“One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre

In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois sent a short letter to members of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre he helped launch in the basement of the 135^th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem announcing his resignation. “With deep regret, I am giving up my work for the Little Theatre movement in Harlem. My work is so pressing that I cannot spare time,” Du Bois explained.¹ A fuller report on his decision to depart would be forthcoming in the New York Amsterdam News, he added, before concluding the correspondence by stating, “I shall miss all of you.”² Du Bois would make good on his word, outlining for readers of the October 5, 1927 edition of the bi-weekly, Black-owned the New York Amsterdam News his rationale for transitioning away from his leadership position with the company he first began imagining and laying the groundwork for in 1925 and would subsequently detail the “four fundamental principles” guiding its work in the pages of The Crisis Magazine. Included among other “special articles” published in the newspaper that week, Du Bois opened the piece, which ran under the title “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre,” by indicating his departure was mostly a consequence of accomplishing what he and dedicated collaborators like Charles Burroughs had set out to do.³ “I have finished a little job which I set myself in 1925. It was the job of starting a Little Theatre movement in high Harlem,” he asserted, “The movement has been auspiciously begun. I leave it with fondest benedictions to those better able than I to conduct its growth.”⁴ The Krigwa Players had already enjoyed extraordinary success in its short life, including staging new works by the likes of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, and Eulalie Spence, and enlisting such collaborators as the renowned painter Aaron Douglas, among dozens of other artistically-inclined Harlemites. Du Bois insisted that the challenges confronting the company, including concerns about whether continuing to rely on the generosity of volunteers was sustainable, were not insurmountable.  

There were, however, several key questions Du Bois felt those supportive of the idea of a Little Negro Theatre in Harlem needed to contend with before a “real” movement could truly flourish: namely, “Is Negro life dramatic and interesting? Do we want profit or art? Will we subordinate ourselves to authority?”⁵ While Du Bois was a great believer in the transformative power of drama and theatre for Black people in the United States, he was clear that any aspirations he held for being an impresario had dissipated. “It was a beautiful venture. We loved it even when we despaired of it,” he stated.⁶ He notably closed the piece by announcing his intent to retain ownership of the name Krigwa, which served to index the company’s emergence from the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists he was instrumental in forming, before again declaring that he was leaving the day-to-day work of running the company to others ostensibly more up to the task than he was.  

While much might be said about the shifting affects suffusing Du Bois’s resignation missive, which range from delight and appreciation to disappointment and regret, I want to linger here briefly on what I view as his very conscious choice to proclaim love for Black drama and theatre amid separating himself from what remains one of the most consequential Black cultural institutions in United States history. I do so, in part, to invite reflection on what this love might help us discern about the ongoing exigencies of these modes of expression in Black life and culture. Du Bois notably invokes the word love one other time in “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre.” Early in the article, he declares, “I am no theatrical man, but I love the theatre.”⁷ Du Bois makes clear here that his affection for the art form is unequivocal, even if trying to keep the Krigwa Players in operation ultimately proved too tall of an order for him.  

Of course, despite his assertions to the contrary, there is no question that Du Bois was, indeed, a theatrical man. The spectacular pageants he mounted in the early decades of the twentieth century and the countless dramas he would go on to write and work to get produced and published well into the Civil Rights era certainly provide rich evidence to support this contention. So too do the multiple manifestos for Black theatre he composed over the course of his extraordinary life. Indeed, as Geoffrey Lokke suggests, the critical essays Du Bois penned to accompany the collection of plays that he endeavored to get printed under the title “Playthings of the Night” beginning in the early 1930s are often as revelatory as pieces like “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement” and “Criteria for Negro Art.” They shed particular light on what Du Bois viewed as some of the distinguishing features and aesthetic ambitions of his dramaturgy.⁸ They are also full of searing commentary on what the renowned activist, writer, and visionary leader often diagnosed as the dismal state of the contemporary theatre. Du Bois routinely conveyed disappointment about the wanting engagements with and representations of Blackness littering stages big and small across the nation.  

Despite his frequent forays into drama and theatre (Lokke, for example, notes that he “was still circulating” the unpublished dramas selected for “Playthings of the Night” well into the 1960s, thereby “showing a commitment to the plays he sustained over five decades”), Du Bois would remain somewhat reticent about identifying himself as a “theatrical man” deep into old age.⁹ This likely accounts for why he began the remarks he crafted for a forum focused on “The Negro and the American Theatre” in October 1946, some twenty years after the Krigwa Players launched in Harlem, with “an apology in appearing upon a program devoted to the drama.”¹⁰ Of course, his subsequent comments would affirm why he was in fact the right person to anchor such a conversation. After reflecting on the extraordinary achievement of staging the “pageant of Negro history called The Star of Ethiopia” in New York to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1913 and the establishment of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in 1926, Du Bois went on to express the following about the expressive significance of drama and theatre:  

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Notwithstanding any misgivings he might have maintained about naming himself a “theatrical man,” what is clear from these remarks is that Du Bois continued to marvel at what drama and theatre could make possible and do for Black people. His love for Black drama and theatre remained as “wide and fruitful” as he proclaimed the fields themselves to be. 

It remains somewhat curious, then, that in the years since Du Bois’s death in 1963 at the age of 95 there has been a recurring tendency to promote the idea that Black drama and theatre are amid some sort of “renaissance.” The underlying implication is that these modes of expression are somehow constantly falling out of favor and are thus in need of resuscitation. What Du Bois’s persisting regard for Black drama and theatre over his expansive life begs us to consider are the ways they have in fact continually remained exigent in the cultural, social, and political lives of Black people in the United States. Certainly, many of the institutions formed specifically to take Black theatrical practice and production in fresh and inventive directions have had noticeably short lifespans (much like the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in Harlem, which only lasted for about three years). This lack of longevity should not be mistaken for a decline in appreciation for Black drama and theatre as “great and fine” modes of expression, however. 

It is meaningful, for example, that Du Bois continued to field queries about the Krigwa Players long after his departure from the group. There was no shortage of interest from Black folks across the country in learning more about some of the plays the company performed or in seeking advice about the steps they might take to establish Little Theatre movements in their own communities. Du Bois would often generously counsel letter writers to contact some of his esteemed peers like the playwright and educator S. Randolph Edmonds, who in addition to founding the Negro Intercollegiate Drama Association (NIDA) during his time teaching at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, a city where Du Bois would take up residence for significant parts of the 1940s, was also a prolific maker and teacher of drama. His generosity in answering such queries is perhaps best exemplified in a letter he wrote in response to a correspondence sent to him by a graduate student named J. W. J. Lovell in February 1929.¹² Lovell explained in his note that he was working on a graduate paper about “The Negro in American Drama” and wanted to know if Du Bois “would be at liberty in directing me to cumulative records about the Krigwa Players and other Little Theatre Movements among Negroes over the country in general.”¹³ In seeking out Du Bois’s assistance, Lovell continued, he hoped “to be able to contribute something of real value to the scholarship on the subject.”¹⁴ It did not take long for Du Bois to send a reply, which he began by detailing that there were Little Negro Theatre movements in a number of cities, including New Haven, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Cleveland, and Boston. He went on to urge Lovell to solicit additional information about these theatres and the dramas that they were commissioning and producing from some of their champions, whose names and addresses Du Bois supplied. Of course, many of the companies Du Bois directed Lovell to investigate further also would not endure. However, much like Du Bois and his collaborators at the Krigwa Players had done for various residents of and visitors to Harlem, these companies created opportunities for their communities to discover and expand their own love for Black drama and theatre. 

To be sure, the demand for Black drama and theatre has never waned precisely because the love for it is unwavering. Correspondingly, when one takes a closer look at all that was going on in the periods immediately preceding or following one of the so-called “renaissance” moments in Black theatrical practice and production, what inevitably emerges is an abundance of evidence of the ways artists have continued to conceive and produce dramatic works and performances that elicit deeper reflection on the conditions of Black life and, more broadly, the complexities of the human experience. The tremendous care and thoughtfulness with which these artists set out to respond to the calls Du Bois put forward in The Crisis magazine detailing the urgent need for more nuanced and layered representations of Blackness on the page and stage is immediately apparent. A January 1926 write-up encouraging submissions to the publication’s literary contest, which offered “$600 in prizes for stories, plays, essays, poems and covers,” is illustrative on this front.¹⁵ Du Bois counseled prospective contestants to write “about things as you know them; be honest and sincere,” adding, “Plumb the depths. If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil paint it. Do not try to be simply respectable, smug, conventional. Use propaganda if you want. Discard it and laugh if you will. But be true, be sincere, be thorough and do a beautiful job.”¹⁶ Du Bois’s insistence that contestants ought to write as imaginatively and expansively as possible, while also remaining grounded in the specificity of Black life and experience, is no doubt a charge that has resonated with Black theatremakers and other artists in the hundred years since he first put it in print. This perhaps accounts for why, when asked to contemplate the question, “What is a black play?” the celebrated playwright Suzan-Lori Parks offered, among other possibilities, that “A black play IZ.”¹⁷ With the pithy phrase, Parks, like Du Bois before her, notably reaffirmed the fact that Black drama and theatre can and must contain multitudes and, in so doing, prompted further consideration of the ways that they remain present in the present and, thus, are always already exigent.  

As Freda Scott Giles observes, “Du Bois viewed the arts as a powerful weapon in combatting oppression, but his appreciation for the arts went much deeper.”¹⁸ While Giles argues that “through his participation in theatre, Du Bois could partially reconcile his mission as a social scientist and civil rights activist with his avocation as a creative artist,” this does not fully capture the extent to which drama and theatre were foundational to his larger objectives of dismantling the oppressive structures constraining Black life in the wake of emancipation.¹⁹ To be sure, Du Bois’s investments in drama and theatre were not merely intellectual or secondary to his political work. His deep love for these forms emerged from a lasting belief in their transformative potential to upend the racist status quo. Thus, his love not only sustains, but it is, indeed, sustaining.