Black History Theatre Fact of the Day: 2/22

[sweetiedarlinmia]

Posted: 2/22/05 at 6:08pm

Sorry I've been slack in posting them. Got a show this week and have been in dress rehearsals these past days.

1. Charles Gilpin, African-American actor and singer.

From Richmond, Virginia, Charles Sidney Gilpin worked as an apprentice in the Richmond Planet print shop before finding his career in theater and becoming one of the most highly regarded actors of the 1920s. He first came on stage as a singer at the age of twelve. In 1896, Gilpin joined a minstrel show, leaving Richmond and beginning a life on the road for many years. While not on stage in theaters, restaurants, and fairs he worked odd jobs as a printer, barber, boxing trainer, and railroad porter. In 1903, Gilpin joined Hamilton Ontario’s Canadian Jubilee Singers.

Two years later he performed with the Abyssinia Company and the Original Smart Set, two traveling musical troupes. He also played his first dramatic roles and honed his character acting while he appeared with Robert Mott’s Pekin Theater in Chicago for four years until 1911. Soon after, he toured the United States with the Pan-American Octetts and spent some time with Rogers and Creamer’s Old Man’s Boy Company in New York. In 1915, Gilpin joined the Anita Bush Players as it moved from the Lincoln Theater in Harlem to the Lafayette Theater, a time when many famous black theatrical careers were launched.

In 1916, he made a memorable appearance in whiteface as Jacob McCloskey, a slave owner and villain of Don Bouciault’s The Octoroon. Though he left Bush’s Company over salary, his reputation while there allowed him to get the role of Rev. William Curtis in the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln. Gilpins Broadway debut moved him next into Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones 1920, a role he played until 192 to great critical acclaim. His work with this production allowed the Drama League of New York to name Gilpin as one of the ten people who had done the most for American theater in 1920, the first Black American so honored.

His invitation to the league’s presentation dinner, however, created a public controversy that ended with his attendance. Following the Drama League’s refusal to rescind the invitation and Gilpin’s refusal to decline it, he was given a standing ovation of unusual length on accepting the award. A 1921 Spingarn recipient from the NAACP, Gilpin was also honored in the White House of president Warren G. Harding. A year later the Dumas Dramatic Club (now the Karamu Players) of Cleveland renamed itself the Gilpin Players in his Honor. Charles Gilpin died in 1929 in Eldridge Park, New Jersey.

2. Thomas Montgomery Gregory, African-American dramatist, educator, social philosopher and activist.

From Washington D.C. his father, James Monroe Gregory, transferred from Oberlin College in 1868 to become the first student enrolled in Howard University’s College Department. He also was in the university’s first graduating class of three men, and remained as a member of the faculty. His mother, Fannie Emma Hagan, a former Howard student of Madagascan descent, mentored young students and devoted much of her life to helping “colored women.” Young Gregory was educated at Williston Seminary from 1902 to 1906.

He came to Harvard, where he was a member and president of the varsity debating team, graduating in 1910, and his class included T.S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann and John Reed. In 1919 Gregory founded the college theatre troupe, The Howard Players. Formerly, the University’s theatre interests came from the College Dramatic Club, developed in 1909 by English instructor Ernest Just and a group of students. From 1916 to 1921, Gregory was the organizer of the Howard University Department of Dramatic Art and Public Speaking and co-creator with Alain Locke of The Stylus Literary Club. He also became the first director of the drama department. The department’s course in Pageantry and Drama was the first of its kind in the U.S. to be offered for credit.

In August 1924, Gregory became Supervisor of Negro Schools, and later Principal, in Atlantic City, New Jersey where he continued to promote Negro drama. In 1929 he toured the South lecturing at eight State summer schools on educational and community drama. With the 80-year-old minstrel tradition and the popularity of Black-themed dramatic works by white writers, Gregory called attention to the efforts of Black playwrights in America. He cultivated and nurtured the concept of a National Negro Theatre Movement during the early decades of the 20th century. In 1956, he retired, and four years later returned to Washington.

A historian, leading figure in the National Negro Theatre Movement Thomas Gregory died after a long battle with leukemia, in Washington's Sibley Hospital, November 21, 1971.