Arts
In the second of two episodes about Black Americans and Shakespeare, we talk with scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson about the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s: from Reconstruction, through the period of Jim Crow segregation, and into the Civil Rights Era. We’ll take a look at landmark performances like Orson Welles’s 1936 all-Black Macbeth and Paul Robeson’s groundbreaking Othello. We’ll also hear a less familiar story that dramatizes the tensions surrounding Shakespeare in the Black American theater—one set at Washington, DC’s Howard University, where a young Toni Morrison played Queen Elizabeth in the university’s production of Richard III in the early 1950s. Ayanna Thompson is a Professor of English and the director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Marvin McAllister is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They are interviewed by Rebecca Sheir. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. ©Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, "Our Own Voices with Our Own Tongues," was originally published January 28, 2015, and rebroadcast with an updated introduction September 1, 2020. This episode was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. Special thanks Dr. James Hatch, co-author, with the late Errol Hill, of A History of African American Theatre; Connie Winston, Anthony Hill and Doug Barnett, co-authors of The Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre; and Jobie Sprinkle and Tena Simmons at radio station WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina.