The First Black Actors on the Great White Way

Taken together, the two books reviewed here form a history of a neglected period of African American theatrical history: The two decades between Booker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition speech in 1895 and the coming of the Great War. The age was startling in its energetic motion: Blacks moved north; cotton moved west; in Cuba the nation won its place among the imperialist powers; movies altered the rhythms of urban life; the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War marked an intersectional lovefeast; Bishop Alexander Walters and the race's most public of intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, each told his people to vote Democrat. And yet in these two books their authors find more to say. Essentially their arguments, speaking in the mode of cultural historians, hold that these were the embryonic years of an urbane black culture that was to follow in the 1920s. In a sense, they follow Henry F. May's The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (1959) in that, just as he saw the origins of “the flapper” in this era (rather than in the “roaring” 1920s), so they fish in the same gene pool for the origins of the Harlem Renaissance

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