Black Activists Write Wheatley and Washington : Terrell, Du Bois, and the Drama of the 1932 Bicentennial

The book examines how early twentieth century Black theatre artists depicted national mythologies of the United States.

White-authored pageants and plays written for the 1932 Bicentennial celebration of George Washington’s birthday relegated Black Americans to the periphery through racist stereotyping. Black activists Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. Du Bois seized the opportunity to place Black people at center stage and to revise contemporary views of Washington and of Black achievement. Terrell’s The Pageant-Play of Phyllis Wheatley and Du Bois’s George Washington and Black Folk dramatize how the achievements of Black men and women fit into the US origin story. The book combines O’Malley’s edited versions of these two scripts with a scholarly monograph contextualizing them within the larger Bicentennial event. This edition will be the first time that Terrell’s pageant, a biography of the life of the enslaved African poet Phillis Wheatley, has ever been published. Du Bois’s pageant is a transgressive revision of the Washington myth.

This interdisciplinary book will be a valuable resource for college and university courses in American theatre and performance studies, Black Studies, and Women’s Studies, as it includes the scripts themselves, the book is particularly useful in theatre or literature classes in these subject areas.