Harlem Renaissance Drama and Black Historical Pageantry in Richardson’s 1930 Anthology

Plays Pageants from the Life of the Negro

First Edition

Richardson, Willis. Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, 1930, is a major African American dramatic anthology compiled during the Harlem Renaissance to give Black actors, students, and audiences historically grounded material outside minstrel caricature and dialect convention. Richardson, a pioneering Black playwright whose The Chip Woman’s Fortune was produced on Broadway in 1923, assembled works by African American writers that used drama and pageantry to teach Black history, affirm racial dignity, and widen the cultural uses of school and community performance. The anthology belongs to African American theatrical and educational culture, illustrating how Black dramatists used stage writing to preserve historical memory and support racial self-representation in the early twentieth century.

Richardson, Willis. Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro. Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1930. First edition. 373 pages. Illustrated by James Lesesne Wells. Brown boards with black cover illustration, no jacket as issued, 8vo. The anthology includes plays and pageants by Richardson and other African American writers, including Thelma Myrtle Duncan, Maud Cuney-Hare, John Matheus, May Miller, Inez M. Burke, Dorothy C. Guinn, Frances Gunn, and Edward J. McCoo. Richardson notes the exclusion of dialect plays, and later commentary on the volume identifies Carter G. Woodson and The Associated Publishers as central to its educational purpose: encouraging African Americans to know their history, cultural contributions, and responses to the modern world.

James Lesesne Wells’s cover and interior block-print illustrations strengthen the book’s place in Harlem Renaissance visual culture; Wells taught at Howard University and was identified by James A. Porter as the “dean of Negro print-makers.” The volume’s combination of Black-authored drama, historical pageantry, Woodson’s publishing network, and Wells’s modernist design makes it a substantial artifact of African American performance, pedagogy, and cultural self-definition. Ex-library stamps on front and rear pastedowns, rear flyleaf, bottom of spine, and top and bottom fore edge; minor cover wear; penciled writing on title page; binding tight, pages crisp and clean; very good. A significant 1930 anthology connecting Black theater, historical education, and Harlem Renaissance book design.

Item #21654

Price: $450.00