Alice Childress

Childress, Alice (1916–1994), actress, director, playwright, novelist, columnist, essayist, lecturer, and theater consultant. Alice Childress established herself as a cultural critic and champion for the masses of poor people in America. Her writings reflect her commitment to the underclass whose lives are often portrayed inaccurately in American literature. Her works explore the debilitating effects of racism, sexism, and classism on people of color as they struggle daily to maintain their dignity. She portrays African Americans who triumph largely because of familial and community support. Childress's works censure American government for its exploitation of the poor in the name of capitalism. Her writings clearly speak against a government that would rather support African Americans as charity cases than allow them to succeed or fail on their own. Her integrity as a writer is evidenced by her refusal to recreate versions of long-held negative stereotypes of African Americans, even though this has cost her financial security.

Alice Childress was born on 12 October 1916 in Charleston, South Carolina. At the tender age of five, she boarded a train bound for Harlem where she grew up under the nurturing hand of her grandmother, Eliza Campbell. Her grandmother's yen for the arts motivated her to expose Childress to museums, libraries, art galleries, theaters, and concert halls. Childress credits her grandmother for teaching her the art of storytelling. Her grandmother also made a point of exposing Childress to Wednesday night testimonials at Salem Church in Harlem. At these testimonials poor people told of their troubles, which Childress stored up for future writing.

Childress attended Public School 81, The Julia Ward Howe Junior High School, and then Wadleigh High School for three years, before dropping out when both her grandmother and mother died in the late 1930s. A voracious reader with a curious intellect, Childress discovered the public library as a child and read two or more books a day. Always very independent and capable, Childress held down a host of jobs during the 1940s to support herself and her daughter Jean, an only child from her first marriage. She worked as an assistant machinist, photo retoucher, domestic worker, salesperson, and insurance agent, all jobs that kept her in close proximity to working-class people like those characterized in her works. Her characters in fiction and drama included domestic workers, washerwomen, seamstresses, and the unemployed, as well as dancers, artists, and teachers.

Childress married professional musician and music instructor Nathan Woodard on 17 July 1957. A reticent and very private person, Childress disclosed little about her life after 1957, except that her only child died on Mother's Day in 1990. Childress resided in Long Island, New York, with Woodard at the time of her death on 14 August 1994. She was at work on her memoirs and a sixth novel.

Childress began her writing career in the early 1940s shortly after she chose acting as a career. In 1943 Childress began an eleven-year association with the American Negro Theater (ANT), an organization that served as a home for countless African American playwrights, actors, and producers, such as Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Frank Silvera. Childress involved herself in every aspect of the theater as was the tradition upheld by anyone connected with ANT. Childress is recognized as one of the founders of ANT, which institutionalized theater in the African American community. As a result of her commitment to ANT, in the 1950s Childress was instrumental in getting advanced, guaranteed pay for union Off-Broadway contracts in New York.

Childress's first play, Florence (1949), was prompted by a challenge from longtime friend Sidney Poitier who insisted that a strong play could not be written overnight. Poitier lost his bet because Florence, written overnight, is a well-crafted play that levels an indictment against presumptuous whites who think they know more about African Americans than African Americans know about themselves. Florence is also about the need for African Americans to reject stereotyped roles. On another level, Florence pays tribute to African American parents who encourage their children to reach their fullest potential by any means necessary. Her first play reveals Childress's superb skill at characterization, dialogue, and conflict.

Following the ANT production of Florence, Childress went on to write a host of plays and children's books, including Just a Little Simple (1950), Gold through the Trees (1952), Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966), The World on a Hill (1968), String (1969), The Freedom Drum, retitled Young Martin Luther King (1969), Wine in the Wilderness (1969), Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970), When the Rattlesnake Sounds (1975), Let's Hear It for the Queen (1976), Sea Island Song, retitled Gullah (1984), and Moms (1987). Alice Childress's plays incorporate the liturgy of the African American church, traditional music, African mythology, folklore, and fantasy. She has experimented by writing sociopolitical, romantic, biographical, historical, and feminist plays.

Childress's Trouble in Mind garnered for her the Obie Award for the best Off-Broadway play of the 1954–1955 season. When the media praised her for being the first African American woman to win this award, Childress insisted that she would feel proud when she was the one hundredth poor woman of color to be recognized for her talent. She felt that to be the “first” only pointed out that African Americans have been denied opportunities. Trouble in Mind attacks the stereotyping of African Americans. Wedding Band, which was broadcast nationally on ABC television but which was banned from an Atlanta, Georgia, theater in 1966, explores the explosiveness of interracial love in a Jim Crow South Carolina. Wine in the Wilderness, perhaps Childress's best-known play, was presented on National Educational Television (NET) in 1969. The play pokes fun at bourgeois affectation. Childress levels an indictment against middle-class African Americans who scream brotherhood, togetherness, and Black Power, but who have no love or empathy for poor, uneducated, and unrefined African Americans. Tommorrow Marie, the heroine, teaches these vapid bourgeois the ugliness of their own superciliousness. Childress's Sea Island Song (1979) was commissioned by the South Carolina Arts Commission, which officially designated the time of the play's run as Alice Childress Week in Columbia and Charleston.

Childress's writings have garnered for her several awards, including writer in residence at the MacDowell Colony; featured author on a BBC panel discussion on “The Negro in the American Theater”;” winner of a Rockefeller grant administered through the New Dramatists and an award from the John Golden Fund for Playwrights; and a Harvard appointment to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute) from which she received a graduate medal.

While Alice Childress was principally a playwright, she was also a skilled novelist. Her first novel, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life (1956), demonstrates Childress's quick wit as the heroine, a domestic, teaches her white employers to see their own inhumanity. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973) was made into a movie with Childress as author of the screenplay. This novel explores the necessity of African Americans’ taking responsibility for nurturing their young sons. A Short Walk (1979) provides historical and cultural insights into the African American experience from the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Rainbow Jordan (1981) explores the ramifications of growing up Black and female under the guidance of a host of women from the community. While her mother abandons her, Rainbow's surrogate mothers nurture and usher her into adulthood. Childress's most recent novel, Those Other People (1989), addresses issues of homophobia, racism, sexism, and classism. Childress's incisive language and skillfull manipulation of multiple narrators place her with writers such as William Faulkner and Ernest J. Gaines. Her novels, like her plays, portray poor people who struggle to survive in a capitalist America. She incorporates African American history in her novels to instruct young African Americans about the heroic lives that have paved a way for them to succeed.

Possessing great discipline, power, substance, wit, and integrity, Alice Childress stands out as a writer who was always a step ahead of her contemporaries. She deliberately chose not to write about what was in vogue, but instead wrote about controversial and delicate matters and had the audacity to reject a Broadway option because the producer wanted her to distort her vision of African Americans. Alice Childress's brilliance, her intense and microscopic penetration into life, and her deft handling of language match such great twentieth-century dramatists as Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Jean Anouilh, Sean O'Casey, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, Wole Soyinka, and Sholem Aleichem, a playwright that Childress singled out as one of her favorite writers. Peopling her works with characters who are challenging, innovative, and multidimensional, Childress became a frontrunner in the development of African American theater and a novelist of significant merit. Alice Childress's major contribution to African American life and culture was her balanced portrayal of Black men and women working together to heal their wounds and survive whole in a fragmented world. The men and women in her works do not give up on each other; often the strong and spirited women reach out to save their men from disaster. Childress passionately created dignified images of African Americans, particularly America's dispossessed and disinherited.

[See also Mildred Johnson.]

Bibliography

• Alice Childress, “Knowing the Human Condition”, in Black American Literature and Humanism, ed. R. Baxter Miller, 1981, pp. 8–11.
• Trudier Harris, “Alice Childress”, in DLB, vol. 38, Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, eds. Thadious Davis and Trudier Harris, 1985, pp. 66–79.
• Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, “Alice Childress: A Pioneering Spirit”, SAGE 4 (Spring 1987): 104–109.
• Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America, 1988.
• Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, ed., Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, 1990.
• Drama Criticism, vol. 4, ed. Lawrence Trudeau, 1992, pp. 64–94.
• Alma Jean Billingslea-Brown, “The ‘Blight of Legalized Limitation’ in Alice Childress’ Wedding Band, in Law and Literature Perspectives, ed. Bruce L. Rockwood and Roberta Kevelson, 1996, pp. 39–51.
• Beth Turner,“Simplifyin’: Langston Hughes and Alice Childress Re/member Jesse B. Stemple,” Langston Hughes Review 15:1 (Spring 1997): 37–48

Elizabeth Brown-Guilloyr

For more information on Alice Childress, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: 1920
• Birthplace: Charleston, SC
• Died: 1994

Alice Childress was an actress, director and playwright, best known for her novel, A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich (1973), which was later turned into a movie. She has received numerous awards and honors for her writings, among them the first Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts.

Chidress had joined the American Negro Theater (ANT) in 1940, in Harlem, and a year later became its director, a position she held until 1952. She wrote and acted in plays for the ANT. Her first play produced outside of Harlem, Trouble in Mind, won the 1956 Obie award for best original Off-Broadway play, the first woman ever to win an Obie.

Most Famous Works

• Florence (1949)
• Trouble in Mind (1956)
• Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White (1966)
• Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970)
• A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich (1973)
• Rainbow Jordan (1982)

Alice Childress (1920-1994) is an author whose writing is characterized by its frank treatment of racial issues. Because her books and plays often deal with such subjects as miscegenation and teenage drug addiction, her work can be controversial.

Alice Childress's work is noted for its frank treatment of racial issues, its compassionate yet discerning characterizations, and its universal appeal. Because her books and plays often deal with such controversial subjects as miscegenation and teenage drug addiction, her work has been banned in certain locations. She recalls that some affiliate stations refused to carry the nationally televised broadcasts of Wedding Band and Wine in the Wilderness, and in the case of the latter play, the entire state of Alabama banned the telecast.

Childress notes in addition that as late as 1973 her young adult novel A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich "was the first book banned in a Savannah, Georgia school library since Catcher in the Rye, which the same school banned in the fifties." Along with other contemporary and classical works, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich has been at the center of legal battles and court decisions over attempts to define obscenity and its alleged impact on readers. Among the most famous cases was Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (102 S. Ct. 2799) in which a Stephen Pico, then a high school student, and others sued the Board on the grounds that their First Amendment Rights had been denied. The case became the first ever of this type to be heard in the U.S Supreme Court. Justice Brennan found for the plaintiffs, having determined that a school board's rights were limited to supervising curriculum, but not the general content of a library. Despite special-interest groups' growing resistance to controversial subjects in books, Childress's writing continues to win praise and respect for being, as a Variety reviewer terms, "powerful and poetic."

A talented writer and performer in several media, Childress has commented about the variety of genres in which she writes: "Books, plays, tele-plays, motion picture scenarios, etc., I seem caught up in a fragmentation of writing skills. But an idea comes to me in a certain form and, if it stays with me, must be written out or put in outline form before I can move on to the next event. I sometimes wonder about writing in different forms; could it be that women are used to dealing with the bits and pieces of life and do not feel as [compelled to specialize]? The play form is the one most familiar to me and so influences all of my writing - I think in scenes."

In an autobiographical sketch for Donald R. Gallo's Speaking for Ourselves, Childress shares how theater has influenced her fiction writing: "When I'm writing, characters seem to come alive; they move my pen to action, pushing, pulling, shoving, and intruding. I visualize each scene as if it were part of a living play…. I am pleased when readers say that my novels feel like plays, because it means they are very visual."

Alice Childress began her career in the theater, initially as an actress and later as a director and playwright. Although "theater histories make only passing mention of her, … she was in the forefront of important developments in that medium," writes Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Trudier Harris. Rosemary Curb points out in another Dictionary of Literary Biography article that Childress's 1952 drama Gold through the Trees was "the first play by a black woman professionally produced on the American stage." Moreover, Curb adds, "As a result of successful performances of [her 1950s plays Just a Little Simple and Gold through the Trees], Childress initiated Harlem's first all-union Off-Broadway contracts recognizing the Actors Equity Association and the Harlem Stage Hand Local."

Partly because of her pioneering efforts, Childress is considered a crusader by many. But she is also known as "a writer who resists compromise," says Doris E. Abramson in Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925-1959. "She tries to write about [black] problems as honestly as she can." The problems Childress addresses most often are racism and its effects. Her Trouble in Mind, for example, is a play within a play that focuses on the anger and frustration experienced by a troupe of black actors as they try to perform stereotyped roles in a play that has been written, produced, and directed by whites. As Sally R. Sommer explains in the Village Voice, "The plot is about an emerging rebellion begun as the heroine, Wiletta, refuses to enact a namby-Mammy, either in the play or for her director." In the New York Times, Arthur Gelb states that Childress "has some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for [black] actors in the contemporary theatre, the cutthroat competition for these parts and the fact that [black] actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which they cannot bring themselves to believe." And of Wedding Band, a play about an interracial relationship that takes place in South Carolina during World War I, Clive Barnes writes in the New York Times, "Childress very carefully suggests the stirrings of black consciousness, as well as the strength of white bigotry."

Critics Sommer and the New York Times's Richard Eder find that Childress's treatment of the themes and issues in Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band gives these plays a timeless quality. "Writing in 1955, … Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive," Sommer remarks. She finds that viewing Trouble in Mind years later enables one to see "its double cutting edge: It predicts not only the course of social history but the course of black playwriting." Eder states: "The question [in Wedding Band] is whether race is a category of humanity or a division of it. The question is old by now, and was in 1965, [when the play was written,] but it takes the freshness of new life in the marvelous characters that Miss Childress has created to ask it."

The strength and insight of Childress's characterizations have been widely acknowledged; critics contend that the characters who populate her plays and novels are believable and memorable. Eder praises the "rich and lively characterization" of Wedding Band. Similarly impressed, Harold Clurman writes in the Nation that "there is an honest pathos in the telling of this simple story, and some humorous and touching thumbnail sketches reveal knowledge and understanding of the people dealt with." In the novel A Short Walk, Childress chronicles the life of a fictitious black woman, Cora James, from her birth in 1900 to her death in the middle of the century, illustrating, as Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan describes it, "a transitional generation in black American society." McLellan notes that the story "wanders considerably" and that "the reader is left with no firm conclusion that can be put into a neat sentence or two." What is more important, he asserts, is that "the wandering has been through some interesting scenery, and instead of a conclusion the reader has come to know a human being complex, struggling valiantly and totally believable." And of Childress's novel about teenage heroin addiction, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, the Lion and the Unicorn's Miguel Ortiz states, "The portrait of whites is more realistic in this book, more compassionate, and at the same time, because it is believable, more scathing."

Some criticism has been leveled at what such reviewers as Abramson and Edith Oliver believe to be Childress's tendency to speechify, especially in her plays. "A reader of the script is very much aware of the author pulling strings, putting her own words into a number of mouths," Abramson says of Trouble in Mind. According to Oliver in the New Yorker, "The first act [of Wedding Band] is splendid, but after that we hit a few jarring notes, when the characters seem to be speaking as much for the benefit of us eavesdroppers out front … as for the benefit of one another."

For the most part, however, Childress's work, particularly her novels for young adults, has been acclaimed for its honesty, insight, and compassion. When one such novel, Those Other People, was published in 1989, it was acknowledged by very few of the traditional children's reviewing sources. The novel deals with a teenage boy's fears about admitting to his homosexuality. Childress has created characters who confront homophobia, racism, and social taboos honestly and with dignity. In her review for School Library Journal, Kathryn Havris notes that Those Other People, skillfully and realistically addresses young people's responses to these problems. This author, says Havris, "has presented the problems and reactions with a competence that deserves reading."

In Crisis, Loften Mitchell notes: "Childress writes with a sharp, satiric touch. Character seems to interest her more than plot. Her characterizations are piercing, her observations devastating." In his review of A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, Ortiz writes: "The book conveys very strongly the message that we are all human, even when we are acting in ways that we are somewhat ashamed of. The structure of the book grows out of the personalities of the characters, and the author makes us aware of how much the economic and social circumstances dictate a character's actions."

In discussing how she came to write books for teenagers, Childress remarks in Speaking for Ourselves that she wanted to "deal with characters who feel rejected and have to painfully learn how to deal with other people, because I believe all human beings can be magnificent once they realize their full importance." "My young years were very old in feeling," she comments elsewhere. "I was shut out of so much for so long. [I] soon began to embrace the low-profile as a way of life, which helped me to develop as a writer. Quiet living is restful when one's writing is labeled 'controversial.'

"Happily, I managed to save a bit of my youth for spending in these later years. Oh yes, there are other things to be saved [besides] money. If we hang on to that part within that was once childhood, I believe we enter into a new time dimension and every day becomes another lifetime in itself. This gift of understanding is often given to those wh constantly battle against the negatives of life with determination."

Childress died on August 14, 1994 in New York City. At the time of her death she had been at work on a novel about her African great-grandmother, who'd been a slave in her childhood, and her Scotch-Irish great-grandmother.

Further Reading

Abramson, Doris E., Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959, Columbia University Press, 1969.

Betsko, Kathleen, and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, Beech Tree Books, 1987.

Children's Literature Review, Volume 14, Gale, 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 12, 1980, Volume 15, 1980.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, 1985.

Donelson, Kenneth L., and Alleen Pace Nilson, Literature for Today's Young Adults, Scott, Foresman, 1980, third edition, Harper Collins, 1989.

Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Doubleday-Anchor, 1984.

Gallo, Donald R., editor, Speaking for Ourselves: Autobiographical Sketches by Notable Authors of Books for Young Adults, National Council Teachers of English, 1990.

Hatch, James V., Black Theater, U.S.A.: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, Free Press, 1974.

Mitchell, Loften, editor, Voices of the Black Theatre, James White, 1975.

Street, Douglas, editor, Children's Novels and the Movies, Ungar, 1983.

Crisis, April, 1965.

Freedomways, Volume 14, number 1, 1974.

Horn Book, May-June, 1989, p. 372.

Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, Volume 12, numbers 7-8, 1981.

Jet, September 5, 1995.

Lion and the Unicorn, fall, 1978.

Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1978; February 25, 1983.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 25, 1982.

Ms., December, 1979.

Nation, November 103, 1972.

Negro Digest, April, 1967; January, 1968.

Newsweek, August 31, 1987.

New Yorker, November 4, 1972; November 19, 1979.

New York Times, November 5, 1955; February 2, 1969; April 2, 1969; October 27, 1972; November 5, 1972; February 3, 1978; January 11, 1979; January 23, 1987; February 10, 1987; March 6, 1987; August 18, 1987; October 22, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1973; November 11, 1979; April 25, 1981.

School Library Journal, February, 1989, p. 99.

Show Business, April 12, 1969.

Variety, December 20, 1972.

Village Voice, January 15, 1979.

Washington Post, May 18, 1971; December 28, 1979.

Wilson Library Bulletin, September, 1989, pp. 14-15.

playwright; actress; novelist

Personal Information

Born Alice Childress, October 12, 1920, in Charleston, SC; died of cancer, August 14, 1994, in Queens, NY; married second husband Nathan Woodard (a musician), July 17, 1957; children (first marriage) Jean (Mrs. Richard Lee).
Education: Attended public schools in New York.
Memberships: PEN; Dramatists Guild (member of council); American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; Writers Guild of America East (member of council); Harlem Writers Guild.

Career

Wrote plays, novels, acted and directed in the American Negro Theatre, New York City, for eleven years starting in 1941, performed in plays Midsummer-Night's Dream, On Strivers Row, and Natural Man; appeared in opening cast of Anna Lucasta on Broadway; wrote Florence; later wrote other plays for adults and children, including Just a Little Simple, Gold Through the Trees, Trouble in Mind, Wedding Band, Wine in the Wilderness, Mojo, String, When the Rattlesnake Sounds, Let's Hear it for the Queen, Sea Island Song, and Moms; wrote books for children and adults including A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, Rainbow Jordan, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life, and A Short Walk; wrote a screenplay and television scripts; wrote column, "Here's Mildred", for Baltimore Afro-American, 1956-58; spoke at universities and schools; took part in panel discussions and conferences on Black American theater at many schools, including Fisk University, 1966; she was a visiting scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute), Cambridge, MA, 1966-68.

Life's Work

Alice Childress, who died of cancer in Queens, New York, on August, 14, 1994, was a pioneering black actress, playwright, and novelist who paved the way for other African-American playwrights like Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka. Her own plays and books, some of which were made into films and television movies, were well-known for their unflinching honesty about racism and its effects, especially concerning topics like miscegenation and teenage drug abuse. Because of the power of her work, one of her controversial plays was not carried on eight television stations and one of her books was banned from schools and libraries in several areas. In spite of her uncompromising themes, Childress has been called a great humanist.

Part of her humanism came from using her own experiences to portray common everyday people in her works. "I write about those who come in second, or not at all--the four hundred and ninety-nine and the intricate and magnificent patterns of a loser's life," she told Children's Literature Review. "No matter how many celebrities we may accrue, they cannot substitute for the masses of human beings. My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice."

Born into an impoverished family with little schooling on October 12, 1920, Childress spent her earliest years in Charleston, South Carolina, before being taken to live in Harlem, New York. She was raised by her grandmother, Eliza Campbell, the daughter of a slave, who encouraged her to write. As Childress stated in an interview in 1987, quoted in Black Literature Criticism, her grandmother "used to sit at the window and say, 'There goes a man. What do you think he's thinking? I'd say, 'I don't know. He's going home to his family'....When we'd get to the end of our game, my grandmother would say to me, 'Now, write that down. That sounds like something we should keep.'"

Childress attended grade school but did not finish high school. After hearing Shakespeare read she began acting and directing in the American Negro Theatre in Harlem in 1941, while also working at several jobs. She stayed with the American Negro Theatre for eleven years, where she performed in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Strivers Row, and Natural Man. She also played in the opening cast of the Broadway production of Anna Lucasta. Other actors also appearing in the show included Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier.

In 1949 she wrote her first play, Florence, which involves a discussion between a white and a black woman in a segregated train station. The black woman's daughter is attempting to become an actress in New York. When the black woman asks for her help, the white woman offers to ask a friend of hers, a stage director, to hire the daughter as a maid, thus bringing out the racism she earlier denied she had. Though Florence was a small production, it drew praise and launched Childress's career.

In 1950 Childress turned a Langston Hughes novel called Simple Speaks His Mind into a play titled Just a Little Simple, which was presented at the Club Baron Theatre in Harlem. Next, she wrote Gold Through the Trees, which in 1952 was the first play by a black woman to be produced on stage in America. Because both plays were successful, Childress brought Harlem's first all-union off-Broadway contracts into practice. They acknowledged the Actors Equity Association and the Harlem Stage Hand Local.

Her play Trouble in Mind was produced in 1955 at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. The play showed how black actors often endured racial prejudice from callous white directors and producers. In it, a troupe of black and white actors rehearsing for a play involving a lynching are forced to question their roles when a black actor refuses to accept the motivation of her character. In one version of the play she leads a walk-out over it and the director corrects and improves the script; in another the audience is left wondering whether the actors all lost their parts.

Trouble won an Obie Award in 1956 for the best original off-Broadway play, and Childress was the first woman to win the award. Of it Sally Sommer of the Village Voice observed, "The plot is about an emerging rebellion begun as the heroine...refuses to enact a namby-Mammy, either in the play or for her director." Arthur Gelb commented in the New York Times, [Childress] "has some witty and penetrating things to say about the dearth of roles for [black] actors in the contemporary theatre, the cutthroat competition for these parts and the fact that [black] actors often find themselves playing stereotyped roles in which they cannot bring themselves to believe....This is an original play, full of vitality...."

On July 17, 1957 Childress married for the second time to Nathan Woodard, a musician who has composed music for her theatrical pieces. No information is given about her first husband. Her first marriage produced one daughter, Jean.

One of Childress's most controversial plays, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, produced in 1966 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told the story of a common-law and at the time illegal marriage of a white baker and a black seamstress in South Carolina during World War I. Because he can not put it on her finger, the baker gives the seamstress a wedding band to wear on a chain around her neck. In the play racism surfaces in all the characters who come into contact with the couple. Although it was supposed to be staged on Broadway it never was. It was not until 1972 that it appeared as a Joseph Papp production at the New York Public Theatre. A year later it was televised on ABC as a New York Shakespeare Festival production and appeared on 168 television stations, though eight local ones refused to broadcast it. In the New York Times Clive Barnes wrote, "Indeed its strength lies very much in the poignancy of its star-cross'd lovers, but whereas Shakespeare's lovers had a fighting chance there is no way that [these two] are going to beat the system." In the Crisis, Loften Mitchell wrote, "Miss Childress writes with a sharp, satiric touch...Characterizations are piercing, her observations devastating...."

Childress sometimes was criticized for making speeches in her plays. Of Trouble in Mind Doris Abramson stated in Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925-1959, "A reader of the script is very much aware of the author pulling strings, putting her own words into a number of mouths." In the New Yorker Edith Oliver observed, "The first act [of 'Wedding Band'] is splendid, but after that we hit a few jarring notes, when the characters seem to be speaking as much for the benefit of us eavesdroppers out front ... as for the benefit of one another."

After writing Wine in the Wilderness, her commentary on the black revolution and the black woman produced by WGBH-TV; Mojo, about a formerly married couple forced to acknowledge their love for each other; and String, an adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant tale, Childress turned towards writing plays for children, among them When the Rattlesnake Sounds and Let's Hear it for the Queen.

She also began writing fiction, and her best-known and most disputatious children's book, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, was published in 1973. Hero tells the story of Benjie, a thirteen-year-old Harlem heroin addict, and the tale is not only told from his point of view but from the viewpoints of his family, teachers, even his pusher. The book was banned in several school libraries, then reinstated in all but one by court order in 1983. It was one of nine to reach the Supreme Court in a book banning case, even though it received numerous national awards, including being named one of the Outstanding Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

In the Washington Post Sada Fretz commented, [The book] tackles the grim topic of teenage addiction head on and contrives no happy ending, but her strong novel is so charged with vitality, personality and tension that it is anything but defeatist....[It is written in] a tough, trenchant Harlem idiom and through the viewpoints of a number of brilliantly delineated people around Benjie...." The book, for which she wrote the screenplay, was later made into a movie starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. In 1977 it received the Best Screenplay Award at the Virgin Islands Film festival.

In 1981 Childress wrote another adolescent novel, Rainbow Jordan, about a fourteen-year-old girl who is perpetually left at home while her go-go dancer mother travels around in search of shows to perform in. Wrote Anne Tyler in the New York Times Book Review, "Rainbow's story moves us not because of the random beatings [she receives] or financial hardships, but because Rainbow needs her mother so desperately that she will endlessly rationalize, condone, overlook, forgive. She is a heartbreakingly sturdy character...." Like Hero, this story is told by many characters in their own dialect and raises questions about the effects of racism and being poor, accepting affection from parents, getting used to loss and solitude, and learning to believe in oneself. Childress's other books for adults have included, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life and A Short Walk.

In 1987 Childress switched back to playwrighting with the show, Moms, which was presented at New York's Hudson Guild. A tribute to the black actor and comedian Jackie (Moms) Mabley (1894-1975) the production garnered favorable reviews. Moms Mabley was famous, among other things, for her crushed hat, loosely hanging dresses, and sagging socks, which drew laughs. In the New Yorker Edith Oliver remarked that Childress's version was "very funny" and "written with considerable tact, with just enough story to keep things moving and varied and to display the best of Moms' wares."

About her writing method Childress once told Contemporary Authors, "Books, plays, teleplays, motion picture scenarios, etc., I seem caught up in a fragmentation of writing skills. But an idea comes to me in a certain form and, if it stays with me, [it] must be written out or put in outline form before I can move on to the next event. I sometimes wonder about writing in different forms; could it be that women are used to dealing with the bits and pieces of life and do not feel as [compelled to specialize]? The play form is the one most familiar to me and so influences all my writing--I think in scenes."

During her life, Childress was a member of professional organizations and groups, including PEN, the Harlem Writers Guild, and the Dramatists Guild. She also lectured at colleges and universities, among them the Radcliffe Institute for Independent study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fisk University. Childress received the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame award in 1977, the first Paul Robeson award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts in 1980, and the Audelco Pioneer award in 1986.

Awards

Obie Award for best original Off-Broadway play, Village Voice, 1956, for Trouble in Mind; John Golden Fund for Playwrights grant, 1957; Rockefeller grant, 1967; A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich was named one of the Outstanding Books of the Year by New York Times Book Review, 1973, and a Best Young Adult Book of 1975 by American Library Association; National Book Award nomination, 1974, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, University of Wisconsin, 1975, all for A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; named honorary citizen of Atlanta, GA, 1975, for opening of Wedding Band; Sojourner Truth Award, National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, 1975; Virgin Islands film festival award for best screenplay, 1977, for A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; first Paul Robeson Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Performing Arts, Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, 1977, for A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich; "Alice Childress Week" officially observed in Charleston and Columbia, SC, 1977, to celebrate the opening of Sea Island Song; Rainbow Jordan was named one of the "Best Books" by School Library Journal, 1981, one of the Outstanding Books of the Year by New York Times, 1982; honorable mention, Coretta Scott King Award, 1982, for Rainbow Jordan; Radcliffe Graduate Society medal, 1984; Audelco Pioneer award, 1986; Harlem School of the Arts Humanitarian Award; Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 1993.

Works

Writings

• Plays
• Florence, (one-act) produced at American Negro Theatre, New York City, 1949.
• Just a Little Simple [adaptor; from the work Simple Speaks His Mind by Langston Hughes] produced at Club Baron Theatre, New York City, 1950.
• Gold Through the Trees, produced at Club Baron Theatre, 1952.
• Trouble in Mind, produced at Greenwich Mews Theatre, New York City, 1955; revised version published in Black Theatre: A Twentieth-Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights, edited by Lindsay Patterson, Dodd, 1971.
• Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, produced at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1966; presented again at New York Shakespeare Festival Theatre, 1972, and as an ABC-TV screenplay in 1973.
• The Freedom Drum, 1969; also performed at Performing Arts Repertory Theatre as Young Man Martin Luther King, 1969-1971.
• String [adaptor (one-act); from the story "A Piece of String" by Guy de Maupassant] produced at St. Mark's Playhouse, New York City, 1969.
• Wine in the Wilderness: A Comedy-Drama, produced by WGBH-TV Boston, 1969.
• Mojo: A Black Love Story, (one-act) New Heritage Theatre, New York City, 1970.
• When the Rattlesnake Sounds: A Play (juvenile) Coward (London), 1975.
• Let's Hear it for the Queen: A Play (juvenile) Coward, 1976.
• Sea Island Song, Produced in Charleston, SC, 1977; presented again as Gullah at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, 1984.
• Moms: A Praise Play for a Black Comedienne (music and lyrics by Childress and her husband, Nathan Woodard) produced by Green Plays at Art Awareness, 1986; then at Hudson Guild Theatre, New York City, 1987.
• Other writings
• Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic's Life, Independence Publishers 1956; reprinted by Beacon Press, 1986. Coward (London) 1973.
• A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, Coward, 1973.
• A Short Walk, Coward, 1979.
• Rainbow Jordan, Coward, 1981.
• Many Closets, Coward, 1987.
• Those Other People, Putnam, 1989.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992, pp. 401-413.
• Children's Literature Review, Gale, Volume 14, 1988, pp. 85-94.
• Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, Volume 27, Gale, 1989, pp. 100-103; Volume 50, 1995, pp. 57-79.
• Contemporary Dramatists, edited by K.A. Barney, St. James Press, 1993, pp. 97-98.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth Century American Dramatists, Volume 7, Gale, 1981, pp. 118-124.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, Volume 38, Gale, 1985, pp. 66-79.
• Drama Criticism, Volume 4, Gale, 1994, pp. 64-78.
• Jordan, Shirley M., editor, Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Writers, Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 29-37.
• Notable Black American Women, Gale, 1992, pp. 181-183.
• Who's Who in America, Marquis, 1992-93, p. 596.

Periodicals

• Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1994, Sec. A, p. 20.
• New York Times, February 10, 1987, Sec. C, p. 16; August 18, 1987, Sec. C, p. 13; October 22, 1987, Sec. C, p. 17; August 19, 1994, Sec. A, p. 24.
• Time, August 20, 1994, p.25.
• Washington Post, August 19, 1994, Sec. B, p. 4.

— Alison Carb Sussman

(1920-1994)

1952	Gold Through the Trees. After writing a debut drama, Florence (1949), set in a segregated railroad waiting room, Childress becomes the first black woman to have a play professionally produced on the American stage. This revue treats the oppression of African people throughout history. Childress began her theater career as an actress and director with the American Negro Theatre. She would gain notoriety with her young adult novel A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973).
1955	Trouble in Mind. Childress becomes the first black woman to win an Obie Award for best original drama for this work. It depicts a group of mostly black actors rehearsing a play about a lynching, which reveals the black stereotypes held by its white writer, director, and producer.
1973	A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich. Childress's groundbreaking juvenile novel tells the story of a thirteen-year-old black heroin addict from a variety of perspectives. The book is both widely praised for its gritty realism and honesty and banned by libraries and schools throughout the country.

• Died: Aug 14, 1994
• Occupation: Writer, Actor
• Active: '60s-'70s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich
• First Major Screen Credit: A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich (1977)

Biography

Famed for writing such plays as Wedding Band, Gold Through the Trees, and Mojo, Alice Childress also wrote books, one of which, A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, she adapted into a feature film starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. In 1979, her novel A Short Walk received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Before becoming a writer, Childress performed with the American Negro Theater. She also landed roles on and off-Broadway. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

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