Review: Julie Burrell's The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966: Staging Freedom

Reviewed by Madeline Steiner

Back in the olden days, before the global spread of COVID-19, when we could freely attend live theatre, I was fortunate enough to see the 2011 revival of Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Written in 1955, the play, a metatheatrical commentary on Black civil rights, contains a complex message about racial representation, whites’ complicity in upholding racist institutions, and a critique of civil rights plays from earlier in the 20th century. Over half a century after it was written, the play is still quite stirring and its civil rights message feels unfortunately just as relevant now as at the time of its writing. Julie Burrell’s new book, The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966: Staging Freedom, explores the context in which Trouble in Mind and other works of 20th-century Black theatre were created. In addition to careful readings and analyses of the various theatrical texts, the book also presents a nuanced history of the civil rights movement as seen through theatre.

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966: Staging Freedom
By Julie Burrell
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
236 pages

Challenging the narrative of the civil rights movement as one of “declining radicalism,” Burrell successfully demonstrates that from the 1930s through the 1960s Black playwrights and theatre companies produced works that grappled with the complex and interrelated issues of leftist politics, Black civil rights, feminism, and anti-Communism. The book analyzes theatrical works produced between the end of the Federal Theatre Project and the rise of the Black Arts Movement, illustrating that the trends of radical leftist theatre that took root in the Depression-era did not disappear when federal funding ended and suddenly reappear with the Black Power movement. Burrell argues that although the overt political messages of the major plays of this period may appear more subdued than in the works that came before and after, there is an undercurrent of radical leftist and feminist ideology that becomes apparent upon close reading. Although Burrell acknowledges that the plays she studies did not have any immediate consequences in changing the shape of democracy, it is important to acknowledge that the “long civil rights movement” was not purely political, but existed in the realm of art and culture as well.[1] The significance of this body of work, Burrell argues, is in how these artists presented “ordinary African Americans as worthy subjects of serious drama, and how they attempted to make the stage a primary medium through which to advance Black political claims.”[2]

While theatre is the main object of study in The Civil Rights Theatre Movement, this book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of the civil rights movement that is useful even for those scholars outside the subfields of theatre and literature. One major strength of this work is Burrell’s argument that “civil rights and the Cold War must be understood as mutually constitutive.”[3] Burrell demonstrates how the context of the Cold War, increasingly aggressive anti-Communism, and the ever-present threat of blacklisting shaped Black theatre in the mid-20th century. Burrell chronologically analyzes trends in civil rights theatre beginning in chapter two by analyzing the “proletarian turn” in Black drama in the 1940s, seen in works such as the stage adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The Marxist-influenced themes in these works, which often highlighted the systemic and economic dimensions of racial oppression in America, were muted in the post-WWII period. The post-war “returning Negro soldier dramas” analyzed in chapter three often portrayed racism as a personal moral issue that could be overcome by softening one’s heart. Despite this apparent loss of the more radical messages of their predecessors, Burrell maintains that these works are still significant in the history of civil rights theatre, particularly for the ways in which these works illustrate the complex relationship between the civil rights movement and the Cold War. As the United States fought to maintain global supremacy in the post-war period, “racial liberalism” became enmeshed in Cold War politics as leaders hoped to avoid an “embarrassing race problem” that might threaten the perception of American democracy as the supreme form of government. Unlike the Black popular front dramas of the 1940s, the “returning Negro soldier plays” eschewed the notion that racism was an inherent problem of capitalism and was instead a “fundamentally moral issue that needed to be solved by whites’ transformation into a non-prejudiced people.”[4]

Burrell’s readings of her three chosen “returning Negro soldier plays,” combined with her analysis of the production contexts and the off-stage civil rights actions of the artists involved, demonstrates that these were not merely works meant to make sympathetic white audiences feel better about themselves. Although the somewhat-assimilationist messages in “returning Negro soldier plays” appealed to white racial liberals, the artists who created and performed in these works were still targets for House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other anti-Communists. This is particularly evident in the section on On Whitman Avenue and the off-stage civil rights activism of its producer and star Canada Lee and his subsequent persecution by HUAC. Despite the loss of the radicalism of earlier civil rights dramas, Burrell argues that these post-war plays were not a step backwards in the Black leftist civil rights struggle. The Black artists involved in these productions maintained an identity as civil rights activists. Furthermore, Burrell argues, the “returning Negro soldier plays” are significant in that later playwrights would critically revise their content resulting in some of the most well-recognized works of civil rights theatre.

The chapters on Black cultural front dramas and “returning Negro soldier plays” are followed by a chapter on 1950s civil rights plays and their “rescripting” of the themes of earlier civil rights plays. The plays discussed in this chapter return to some of the more radical themes of pre-war plays, including “anti-anti-Communist” messages that explicitly linked McCarthyism to Jim Crow. Chapter four includes a long section on Trouble in Mind, considering how the metatheatricality of the play and the use of Brechtian alienation tactics contributed to its criticism of postwar racial problem plays.

 From here, the structure of the book diverges and rather than focusing on plays by various authors that are unified in form and content, the fourth and fifth chapters are each focused on several works by a single playwright: Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress, respectively. Here the book speaks to a more specialized audience in theatre and literature studies, as there is greater emphasis on the scripts and performances themselves than on the off-stage activities of those involved. Although these are each well-written, well-researched, and enlightening chapters, they feel somewhat detached from the earlier sections of the book. Throughout the book, Burrell makes efforts to highlight the intersectionality of gender oppression and civil rights, but in chapters five and six, discussion of gender alone takes center stage (pun intended).

For example, the main goal of the chapter on Hansberry appears to be a challenge to existing scholarship on the artist’s representations of masculinity, refuting accusations that her portrayals of male characters are either “an unfortunate departure from her feminist concerns, or indicative of her damaging representation of black men.”[5] Burrell argues that Hansberry’s male characters embodied the concept of “progressive black masculinities,” shifting from “a version of Cold War masculinity ordered by individualistic capitalism to a progressive masculinity that embraces a communal, feminist ideology.”[6] Burrell’s strongest example of this is the character of Walter Younger from A Raisin in the Sun. Unlike other critics who view the conflict between Walter and Mama as “either Mama’s stifling Walter or replicating a patriarchal conception of masculinity,” Burrell argues that due to Mama’s influence, Walter embraces a sense of manhood “founded upon pride in his lineage” which enables him “to support the dreams of the women in the household against the obstacles of racist and sexist oppression.”[7]

Burrell successfully demonstrates that Black left feminism was both an essential part of the civil rights movement and a key influence on Hansberry and Childress’ work. These chapters maintain the same nuanced analysis of the political and social context surrounding the theatrical productions. Still, one is left wondering why these two playwrights were singled out for their own chapters. They were certainly not the only artists creating works with these themes, so perhaps it is the enduring popularity of their works in both public and scholarly contexts, especially A Raisin in the Sun, that makes their plays worthy of standalone chapters? In this case, it would be helpful to have a more in-depth exploration of why Raisin has had such a lasting legacy while earlier plays such as On Whitman Avenue that explore similar themes have not. These questions do not detract in any way from the merits of the book as a whole, but do make it so that these final two chapters speak to a more narrow audience than the preceding four.

The Civil Rights Theatre Movement should be on the reading list of any scholar interested in civil rights culture, the history of American theatre in the 20th century, or the history of radicalism in the United States. Burrell demonstrates that between the New Deal and the 1960s, Black theatre artists maintained a vibrant tradition of civil rights theatre with consequences that extended beyond the stage. This book avoids classifying plays as “good” or “bad” for the cause of Black civil rights. Instead, it places them deep within their historical contexts, providing well-rounded readings of these works of Black theatre and analyses of how they embody the various shifts, phases, and factions of the long civil rights movement in the United States. As Burrell notes in her epilogue, there is a trend in contemporary theatre in which playwrights look back to the civil rights theatre movement, seen in works such as Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park, a follow up to A Raisin in the Sun. Burrell notes that, while a thoughtful commentary on racial issues in the 21st century, Clybourne Park ultimately erases most of Hansberry’s class politics, indicating that if we fail to read works of civil rights theatre in their full context, we are in danger of obscuring the radical messages therein.

Madeline Steiner is a PhD candidate in history at the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on the growth of the commercial entertainment industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. She is currently a Bilinski Fellow at USC and will finish her dissertation, concerning business and labor practices in the traveling amusement industry, in the spring of 2021. 

[1] The concept of the “long civil rights movement” was coined by historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History, 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233-1263.

[2] Julie Burell, The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966: Staging Freedom, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) 16.

[3] Burrell 5.

[4] Burrell, 74.

[5] Burrell, 156.

[6] Burrell, 156.

[7] Burrell, 164.