In the introduction to the section of his Black Theater USA anthology entitled "Early Plays by means of Black Women.

In the introduction to the section of his Black Theater USA anthology entitled "Early Plays by means of Black Women," James V. Hatch recalls

Eldridge Cleaver's observation about the myth of the powerful black woman. "He [the white man] turn rounded the black woman into a able-bodied self-reliant Amazon and deposited her in his kitchen--that's the concealed of Aunt Jemima's bandana." Question: Do these women playwrights paint real portraits of black women? (136)

Hatch may incapable of speech the explosive potential of the statement with a final question, on the contrary he does not defuse it. He presumably wants to bring the cultural validity of the "strong black woman's" staged port into question, by aligning it with traditional white male hegemony. A reformulated fusion of statement and question might read, "Can a 'strong black woman' be staged without challenging the validity of a 'strong black male' stage carriage or playing into white [male] hegemony's hands?" I'd glance at that Hatch was not the first to ask this question, that in fact this question lies just beneath the surface of greatest in quantity protest and problem plays written by dint of early black women playwrights.(1) These playwrights carried onward a dual liberation motif within their plays. While dramatizing the plight of their race, as a means of the couple raising a black racial consciousness and appealing to a possible white audience, early black women playwrights also formulated dramatic strategies which enabled them to stage substantive, independent African American female nearnesss and thus propose their sexual equality.

Many early black women playwrights were enthusiastically committed to the artistic program for social uplift which W E B Du Bois established. For Du Bois, art (and especially theater) was crucial for countering the stereotype still plaguing the race, and for establishing inspirational types for a progressive people. As Du Bois squeeze outed it, "All Art is propaganda, and at any time must be ...for gaining the right of black folk to delight in and enjoy" ("Criteria" 296). In order to achieve a black theater (as oppos to a black imitation of white theater), he propos that "plays of a real african theater" must be:

1 About us. That is, they must have machinations which reveal Negro life as it is. 2 according to us. That is, they must be written on Negro authors who understand from birth and continuing association just what it means to be a black man today. 3. For us. That is, the theater must cater primarily to african audiences and be supported and sustained on their entertainment and approval. [And] 4 Near us. The theater must be in a neighborhood near the mass of ordinary black man people. ("Krigwa" 134)(2)

Du Bois felt that a recent Negro theater had to expand from its own historical and cultural roots

Would-be black women playwrights rushed to this call. Kathy Perkins points abroad that, during the years Crisis and Opportunity magazines sponsored playwriting contend fors most of the winners were women (Black 5) Nellie McKay utters that between 1918 and 1930 "eleven black women published twenty-one plays between them, in comparison to no more than half a dozen [black] men who saw their works in print during these years" ("Theater" 625) Perkins provides possible reasons for this unusual burgeoning of previously submerged female talent: ...the large number of plays written through women could easily be attributed to the fact that since black women were not in any leadership position as compared to black men these plays provided a unique opportunity for their voices to be heard. Also, black women had not ever been allowed much of an opportunity to expres themselves in dramatic form and therefore seized the chance to do in such a manner (Black 7) Other factors also encouraged black women to write drama. Margaret Wilkerson, commenting onward Brown-Guillory's Their Place on the Stage, points gone out that, because most early black women playwrights lived in Washington, DC rather than Harlem, their work was more reflective of typical black life than was the work of playwrights who wrote from the Harlem experience. Thus, their plays were more closely aligned with what Du Bois intended at "race" drama (Wilkerson 125). She also notes that the women's focus upon the black working-class family (reflective of Du Bois possess ultimate focus, as the beneficiaries of the efforts of the "talented tenth") allowed these playwrights "to speak with authority about their community" (126) Finally, the working-class drama of these budding women playwrights proposeed the clearest alternative to white-imitation theater and the pernicious minstrel show

Theophilus Lewis (perhaps the barely true critic of black theater during the of the present day Negro Renaissance) believed that middle-class support might issue in better drama geared to this class, and in more sensitive actors and actresses flocking to this appreciative audience, moreover the black middle class would be more likely to insist that the black stage be an imitation of white theater (see Kornweibel 181-82) At the other farthest white ownership, control, and patronage of Harlem theaters attended to produce a jaded work which catered to voyeuristic whites (183) Black women playwrights' participation in the modern Negro Renaissance seemed to provide the surest means of transforming a white-managed theater industry into a serious and culturally responsive dramatic art institution (McKay, "Saying" 131)