Black Activists Write Wheatley and Washington

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. The book's chapters contextualize these plays within the larger Bicentennial event. O'Malley also includes her edited version of Terrell's script, published here for the first time. 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.

Lurana Donnels O'Malley is Professor Emerita in Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawai-i at Manoa, USA, where she taught in the areas of Euro-American theatre history, research, and directing from 1991 to 2025.

Acknowledgements vii Author's Note viii Abbreviations ix Part I Historical Background and Critical Analyses 1 1 Washington Conscious: The George Washington Bicentennial of 1932 3 2 Idealizing Washington: Portrayals of an Enslaver 35 3 Black Voices and the Bicentennial: Performances By and For Black Citizens 60 4 Visions of Washington in DC: Three White-Authored Bicentennial Performances 87 5 Terrell Chooses Wheatley: The Creation of the Wheatley Pageant-Play 133 6 The Trials of Mary Church Terrell: The Production of the Wheatley Pageant-Play 175 7 Du Bois and the Bicentennial Crisis: George Washington and Black Folk 201 8 Conclusion 225 Part II Edited Script 229 9 Historical Pageant-Play Based on the Life of Phyllis Wheatley by Mary Church Terrell 231 Index 266