"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

The recovery of the lost lynching plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson brings to light a vital part of African American culture that is continually under the threat of erasure. These plays also provide scholars with a newly complete unit of Johnson's work that commands a central position in a distinctly American theatrical genre, a type of drama that is only now beginning to gain recognition. In addition to their value as a unique contribution to American dramatic literature and theatre history, the dramas provide a new site for studying relations among race, gender politics, and aesthetics; they permit us to see more clearly the impact of racism and to understand art as a force of resistance as well as a force of renewal.

Notes

1. See Georgia Douglas Johnson's "Catalogue of Writings" in the Georgia Douglas Johnson Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard U, Washington, DC. A typescript of these papers indicates that Johnson wrote six one-act lynching dramas, not eleven, as previously reported.

2. See my numerous articles on the genre.

3. "Anti-Lynching Bill Play, 1936-1938," NAACP Papers, Box C-299, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress. All correspondence concerning Johnson's typescripts is in this file.

4. Letter from Johnson to Walter White, 19 Jan. 1938.

5. Letter from Miss Jackson, Special Assistant to the Secretary, NAACP, to Johnson, 7 Feb. 1938.

6. dele jegede's essay on Yoruban arts contrasts an African view of "art for life's sake" with the Western concept of "art for art's sake."

Works Cited

"Anti-Lynching Bill Play, 1936-1938." NAACP Papers, Box C-299. Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress.

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Cherry, Eileen. Rev. of Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, ed. Kathy Perkins and Judith L. Stephens. Theatre Journal 51.2 (1999): 224-25.

Fletcher, Winona. "From Genteel Poet to Revolutionary Playwright: Georgia Douglas Johnson." Theatre Annual 30 (1985): 41-64.

-----. "Georgia Douglas Johnson." Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Dictionary of Literary Biography 51. Ed. Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis. Detroit: Gale, 1987. 153-64.

-----. "Georgia Douglas Johnson." Notable Women in the American Theatre. Ed. Alice Robinson, Vera M. Roberts, and Millie Barranger. New York: Greenwood, 1989. 473-77.

Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre U.S.A: Plays by African Americans. 2nd ed. New York: Free P, 1996.

hooks, bell. "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 338-47.

Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

jegede, dele. "Art for Life's Sake: African Art as a Reflection of an Afrocentric Cosmology." The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions. Ed. Kariamu Welsh-Asante. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. 237-47.