An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision

In theatre and performance studies, W. E. B. Du Bois’s name has become synonymous with his manifesto for “a real Negro theatre” that is “1. About us ... 2. By us ... 3. For us ... 4. Near us.”¹ Interpreted within the context of the essay’s title, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” Du Bois’s vision for Black theatre has often been interpreted to be local, topical, and “little” in the form of community theatre.² For instance, David Krasner interprets an extensive array of Black American drama, theatre, pageantry, and performance through the lenses provided by Du Bois’s landmark 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Within this framework, he interprets even Du Bois’s Afro-diasporic pageant The Star of Ethiopia as an example of an “emerging Black Nationalism” among Black Americans.³ For Krasner, the theorization of “a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness” experienced by “Black folk”—“this always looking at one’s self through the  eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”—frames Du Bois’s political and aesthetic engagements with Black theatre firmly within the “two-ness” of Black American experience: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”⁴ Similar framings of Du Bois’s contributions to Black theatre and performance as focusing primarily on the “peculiar experience” of Black American identity and subjectivity and its role in the formation of the Little Negro Theatre movement across particular, local Black American communities.⁵ Yet, recent scholarship on Du Bois’s pageant The Star of Ethiopia emphasizes Du Bois’s Black internationalist political vision in his artistic contributions to the Black theatrical tradition.⁶ There are therefore two warring ideals of Du Bois in contemporary scholarship on Black theatre and performance: Du Bois, the Black nationalist, and Du Bois, the pan-Africanist. These two interpretations of Du Bois, however, may be reconciled through closer attention to the continuities between his writings on Black American experience and pan-Africanist history and politics. Indeed, Du Bois’s theatrical projects and his lasting influence on Black theatre makers outlines a significantly more transnational imagining of the “us” at the heart of Black theatre—an expansive “us” that situates the Black American theatre firmly within a wider Black diasporic project and politics. Through his pageant The Star of Ethiopia and his intellectual mentorship of pan-Africanist playwrights Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry, Du Bois manifested an avowedly internationalist, “pan-Negro” theatrical vision that both anticipated and elaborated upon his artistic and political investments in the Little Negro Theatre movement. 

Du Bois’s investments in theatre and performance drew primarily from his view that the arts should be used for “propaganda”—that is, public pedagogy dedicated to “education and social uplift.”⁷ His most direct involvement with performance arose through his interest in the American pageant movement and its mobilization of mass participation in support of public enactments of history.⁸ Du Bois produced his signature historical pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, in four cities across the United States in a series of iterations that involved significant revisions and reimaginings of its characters and its symbolism. The earliest iteration dates to 1911, though there is no clear surviving evidence of this earliest draft.⁹ The first publicly performed version was staged in New York City in 1913 as part of the Emancipation Exposition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation under the title, The People of the Peoples and Their Gifts to Men.¹⁰ Then, in Washington, D.C., in 1915, Du Bois produced a version under the pageant’s final title, The Star of Ethiopia, in which he transformed the figure of the “Veiled Woman” into the role of “Ethiopia.”¹¹ Following the 1915 production, Du Bois continued revising the pageant, culminating in additional productions in Philadelphia in 1916 and in Los Angeles in 1925.¹²  

Though Du Bois continually rewrote his pageant, a consistent plot arc served as its narrative spine: The Star of Ethiopia dramatizes the history of Black peoples beginning in prehistorical Africa, through the rise of Pharaonic Egypt, the arrival of Islam to the African continent, the emergence of the slave trade and the consequent enslavement of Africans, the resistance of the enslaved throughout the Americas through revolts and rebellions, and the eventual emancipation of Black Americans during the Civil War. Beginning with the 1915 production, Du Bois added a set of concluding episodes that stage the post-emancipation discrimination of the Jim Crow era and Black resilience in the face of enduring oppression.¹³ As the global sweep of his pageants demonstrate, Du Bois’s vision was not simply to dramatize the history of Black people in the United States but rather, as Du Bois himself wrote in his Autobiography, “The pageant was an attempt to put into dramatic form ... a history of the Negro race.”¹⁴ Here, Du Bois crafted The Star of Ethiopia as a dramatic parallel to his contemporaneously published scholarly text The Negro (1915), which he intended to be “a complete history of the Negro peoples.”¹⁵ 

Du Bois’s conception of the relationship between Black Americans and “the Negro people” writ large had long been defined by his internationalist and pan-Africanist politics. In his 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races,” he identified “the eight million people of Negro blood in the United States of America” as “the advance guard of the Negro people,” who were connected to “Negro people” throughout the world by “pan-Negroism.”¹⁶ Thus, as Soyica Colbert notes, Du Bois crafted the dramaturgy of The Star of Ethiopia to “present[] an international landscape instead of recounting a local history.”¹⁷ As Krasner further observes, “In The Star of Ethiopia, Du Bois sought a cultural representation of the black diaspora, a collective consciousness among black people centered upon a common history and ancestry.”¹⁸ Prehistoric Africans, ancient Egyptians, Muslims, Christians, animists, African enslavers and enslaved Africans, in Africa and across the Americas — all, for Du Bois, shared a common “pan-Negro” history. Moreover, Du Bois viewed “pan-Negroism” as integral to his vision of “the development of Negro genius, of Negro literature and art, [and] of Negro spirit” which only would be made possible by “Negroes bound and welded together, Negroes inspired by one vast ideal, [who] can work out in its fullness the great message we have for humanity.”¹⁹ Therefore, by charting a world-historical arc that spans from prehistoric Africa to the contemporary United States, Du Bois fashioned “an expansive historical narrative” that promulgated an expansive conception of the Black “us” at the center of his “real Negro theatre.”²⁰  

It is no stretch to connect Du Bois’s pageant to his later theorization of a “Little Negro Theatre.” Indeed, in his autobiography, Du Bois placed The Star of Ethiopia directly alongside his discussion of the Krigwa Players:  

As this passage demonstrates, Du Bois saw his pageant and the Little Negro Theatre movement as part of the same project of “trying to develop Negro art and literature,” and he placed them along the same continuum of theatrical practice.²² This reflection echoed Du Bois’s earlier 1916 writing about The Star of Ethiopia in which he asserted that “pageantry among colored people is not only possible, but in many ways of unsurpassed beauty and can be made a means of uplift and education and the beginning of a folk drama.”²³ In other words, for Du Bois, the roots of a Little Negro Theatre and its “folk drama” lay in his experiments in pageantry “for the benefit of large masses of people.”  

As remarkably ambitious theatrical experiments, Du Bois’s several stagings of The Star of Ethiopia anticipated his later vision for a “real Negro theatre” that was “About ... By .... For ... and Near” Black people. First and foremost, Du Bois wrote his pageants for Black people as correctives to the omission of Black and African history from the emergent US pageant movement.²⁴ He also wrote his pageants for Black people so that they might become more involved in the theatrical life of their communities. As Du Bois reflected following the 1916 pageant in Philadelphia, “It seemed to me that it might be possible with such a demonstration to get people interested in the development of Negro drama to teach on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre.”²⁵ Moreover, by enlisting everyday Black people as performers, Du Bois’s pageants were exercises in drama by Black people that, in keeping with his vision for a Little Negro Theatre, “creat[ed] a community through the process of staging.”²⁶ His pageants also were performed near Black people, as he staged iterations across the country to bring his dramatization of Black history to different Black communities. His vision of bringing Black pageantry to Black people is perhaps most evident in the 1915 staging in Washington, D.C., at the American League Baseball Park down the road from Howard University, where it drew a predominantly Black audience.²⁷ Taken together with his dramatization of Black history—itself a theatrical work about Black people in an expansive sense—Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia anticipated and fulfilled the “four fundamental principles” that he would later outline for “a real Negro theatre.”²⁸ 

Importantly, Du Bois’s foundational contributions to a “Pan-Negro” theatrical vision did not end with The Star of Ethiopia nor with his manifesto for a “Little Negro Theatre.” His role as a friend, teacher, and mentor to two of the most significant Black playwrights of the twentieth century—Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry—ensured that his pan-Africanist dramaturgy and politics endured well after he ceased working in the theatre. Indeed, recent scholarship on Childress and Hansberry has noted Du Bois’s significant role in serving as a pedagogue and model for both playwrights insofar as he both instructed and inspired Childress and Hansberry and their “radical visions.”²⁹ However, scholarship on Du Bois’s theatrical work has not yet considered the implications of his mentorship as part of his broader contributions to Black theatre and performance. 

The earliest known acquaintance between Du Bois, Childress, and Hansberry almost certainly occurred in the early 1950s at 53 W. 125^th Street in Harlem, where the Council on African Affairs (CAA), led by Du Bois and Paul Robeson, shared office space with Robeson’s newspaper Freedom, for which Childress and Hansberry were both regular contributing writers. Du Bois used the CAA to organize Black Americans in support of pan-Africanist politics, while he continued publishing pan-Africanist scholarship such as The World and Africa (1946).³⁰ The influence of Du Bois’s pan-Africanism on Hansberry’s and Childress’s dramaturgy was remarkably direct. The program for Childress’s 1952 pan-Africanist dramatic revue Gold Through the Trees—which Mary Helen Washington identifies as “virtually a textbook of 1950s Harlem leftist politics” and their Black internationalist horizons—explicitly cited Du Bois’s The World and Africa.³¹ Around the same time, Childress and Hansberry coauthored the script for “A Cultural Festival in Celebration of Negro History Month” for a celebration of the first anniversary of Freedom. The production starred Childress as the emcee alongside performances by Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Beah Richards (Beulah Richardson), and Harry Belafonte. It opened with a “Nigerian Processional” replete with “African song” and characters identifying themselves as belonging to various African ethnic groups who recounted their journey through the crucible of slavery and their ongoing commitment to pan-Africanist liberation.³² In many ways, Childress’s Gold Through the Trees and the “Cultural Festival” that she coauthored with Hansberry were continuations of the work initiated by Du Bois in The Star of Ethiopia. They were dramatizations of a “pan-Negro” political and theatrical vision that galvanized the development of Black art to engage and educate local Black communities. 

Moreover, Du Bois’s mentorship of Childress and Hansberry also took place in actual classrooms. Both Childress and Hansberry enrolled in Du Bois’s course on African history at the Jefferson School of Social Science in 1953. Childress wrote a final paper on the Gold Coast, while Hansberry’s final paper was titled “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History, and Its Peoples.”³³ Through this course, Du Bois created a small community of committed pan-Africanist students, a community that Du Bois further fostered by inviting students from the class to dinner at his home.³⁴ The relationships formed through Du Bois’s mentorship were lasting. Du Bois sought Childress’s perspective about a novel he was developing in 1955, and Childress cherished a cigarette holder Du Bois bequeathed to her.³⁵ Both Childress and Hansberry also maintained active relationships with Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. In April 1953, Childress escorted the Du Boises to a cultural reception in honor of Herbert Aptheker, and three years later, Graham Du Bois advocated for Childress’s Trouble in Mind to be produced by a Black theatre company in Los Angeles.³⁶ 

As for Hansberry, Graham Du Bois recalled that she was Du Bois’s “favorite pupil” and that he was “exceedingly fond and proud of her.”³⁷ For her part, Hansberry was a longtime avid reader of Du Bois’s writing (particularly his 1939 Black Folk Then and Now), and through his tutelage she deepened her investments in pan-Africanist thought and politics.³⁸ In 1960, following the incredible Broadway success of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Graham Du Bois sent Hansberry a series of letters in which she expressed “how proud” she was of Hansberry’s theatrical achievements and praised her “dignity and outspoken appearances on television.”³⁹ Attesting to the Du Boises’ great esteem for her, in February 1964, Hansberry was selected to read Shirley Graham Du Bois’s words at a memorial in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois, which Hansberry prefaced with her own reflections on her departed mentor: 

Hansberry was one vector by which Du Bois’s influence extended well beyond his own work as a scholar, political organizer, and theatre maker. For her, “to honor Du Bois [...meant] sustaining his Pan-Africanist and socialist vision”—both within and beyond the theatre.⁴¹ As such, Hansberry interwove Du Boisian politics of Black internationalism in A Raisin in the Sun through the figure of Joseph Asagai.⁴² Additionally, Hansberry drew from Du Bois’s lessons in African history in crafting her posthumously staged play on African anticolonial movements, Les Blancs, which included direct references to the research paper she submitted to Du Bois on Belgian colonialism in the Congo.⁴³ Thus, like Childress’s Gold Through the Trees, Hansberry’s Les Blancs is a testament to the endurance of Du Bois’s theatrical vision. Their collective Black internationalist dramatic output attests to the endurance of Du Bois’s expansive, internationalist vision of Black politics.  

Taken together with Du Bois’s own pageantry, Childres’s and Hansberry’s pan-African dramas exemplify the ways by which Du Bois’s “pan-Negro” theatrical “ideas have influenced a multitude who do not even know his name.” Moreover, they trace how Du Bois’s pan-Africanist and Black internationalist politics have long served as a central pillar of Black American theatre. Indeed, Du Bois’s “pan-Negro” theatrical vision influenced Black artists well beyond Childress and Hansberry. His distinctive Black internationalist aesthetics and politics may be viewed as the bedrock upon which the Black Arts Movement took root—from Amiri Baraka’s vision for an anti-Eurocentric and avant-garde “Revolutionary Theatre” to Barabara Ann Teer’s ritual theatre.⁴⁴ It would be hard to imagine a contemporary Black theatre canon without the foundation laid by Du Bois’s Black internationalist political vision. In this sense, the “ritualizing repair” enacted by Aleshea Harris’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down — which notably is subtitled “A play. A pageant. A ritual. A homegoing celebration” — exemplifies Du Bois’s enduring yet hidden influence on contemporary Black theatre.⁴⁵ With its deft combinations of propaganda and community-building and its explicit citation of Du Bois’s pageantry, Harris’s play-pageant-ritual-celebration stages a “little” community drama undergirded by an expansive “pan-Negro,” Black internationalist theatrical vision that remains urgently relevant in confronting the social and political realities of the Global Majority.