In the period previous to the Civil War the Negro appeared as a minor character in L. Beach's Post Free (1807) and in Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1845). In the '4os the minstrel show was making its appearance. Charles Callender, Lew Dockstader and Primrose and West, in turn presented caricatures of the Negro that have persisted in the American theatre. Following the Civil War the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was dramatized and produced throughout the North, soon to be followed by another drama of the same type, The Octoroon, by Dion Boucicault. These plays accustomed the public to Negro drama designed to appeal to its sympathy rather than its ridicule. The minstrel characterization of the Negro continued until 1895, when John W. Isham organized a musical show, The Octoroons, the first of a long line of musical comedies which have opened the doors of opportunity to a group of notable Negro actors, including Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, S. H. Dudley, T. Leubie Hill, Ernest Hogan, Sissle and Blake, Miller and Lyles, Florence Mills and Adelaide Hall. These musical shows have con tributed little to the direct stream of Negro drama, yet they have demonstrated the exceptional histrionic talents of the race. They may yet furnish the material for the evolution of new dramatic forms in the future. Witness the interesting experiment of Lau rence Stallings and Frank Harland in the jazz opera Deep River and Edna Ferber in Show Boat.
In 191o, Edward Sheldon's The Nigger was produced. In 1913 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote and produced the first important Negro pageant, The Star of Ethiopia. On March 3,1916, Rachel, a three act play written by Angelica Grimke and the first successful drama written by a Negro, was produced.
The first important step in the development of an authentic Negro drama was taken on April 5,1917, when Mrs. Norman Hap good, in association with Robert Edmond Jones and others, pre sented a group of Negro actors in a programme of three one-act plays written for the Negro theatre by the American poet, Ridgely Torrence.
In the years immediately following the termination of the World War Negro drama suddenly assumed a place of major importance in American drama. The production of Eugene O'Neill's, The Emperor Jones, proved to be a landmark. Charles Gilpin, a Negro, who played the title role of the emperor, was selected by the New York Drama League as one of the ten per sons who had contributed the most to the American theatre during that year.
The Colored Folk theatre, later known as the Ethiopian Art theatre, was organized by Raymond O'Neill in co-operation with Mrs. Sherwood Anderson, in Chicago in 1923. Its main contribu tion to Negro drama was the excellent presentation of a one-act folk play, The Chip Woman's Fortune, written by a Negro play wright, Willis Richardson, who has contributed a number of meritorious one-act plays to Negro drama.
Simultaneously with the activities of these Little theatre groups a definite movement for the establishment of an experimental laboratory of Negro drama and for the development of a national Negro theatre was instituted at Howard university, a Negro uni versity in Washington. The organizer and director of this under taking was Montgomery Gregory, who was ably assisted by Alain Locke, Marie Moore Forrest, Cleon Throckmorton and the uni versity authorities. Their leading idea was that the medium of dramatic expression offered the Negro race its best means of rais ing itself in the estimate of the American people. The Howard players successfully produced several one-act plays written by members of the group. Hampton institute, Tuskegee institute and Atlanta university are other Negro schools that have done effective work in educational and experimental race drama.
The Carolina playmakers of the University of North Carolina, under the inspired direction of Frederick Koch, have made notable contributions to Negro drama. Prof. Paul Green of this university ranks with Eugene O'Neill as the leading dramatist of Negro life. White Dresses, Granny Boling, The No 'Count Boy, In the Valley and the Pulitzer prize play, In Abraham's Bosom, are among his successful dramas. The awakened national interest in Negro drama chiefly occasioned by the production of The Emperor Jones has resulted in a succession of plays of Negro life on the New York. stage. Some of these plays were : Goat Alley by E. Howard Cul bertson, Roseanne by N. Stephens, Taboo, by Mary Hoyt Wiborg, All God's Chillun Got Wings, by Eugene O'Neill, Black Boy, by Jim Tully and Frank Dazy, In the Bottom of the Cup, by J. E. M. Bashe and Porgy, by Du Bose Heyward.