"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Judith Stephens

My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's "lost" lynching plays ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress on June 11, 1999, make possible a more thorough study of the six one-acts comprising the body of work Johnson specifically referred to as her "lynching plays" or "plays on lynching."(1) Since Johnson was the most prolific playwright of lynching drama, such a study can provide a clearer understanding of her contributions to this uniquely American dramatic genre, as well as the conditions of its production and reception.

Plays representing the history of lynching in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American dramatic genre, a type of theatre that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage.(2) As the first anthology to address how the horrors of lynching have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Indiana UP, 1998), reveals the historical continuity of the genre and speaks to its prior neglect in theatre history and dramatic criticism.

The fact that Johnson is known primarily as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance but has, until recently, remained invisible as the leading playwright of an unrecognized dramatic genre speaks loudly to the genre's status and critical reception, as well as to the precarious position Johnson occupied as a black woman writer in the 1920s and '30s. In her recent review of Strange Fruit, Eileen Cherry's comment that lynching dramas "may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself" provides insight into why the genre has been neglected in the recorded history of American theatre (224-25).

This note describes the conditions surrounding the production of "And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to be Passed," provides brief synopses of the plays, and locates the texts in relation to Johnson's more familiar and accessible lynching dramas: Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and Blue-Eyed Black Boy. I am indebted to the work of scholars such as James V. Hatch, Ted Shine, Winona L. Fletcher, Margaret Wilkerson, Sandra Richards, Kathy Perkins, Bernard L. Peterson, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hall, Cheryl Wall, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Claudia Tate, whose writing on Johnson brought the importance of her work to my attention.

According to correspondence in the NAACP files, in June of 1936 Johnson sent Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, several of her plays on the subject of lynching, but White returned the plays in January of 1937 on the grounds that they "all ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless despite all the courage which was used by the Negro characters."(3) Johnson graciously replied that she understood the point that White was making but added, "Yet, it is true that[,] in life, things do not end usually ideally[;] however, it is a point that I shall keep in mind if I write others or perhaps rewrite these."(4) Today Johnson's words are prophetic, since we know that, despite the NAACP's considerable and sustained efforts, the United States Congress never enacted any federal anti-lynching legislation. In her letter to White, Johnson mentioned that her lynching plays were under consideration for publication by Samuel French, but since her more recent "Catalogue of Writings" does not list these dramas among her published plays, it seems clear that French rejected them. Winona Fletcher's valuable 1985 article in Theatre Annual documents Johnson's submisson of her lynching dramas to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1939, as well as the result that none were accepted for production in any of the producing units of the FTP. These historical records provide a glimpse into the struggle Johnson faced in seeing her lynching dramas published or produced in her lifetime, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the brutality of lynching was not an uncommon occurrence in society.

In January of 1938 the NAACP called upon Johnson to write a short play to be used in the then-current "fight against lynching," but a request for last-minute revisions in the script prevented its inclusion in a mass anti-lynching demonstration, as originally planned. Correspondence shows that Johnson was asked to draw on the Congressional Record in dramatizing the specifics of the struggle to pass a federal anti-lynching bill. The NAACP assured Johnson that her scripts would be kept by the organization and made available to "the numerous white and colored groups throughout the country who constantly write us for anti-lynching plays."(5)

The NAACP file of 1937-38, titled "Anti-Lynching Bill Play," contains three typed scripts by Georgia Douglas Johnson, and correspondence concerning the writing of the plays. Two scripts, each fourteen pages long (with one script including three additional pages of songs) are slightly different versions of "And Yet They Paused," which depicts the struggle to pass a federal anti-lynching bill through the U.S. House of Representatives. The third script, "A Bill to be Passed" (sixteen pages, plus three pages of songs), portrays the successful passage of the bill in the House and ends with a call to continue the struggle for passage in the Senate. A brief (four-and-one-half-page) additional ending scene by Robert E. Williams (currently unknown, but possibly an NAACP staff member) is attached to Johnson's third script and represents the historic filibuster carried out by Southern Senators to defeat the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. Williams's scene ends with a commentator as well as the character of Walter White, then Executive Secretary of the NAACP, urging audience members to fight on.