African American Women Playwrights Confront Violence

The pain of America’s racial legacy has been richly addressed in the nation’s literature, often by women who have gone largely unrecognized. This critical and gender-focused text scrutinizes the role of lynching dramas and social protest plays produced by African-American women. Writers covered include Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimke, Mary Powell Burrill, and Myrtle Smith Livingston. The work also analyses the social protest plays of modern and contemporary dramatists Alice Childress, Sandra Seaton, Endesha Ida Mae Holland and Michon Boston. Of particular interest are the roles of black maternity and the pervasiveness of violence against black women in both the early and the later plays.