Reflections on Fundamental Principles

The approaching centennial of the publication of W.E.B. DuBois’s “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement” invites renewed consideration of this manifesto for Black theatre in the United States. What explains the expansive impact of this brief essay, emanating out of the work of a shoestring “Little” theatre company housed in a tiny basement auditorium of a neighborhood library? How do we account for the essay’s seminal influence among artists, critics, and scholars, across one hundred years of Black theatre history? To pay tribute to this remarkable document, here I share some reflections on why the mission of the Krigwa Players proves so fundamental for so many, and for me in particular. 

The essay’s now familiar “four fundamental principles” for “a real Negro theatre” loom large across Black theatre historiography, including my own scholarly work. In two monographs, and several journal articles and book chapters, I use the formulation of “About us… By us… For us… [and] Near us…”¹ as a cornerstone of critical analysis, whether or not the period under discussion is the New Negro Renaissance.² I employ DuBois’s principles as mathematicians use their X and Y axes—assigning value to objects based on proximity to and/or distance from these brightly drawn lines. Similarly, in teaching African American theatre, DuBois’s framework becomes an indispensable standard against which my students and I chart the field’s rich past, the realities of the present, and possibilities for the future. Why? What allows this vision of Black theatre to loom so large in my thinking about the history and evolution of this artistic tradition? 

For me, one attraction to the essay is its rhetorical strategy. I find myself drawn toward this statement for the directness of its tone, the elegance of its quadripartite structure, and the unassailable logic of its claims. To read DuBois’s account of the birth of the Negro little theatre movement is to be guided naturally toward an inescapable conclusion: there simply is no other group of people that a truthful, genuine, socially relevant Black theatre could plausibly be about, by, for, or near. From our own vantage point, that conclusion seems self-evident. But from DuBois’s position in 1926, the statement defies almost the entirety of the nation’s cultural history to that point. The four principles, while fundamental for honest Black theatrical self-expression, are defiant counter-arguments to an American genealogy defined by gross violations against them: falsifications and demeaning stereotypes, cynical acts of racial impersonation, blatant pandering to the basest prejudices of the white public, and Broadway “race dramas” penned by white writers (Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, Ridgely Torrence, and others) out of reach for most Black audiences (and never intended for their consumption in the first place). “About us… by us… for us…near us…” lays those tendencies bare for condemnation and reinvention. Each two-word phrase encapsulates an indictment of the theatrical status quo, a vision of future progress, and a non-negotiable standard against which that progress must be measured. DuBois’s essay thus becomes a lucid, user-friendly guide for confronting questions foundational to American theatre history of the early-20th Century. 

What I also find indispensable in DuBois’s “four fundamental principles” is the foregrounding of the theatre’s multifaceted and collaborative nature. Debates about racial authenticity within Black culture were ubiquitous within the critical discourse of the New Negro Renaissance; essays on theatre were a key part of that conversation. Often, statements about “Negro drama” from this era focus narrowly on one of two specific concerns: either the question of how playwrights might represent African American life more truthfully; or else the need for wider acceptance of Black actors portraying serious dramatic roles (including within familiar classical works of the Western canon).³ DuBois’s manifesto expands the aperture on Black theatre in several important ways. While its enumeration of principles refers to the “plots” of new plays and the contributions of “Negro authors,” there is also an ​implicit argument that actors, directors, and designers “who understand from birth and continued association just what it means to be a Negro today” are necessary as collaborators in the mission of “reveal[ing] Negro life as it is” on the stage. This perspective becomes more explicit later in the essay, as DuBois celebrates how members of the Krigwa Players “furnished the curtain, the scenery, gave the plays and secured the audiences” to bring to fruition a new “experiment” whose “success is unquestioned.”⁴  

The manifesto’s focus on Black audiences is particularly revelatory in this regard, in its call for a theatre that is unequivocally “for us” and “near us.” The need for flesh-and-blood witnesses who share a racial subjectivity with the artists on stage and behind the scenes is a condition that had been largely underplayed in the era’s discussions. DuBois’s statement reminds us how, in distinction to other acts of cultural consumption (such as the reading of literature, the viewing of visual art, or the screening of a film), each performance of a play occupies a single, fixed, unreplicable sliver of space-time that ignites a live communion between creators and witnesses. The veracity of that performance depends upon the ratification of the spectators it is offered “for,” and whether those necessary co-participants are “near” enough to access it. The Krigwa Players knew, no matter how many race dramas with integrated casts came to Broadway, that the “Great White Way” could never foster a “real Negro theatre.” Revisiting and reckoning with DuBois’s essay keeps me attuned to questions of geography, of community, and of the role of spectatorship—essential considerations for all rigorous theatre scholarship. 

At the same time, the statement touches something of a nerve for me, in light of my own positionality as a white scholar, and as a white instructor situated at a predominantly white institution. Each repetition of “us” speaks to a subjectivity to which I have no access. The more I ponder DuBois’s repetitions of “us” as the object of four prepositions, the more unstable my own relationship to the subject seems to be. DuBois’s statement reminds me how my own claims to expertise come from an unbridgeable distance; I stand fixedly on the outside of “us,” trying my best to be responsible, thorough, scrupulous, and open-minded as I look in. I will never have direct, personal insight into how a play script or a performance might capture the subjective experience of African American life in the United States. And yet, DuBois’s essay also offers a scaffold upon which I can build my own inquiries—a series of tests that any historian (whether of the intended “us,” or not) can apply to the study of Black theatre in any era. Keeping these tests in the forefront of my thinking helps mitigate some of my anxieties about the possibility of misreading or (even worse) of marring the historical terrain I endeavor to traverse. (Ultimately, I leave it to readers, to colleagues, and to students to help me understand where I might be succeeding in that project, and where I fall short.) 

There’s one more thing I find inspirational within the Krigwa Players’ legacy, which is found elsewhere, apart from its most oft-quoted statement of purpose. To illustrate the application of his “four fundamental principles,” Dubois provides in “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” a brief account of the ensemble’s first public performance, which had been mounted the previous year: 

The playbill from this 1925 evening of short plays survives in the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (located in the same library building that housed the theatre itself). In that playbill appears a different mission statement for the Krigwa Players, which departs somewhat from the manifesto published in Crisis the following year: 

The published essay of 1926 contains no echo of this last portion of what was shared with the Krigwa’s first audiences. The 1925 statement points to something beyond the boundaries of “About us… by us… for us… near us…” It expands the parameters of exactly whom this ensemble’s work could be by, about or for. That the Krigwa Players would—amid their transformational experiment building a “real Negro theatre”—also extend its welcome to sympathetic supporters “of all races” in search of “beautiful ideas” is provocative. This invitation, for me, is itself a beautiful idea. I consider it one more field-defining principle to add to the more recognizable list of four. It is a principle which also grounds, informs, and inspires my scholarly work, one hundred and one years later.