allblack cultural nationalist project of exactly the kind that Ward had warned against. In this case, Lowry’s support of this effort simply reflected the dominant belief at the Foundation that black poverty was a function of culture and psychology, not the structures of American society, as Ward would argue . Likewise, while Robert Macbeth, like many cultural nationalists, shared a psychological conception of black powerlessness with the Foundation, Lowry was not interested in cleansing black minds of a corrupt white culture as Macbeth intended; instead he wished to build the self-esteem of the black poor as the essential, behavioral element of an assimilationist developmental separatism. Despite...

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