Staging Faith

Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II

Craig R. Prentiss

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814708217
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the years between the Harlem Renaissance and World War II, African American playwrights gave birth to a vital black theater movement in the U.S. It was a movement overwhelmingly concerned with the role of religion in black identity. In a time of profound social transformation fueled by a massive migration from the rural south to the urban‑industrial centers of the north, scripts penned by dozens of black playwrights reflected cultural tensions, often rooted in class, that revealed competing conceptions of religion's role in the formation of racial identity. Black playwrights pointed in quite different ways toward approaches to church, scripture, belief, and ritual that they deemed beneficial to the advancement of the race. Their plays were important not only in mirroring theological reflection of the time, but in helping to shape African American thought about religion in black communities. The religious themes of these plays were in effect arguments about the place of religion in African American lives. In Staging Faith, Craig R. Prentiss illuminates the creative strategies playwrights used to grapple with religion. With a lively and engaging style, the volume brings long forgotten plays to life as it chronicles the cultural and religious fissures that marked early twentieth century African American society. Craig R. Prentiss is Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the editor of Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (New York University Press, 2003).

1
Setting the Stage

The newer voices, at a more comfortable distance, are beginning to find a new beauty in these heritages, and new values in their own lives.

—Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” in The New Negro (1925)

Although theater was born from religious ceremony, theatrical culture has frequently found itself in tension with religion. In Shakespeare’s day, actors were classed among the “rogues and vagabonds,” and theaters were the target of lengthy diatribes by Puritan divines. Puritanical politics led to routine closings of British theaters in the post-Shakespeare, pre-Restoration period. Nineteenth-century evangelical ministers in America often lashed out at theater’s propensity to challenge, flout, and muddle the conventions of morality. Actors regularly tested the borders of social propriety by adopting “bohemian” and nonconformist lifestyles stemming, no doubt, from the nomadic nature of the profession, making the sort of stable home life so treasured in the Victorian age difficult, if not impossible, to manage. Actors’ divorce rates were among the highest of any profession, and the attention brought to more famous actors for transgressing social codes was readily generalized to the profession as a whole. Ritual complaints about the lewd and immoral standards of theatrical performances, not only within the vaudeville genre but within “straight” dramatic theater as well, were common by the turn of the twentieth century.¹ More frustrating still to the Christian moralists was that the more bawdy theatrical productions drew larger audiences than their highbrow competitors. The famed white playwright Channing Pollock, whose plays The Fool and The Enemy drew heavily on religious themes, commented in the mid-1920s that “there are not ten plays appealing to an intelligent audience on Broadway, and that not more than two have ever been more than half a jump ahead of the Sheriff.” Moreover, “The two worst plays in New York … make more in one week than all of the Ibsen productions have made in five seasons.” The Federal Council of Churches even arranged a meeting in 1925 at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel with actors, directors, and producers to see if they could raise the moral standards of Broadway plays and feature more edifying material, to little avail.²

Among African Americans, a church’s attitude toward the theater typically reflected where that church found itself on the line of progression between theological conservatism and liberalism, or between an impoverished congregation and one composed of wealthier members. Holiness and Pentecostal churches took an unambiguous stand against participation in entertainments such as theater. Notably, Zora Neale Hurston herself framed these “Sanctified” churches (a term she coined) as developing in “protest against the high-brow tendency in Negro Protestant congregations as the Negroes gain more education and wealth.”³ Theater, dancing, gambling, and drinking were considered threats to the spiritual purity of Sanctified congregants. (Ironically, the theatricality of their church services strongly influenced staged productions of religious practice.) Sanctified churches were not alone in their disdain for theater. The Methodist Episcopal Church, which, though largely white, had a significant black membership, went so far as to threaten its congregants with expulsion for patronizing the theater beginning in 1877. The threat lasted for decades.⁴

African American motivations for avoiding the theater in the early twentieth century were compounded by the humiliations they suffered as patrons. Even in northern cities, black theatergoers were frequently forced to enter through separate doors and sit in separate sections of the building, if they were allowed to enter at all.⁵ It was no wonder that black churches had come to function as community centers for a population so restricted from other public venues, for they served as the only multiuse spaces owned and operated by African Americans themselves. As a Detroit Mayor’s Interracial Committee report confirmed in 1926, the average African American had

been humiliated in so many public and privately owned institutions and amusement places that he has resorted to the church as a place in which he can be sure of peacefully spending his leisure time. To a large extent it takes the place of the theatre, the dance halls and similar amusement places and fills the vacancy created by the failure of the public and commercial places of recreation and amusement to give him a cordial welcome.

Yet, in that same decade, despite all these barriers, black attendance at theaters began to grow, especially among the young. Surveys revealed a new resistance among youthful members of conservative churches to accepting limitations on their amusements. One researcher found that these “diversions, once considered so diabolical by the Negro church, are now regarded by Negro youth as essential parts of their pleasurable moments.” One of the consequences of this dynamic was that churches came to see themselves in direct competition with theaters, movie houses, and dance halls for the attention of their younger members.⁶

As conservative churches struggled against theater, many theologically progressive churches sought ways to connect with the theatrical realm to benefit their congregations and keep young members engaged. Some came to see theater as a potential partner in improving the lot of the working class. One minister explained theater could be “useful not only in affording tired brain-workers the very best recreation possible to them when they live in towns and cities, but also affording intellectual stimulus of a moderate kind, and often stirring the heart and quickening the emotions by noble ideals, nobly presented.” While this description bore little resemblance to the reality of most commercial theater, it pointed to new opportunities for partnership.⁷

Black playwrights writing by the 1920s inherited this history of tensions between theater and church, as well as the bridges opened to theater by progressive congregations. Yet the scripts they wrote reflected a range of social forces, not the least of which was the changing class dynamics within the broader African American community. And nothing impacted these dynamics as profoundly as the Great Migration. The massive influx of southern blacks into northern cities forever altered the trajectory of both artistic and religious life among African Americans. Therefore, making sense of the manner in which religion was portrayed in early twentieth-century African American theater requires familiarity with the class relations affecting the lives of black playwrights, the state of theatrical development within the African American community, and the important religious movements during this era.

The Great Migration through the Lens of Class

Northern black elites had always seen themselves as responsible for leading southern blacks out of their oppression, but they were unprepared for hundreds of thousands of these migrants arriving at their doorsteps. Much has been written about the disorientation felt by these new city dwellers, stripped of familiar surroundings and left to carve their own niches in an unfamiliar terrain. The process of establishing new social networks involved extensive experimentation, as cities such as Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, became laboratories dedicated to reconstructing not only personal identities but racial identities as well. Migrants provided new audiences for the arts while flooding theaters and cabarets with fresh talent. New businesses were opened, new political alliances and opportunities emerged, and the energy migrants brought with them created a sense of possibility. City air was saturated with excitement, awe, and at times fear. Change, as always, brought promise and peril in equal measure. Poverty was the greatest challenge, as economic growth still struggled to keep pace with the growth in population. A new black urban proletariat developed that would significantly impact a relatively young labor union movement. Established churches were now charged with helping migrants transition to their new environment, but they also felt threatened by the wide range of unfamiliar theological and ritualistic elements brought north by the southern crowd.⁸

In 1910, nine out of every ten African Americans lived in the South; of those, nearly two-thirds were engaged in agricultural work, while the remainder were almost evenly split between domestic work and forms of manufacturing or transportation labor. Unemployment was high and growing among blacks, thanks to an influx to southern cities by farmworkers who had been displaced from cotton fields by boll weevil infestations destroying harvests across the region. Because of restrictions barring them from work in certain trades, Jim Crow laws, and a reign of violence and terror giving rise to an epidemic of lynching, African Americans were drawn north in waves. The large-scale migration began around 1916 and continued for decades. It was fueled by active recruitment efforts of northern black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, as well as enticements offered by northern factories. Those who had already abandoned agricultural work were disproportionately represented in the total migrant population, though over the next thirty years, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers would desert southern fields as well.⁹ By 1950, more than 2.5 million African Americans born in the South had left the region, with most settling in the urban centers of the North.¹⁰

For all the attention given to the community-making enterprises of migrant African Americans, far less has been said about the responses of those African Americans who had lived in these same cities for a generation or more, and who were witnessing the sands of the black culture they had created shifting beneath their feet. The internal dynamics of northern African American communities had suffered from social stratification for decades, but those social markers were compounded by the arrival of the southern migrants.¹¹ It was from those longtime residents of the urban North that so many influential African American figures would emerge. Moreover, a large percentage of the black playwrights writing before World War II had their roots in the premigration North or had been shaped by the sensibilities of the urban and educated elite in northern cities. Historian Carter Woodson’s essay “Migration of the Talented Tenth,” in his 1918 study, A Century of Negro Migration, described the process by which the South had already been “robbed of their due part of” the educated, entrepreneurial, and upwardly mobile African American population by 1910.¹² Bearing in mind that the African American elite rarely, if ever, possessed the economic security of the wealthiest whites, the impact this prosperous subsection of blacks had upon shaping the social and cultural order of their new racially defined communities was disproportionate to their numbers.

In Washington, DC, for instance, many blacks were distinguished precisely for conformity to “Victorian values.” Building on the work of scholars like Constance McLaughlin Green, Wilson J. Moses argued that Washington’s African American population, replete as it was with figures of status and accomplishment, has been largely ignored because it failed to “conform to vulgar perceptions of black culture.” Being visible to historians required that black culture conform “to the patterns of urbane exoticism found in jazz and the blues,” Moses insisted, that were measured “solely in terms of their usefulness in undermining any vestiges of Victorian civilization that survived.” Yet precisely these survivals characterized the culture of many who greeted the new arrivals from the South after 1916.¹³

Though Harlem was decidedly more bohemian and volatile than Washington leading up to the Great Migration, it had attracted a thriving professional population reflecting the values common to the privileged classes. This Victorian ethos developed in Western Europe as a way of mitigating the unprecedented changes to its ancient social order during industrialization. Predictably, conformity to the rules circumscribed by this ethos loomed large in efforts by black political, cultural, and economic leaders to adapt to the sensibilities of the white elite. In this environment, Robert Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, and other newspapers published weekly “guidelines for migrant behavior” by 1917, including rules regulating language, clothing, and personal carriage. Abbott’s desire to shape the behavior of newly arrived southerners reflected the unease with which they were greeted by the long-established African American population in these cities. As Wallace Best described the situation in Chicago, “Longtime residents felt at liberty to scrutinize every aspect of migrant speech, dress, and behavior.”¹⁴ This tendency toward scrutiny is reflected in playscripts as well.

Celebrating markers of refinement, including speech, dress, and emotional reserve, was a response to white supremacist culture whose portrait of blacks onstage, and in literature, popular magazines, and film, typically degenerated into the grotesque features of minstrelsy. Kevin Gaines has explained how qualities of the uplift ideology that took hold of the black elite are best read as rejections of minstrel characterizations and of a racial order guided by social Darwinist certainty that blacks were inherently incapable of matching or exceeding whites in the arenas of intellect, commerce, personal morality, self-discipline, and militaristic valor. Each example of an African American triumph in any of these or other realms was celebrated as evidence that the theories undergirding white supremacy were lies. Like dismantling a wall one brick at a time, the Talented Tenth compiled a collection of successes that would ultimately force “unsympathetic whites” to “relent and recognize the humanity of middle-class African Americans, and their potential for the citizenship rights black men had possessed during Reconstruction.” The tragic flaw in this strategy, as Gaines argues, was that in establishing themselves as “bourgeois agents of civilization” who would lead the masses of African Americans to full citizenship, they sometimes validated the very stereotypes they struggled to disprove. In the framework of the Great Migration that saw a dramatic decline in the proportion of genteel northern African Americans to the total number of the poor and uneducated, Gaines maintained that “elite cultural values were crucial in discerning that which migration … had thrown into question: the ideological class boundaries that [elites] labored to maintain as evidence of group progress.” Uplift ideology’s “orientation toward self-help implicitly faulted African Americans for their lowly status, echoing judgmental dominant characterizations of ‘the Negro problem.’”¹⁵ Certainly religious life figured into the status markings, and theatrical representations of black religion frequently illustrated the dynamic Gaines describes.

Though E. Franklin Frazier’s 1957 critique of the African American middle class in Black Bourgeoisie focused on the values of those economically secure blacks who had come of age after World War II, his argument points to social dynamics traceable to changes initiated during the Great Migration decades earlier. By the 1950s, Frazier was especially concerned with what he believed to be rampant materialism generated through an excessive regard for spreading “the faith in salvation by business,” with its concomitant conspicuous consumption. This “bourgeoisie” class, however, was not a class of producers. Instead, it typically depended on wages and salaries paid by whites. Though this new class was more comfortable than any that had preceded it, Frazier contended that it suffered from a spiritual and intellectual malaise stemming from its abandonment of “cultural tradition” and its refusal to identify with the “Negro masses,” while still remaining outsiders to white society, generating a “deep-seated inferiority complex.” Frazier is open to criticism for painting postwar middle-class African Americans with too broad a brushstroke, but his perception that important demographic and cultural changes had taken place in the early decades of the twentieth century was correct. These changes sparked a sense of disconnect between a figure like Frazier, who had been reared and educated within a “genteel tradition” whose loss he lamented, and later generations that had migrated north.¹⁶

African Americans elites were, in the aggregate, a combination of southern “mulattoes who assimilated the morals and manners of the slaveholding aristocracy” mixed with a “nucleus,” as David Levering Lewis described it, of

free blacks, descended from tiny colonial populations concentrated in Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Providence, Rhode Island, gradually augmented by Underground Railroad fugitives and, after the Civil War, by Southerners with some or all of the endowments of pedigree, professional distinction, goo...