Drama for "Neglected People": Recovering Anna Julia Cooper's Dramatic Theory and Criticism from the Shadows of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke

Anna Julia Cooper is entitled to a more prominent placement in history, particularly theatre history where she has been all but neglected. Commonly referred to as the "female W.E.B. Du Bois,"¹ and the middle way between the vocational ideals of Booker T. Washington and the elitist intellectualism of Du Bois, she has received the occasional "honorable mention." But she has thus far never received due consideration for her contributions to African American theatrical development, especially in the context of an evolving American theatre. This essay works toward rectifying these oversights and to position Cooper more prominently in the record among her male colleagues.

Cooper lived for one hundred and five years with a remarkable list of accomplishments including a respected place in Black feminist history. Her extraordinary life and work have been recently recovered in studies by Mary Helen Washington, Karen A. Johnson, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Vivian M. May, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Barbara McCaskill and others who identify Cooper's prominence as an activist, educator, and advocate for equal rights for women, especially Black women who she noted as doubly oppressed due to the combined forces of racism and sexism. Her views on African American representation in A Voice from the South (1892) have received general attention, yet Cooper is less often associated with theatrical discourse especially with regard to her creative work. Kathy A. Perkins identifies Cooper as a pageant author but does not include her plays in Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950, featuring plays by Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary P. Burrill, Eulalie Spence, Shirley Graham, and Marita Bonner. Perkins's reference does, however, momentarily shift the gaze to Cooper as a creative artist.²

Studies by Derrick P. Alridge and others consider Cooper's theoretical positioning alongside Du Bois, which may in fact, contribute to her views being eclipsed by those males with whom she was affiliated. In fact, a closer look at the case of Anna Julia Cooper and theatrical discourse reveals that it may be more appropriate to refer to Du Bois as "the male Anna Julia Cooper." Indeed, her commentary on African American representation predates his, he was known to quote her without crediting her, and she was known to inspire him and others to actively resist racial discrimination through scholarship and art production in spite of her marginal position at the turn of the twentieth century.

Cooper redefined her status by illuminating the Black Woman's critical standpoint at the intersection of race and gender. Criticism of Cooper's elitist voice in her writing suggests her audience was the intelligentsia of her time. A closer look at specific writings, venues in which she published, and her creative work suggests women, children, and the working class of "neglected people" whom she taught and also wrote about were in her purview. Cooper maintained a "unique, isolating theoretical position" as a Black American woman of mixed race born into slavery yet representing a higher social class while living "constantly at economic risk."³ She also occupied the center of various intersecting identities including, but not limited to, her roles both as an educator and activist, and a widow and adoptive mother whose commitment to Christianity, democracy, and patriotism is apparent in her work. Unfortunately, her roles as theatre critic, director, and playwright have received less attention until now.

Cooper's voice is conspicuously missing from the historical record of American and African American theatre history. Many of her fundamental ideas on theatrical development may not have been included in the magazines Crisis, Opportunity, and Fire!! but they appear in what may have been Cooper's informal column in the Washington Tribune, a Black newspaper published regularly from 1925 through December 1935. These columns, letters to the editors of newspapers and journals, her essays "The Negro Dialect" (1930?) and "Sketches from a Teacher's Notebook" (1923?), nontraditional sources, and her creative works reflect her theories of drama, which have been overshadowed by her prominent...