Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work
artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal
Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated
“Negro Units” set up under the FTP, African American artists took
on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of
“white” classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh
history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls
the black performance community—a broad network of actors,
dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made
and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other
theatre companies from New York to Seattle.
Tracing how African
American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how
they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues
that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and
understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on
their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre
artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and
their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.