Childress, Alice

CHILDRESS, ALICE (1916-1994). As an actor, writer, playwright and activist, Alice Childress was a major player in the interracial literary and cultural Left in New York from the 1950s until her death. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Childress (born Alice Herndon) was raised by her maternal grandmother Eliza Campbell, the daughter of an enslaved woman, who introduced Childress to New York culture, from art galleries to Harlem churches, and encouraged her to imagine stories about the people and places they encountered and to get involved in amateur acting. Childress’s FOIA file reveals that she was active in theater as far back as junior high school with the Urban League and with the Negro Theatre Youth League of the Federal Theatre Project, where she was almost certainly exposed to radical politics.

After the death of her grandmother, Childress supported herself working odd jobs as a machinist, domestic worker, saleswoman, and insurance agent. She married Alvin Childress, also an actor (who later played Amos, the cab driver on the television Amos and Andy show), and had one child, Jean, in 1935. In 1941, two years after the close of the Federal Theatre, Childress joined the American Negro Theatre (ANT), founded in 1939 by actor and blacklisted trade unionist Frederick O’Neal and writer Abram Hill, to identify and encourage Blacks in theater. For its first five years, the struggling ANT operated in the basement of the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Following the progressive path of the Federal Theatre, the ANT organized as a cooperative, where actors, playwrights, directors, and stage crew worked cooperatively, “[shared] expenses and profits” and developed artists and plays for the Black community. In 1949, in response to an argument with Sidney Poitier and other men of the ANT, who claimed that only issues involving Black men could represent racial struggle, Childress wrote the 1949 female-centered play Florence, published in Masses and Mainstream, to prove that Black women’s lives were just as central to issues of underemployment, segregation, and racial violence as men’s. All of Childress’s work reflects this strong Black left feminist viewpoint.

Childress spent the next eleven years at the ANT, performing all the roles in the theater, including playwright, director, manager, actor, stagehand, and even, at one point, union negotiator. Along with fellow actors who started at the ANT, including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Poitier, and Belafonte, Childress starred in several of ANT’s most popular productions, eventually landing a part in the all-Black cast of Anna Lucasta, ANT’s first big-time commercial success. This performance earned Childress a Tony nomination for her role as the prostitute Blanche.

In February, 1951, Childress published her first (and only) Marxist-inflected essay, “For A Negro Theatre,” in Masses and Mainstream, which was then reprinted in the Communist Daily Worker with an enhanced Marxist title, “For a Strong Negro People’s Theatre,” accompanied by a photo of the glamorous Childress. The essay reveals the hesitancies and fissures in Childress’s relationship with the interracial Left and sets out her own distinctive ideas of radicalism. She explained in the essay that she came to accept the notion of a “people’s theater” after a “heated discussion” with the Black radical left-wing playwright Theodore Ward, with Ward arguing that there was a “definite need for such a theatre,” and Childress, despite her own long relationship with the American Negro Theatre, expressing the fear that a separate theater for Negroes might become “a Jim Crow institution.” Without committing to Ward’s vision, Childress proposes a “Negro people’s theatre” that will combat the racist practices of mainstream theater and will promote serious study of Negro culture. But a Negro people’s theatre, she insists, must also be both multicultural and internationalist: it must desire “the liberation of all oppressed peoples,” take advantage of “the rich culture of the Chinese, Japanese, Russian and all theatres,” and study “oppressed groups which have no formal theatre as we know it,” because “We must never be guilty of understanding only ourselves.”

Childress’s racialized radicalism did not separate her from white Left radicals nor from interracial work. She was deeply involved in three of the most radical interracial cultural groups of the 1950s—Harlem’s Unity Theatre, the Committee For the Negro in the Arts, and the New Playwrights theater group, formed by Communist Mike Gold, blacklisted screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and left-wing writer John Dos Passos, the latter two organizations listed on the FBI’s Security Index.

From 1951 to 1955, Childress became a regular columnist for Paul Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, where she shared an office alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, a young typist-receptionist named Lorraine Hansberry, and the dynamic young Communist editor Louis Burnham. Childress wrote more than thirty columns called “Conversations,” featuring Mildred Johnson, a fictional outspoken domestic worker, Harlemite, and spiritual cousin to Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Simple. In the January, 1954 issue, Childress joined Robeson and the other Freedom contributors to produce a relentless broadside on McCarthy and HUAC witch-hunts. Mildred calls McCarthyism a form of legalized terror in which everyone from the Army, to the post office, to ordinary housewives being investigated, and she predicts, “we are all going to suffer much more until we wake up and defend the rights of Communists.” In another “Conversation,” Mildred affirms her support for Robeson, who, by 1954, was under rightwing attack. When her white employer cautions that Robeson would only cause her trouble, Mildred ends the conversation, saying, “Somebody has made trouble for me, but it ain’t Paul Robeson. And the more he speaks the less trouble I’ll have.”

In 1952 Childress produced the radical musical Gold Through the Trees, which immediately caught the attention of the FBI. Written as a series of dramatic sketches, Gold depicted the Black militant struggle against South African apartheid, Harriet Tubman’s assaults on slavery, and the trial of Black men executed for rape in Martinsville, Virginia. Her FOIA file reports that on 20 May 1952, Gold would be produced by the left-wing Committee for the Negro in the Arts to benefit the left-dominated Civil Rights Congress (that bought out the house for one performance). The play would be performed at the progressive-interracial Club Baron and be reviewed favorably by Lorraine Hansberry in Freedom and by Lloyd Brown in Masses and Mainstream. In short, by the early 1950s Childress was fully embedded in the Harlem Left community.

In her most acclaimed play Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, Childress portrayed an interracial love affair between working-class figures who present a radical statement about race, class and gender. As a protest against the thousands of state laws against miscegenation and intermarriage, Wedding Band was considered too controversial for most venues, but finally produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Public Theatre in 1972. When the play reached the air as a CBS television drama starring Ruby Dee, television stations in the South would not air it, and many northern television affiliates showed it only after midnight.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Childress published two novels that continued to reflect her belief that interracial struggle, so central to Left politics, was crucial to political empowerment. Her 1979 novel A Short Walk depicts the efforts of Communists to challenge racial segregation by fighting evictions, which helped the Party in the 1930s make historic gains in Black communities. Childress creates a Depression-era eviction scene in A Short Walk that normalizes Communists: “Folks from the Communist Party come around after the marshal leaves, knock the lock off the apartment door and move the people back into their place. Makes the landlord mad cause he has to pay the marshal each time for putting things out. The neighbors chip in and buy containers of beer for the Communist Party and also bring odds and ends of food to make up a ‘welcome home’ party for the evicted.” Using the affective and intimate terms of an insider familiar with Communist culture and practice, Cora described the Communist Party as an organization with naturally occurring disagreements and misunderstandings as well as with affective bonds between Blacks and whites. In her final literary production, Those Other People (1989), a young adult novel about a young, white, gay male computer instructor, Childress extended the lessons of the Harlem Left Front by putting queer sexuality at its center. When Jonathan Barnett, a teacher at a small-town high school witnesses a sexual assault on one of the female students by another male teacher, he becomes the target of an anti-gay community trying to suppress the story of the assault. He finds an ally in one of the Black students, Tyrone Tate and Tyrone’s militant Uncle Kwame. In this final literary text, Childress offered an example of a progressive Black and interracial front as they join together to resist the power of a repressive state.

Childress, “For a Negro Theater,” Masses and Mainstream, February, 1951.

Maguire, Roberta. “Alice Childress,” in J.P. Bryer, The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary Dramatists. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Alice Childress Papers, 1937-1997. New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20917