Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays before 1950

May Miller

May Miller (1899- ) May Miller during the early 19408. (Courtesy of May Miller) May Miller in 1986. (Courtesy of May Miller) We create only from familiar elements, the possibilities of which are enhanced by imagination. 1 MAY MILLER (SULLIVAN) WAS PRESENTED with the 1986 Mister Brown Award for Excellence in Drama and Poetry by the National Conference of African American Theatre at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland . (Mr. William Brown was manager of the African Company in New York, 1816-1823.) Presently hailed as an outstanding poet, Miller is also recognized as one of the outstanding playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s, along with Georgia Douglas Johnson and Eulalie Spence. Not only was Miller a prolific and versatile playwright, but she was the most widely published black female playwright of this period. Of her fifteen plays, nine were published; many of them were staged at numerous colleges and little theatre groups throughout the country. Born January 26, 1899, to Kelly and Annie May Miller, she grew up on Howard University's campus where her father was a prominent professor. Kelly Miller gained national recognition for his scholarly essays in sociology and as an educator. He was also one of the founders of the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center at Howard. He served as an early influence on Miller in her aspiration to become a writer. Miller graduated from the famous Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in 1916, where she studied under playwrights Mary P. Burrill and Angelina Grimke. It was Mary Burrill who encouraged her to write her first play, Pandora's Box (1914), while still a student. The play was submitted and published in the School Progress magazine that same year. As a Howard University student, Miller received further encouragement to write from such eminent professors as Alain Locke and Montgomery T. Gregory. She graduated in 1920 at the head of her class with a Bachelor of Arts degree and during the graduation exercises received the first prize ever awarded at Howard in playwriting for her one-act play, Within the Shadow. Following graduation, Miller taught speech, drama, and dance at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore. It was there that she wrote most of her plays. Miller joined the Baltimore Krigwa Players and on weekend trips to Washington, D.C., frequented Georgia Johnson's "s Street Salon." During the summer months, Miller took playwriting courses at such institutions as Columbia University. At Columbia, she studied under the wellknown scholar Frederick Koch, who recognized and encouraged her talents. In 1925 she placed third in the Opportunity playwriting contest for The Bog Guide, and received honorable mention in the 1926 contest for The Cuss'd Thing. May Miller's plays stand out from those of other women writers because of her diversity. Considered a "folk" dramatist, she also wrote on a variety 144 / MAY MILLER of topics which bordered on "propaganda." While most black women chose to utilize an all-black cast, Miller would incorporate white characters to stress a point as in Stragglers in the Dust (1930) and Nails and Thorns (1933). Miller cleverly dealt with sensitive issues of the times without offending her audience by leaving unanswered such questions as: "Is the body in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier really that of a black soldier?" or "how bad is lynching in this country?" In Graven Images (1929), a play written for eighth graders, Miller explores racial discrimination as seen in the Old Testament. She relied on Numbers 12:1 for the basis of her play: "And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman he had married." Some of Miller's plays centered on rural blacks, and on both the educated and uneducated black in urban America As an educator she wrote history plays to educate her students at Douglass High. In 1934, Carter G. Woodson urged Miller and renowned playwright Willis Richardson to collaborate on an antholpgy dramatizing the lives of black heroes and heroines. In 1935, Negro History in Thirteen Plays was published. Miller had three entries in this anthology-Sojourner Truth, Samory, and Harriet Tubman. She also, included Georgia Johnson's plays William and Ellen Craft and Frederick Douglass. In 1943, Miller wrote her last work-Freedom's Children on the Marcha dramatic folk ballad with music which was performed at the June commencement exercises at Frederick Douglass. The following year, she retired from the Baltimore school system. Feeling that...