Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Black Activists Write Wheatley and Washington: Terrell, Du Bois, and the Drama of the 1932 Bicentennial

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

Donnels O'Malley, Lurana

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

Acting & AuditioningTheater HistoryPlaywriting

ISBN10: 1032360933
ISBN13: 9781032360935
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Jul 11 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.27
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

This 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 Historical Pageant-Play Based on the Life 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. Terrell's script is a biography of the life of the enslaved African poet Phillis Wheatley; Du Bois's pageant is a transgressive revision of the Washington myth.

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