Playwrights Force Issue of Racial Integration in Washington, D.C.
The issue of race discrimination in Washington theaters came to a head, it was reported on this day, when the Dramatists Guild signed a contract with local theaters demanding that there be no racial discrimination “on either side of the footlights.”
The issue of race discrimination in the nation’s capital had been brewing since 1939, when the great African-American singer Marian Anderson was denied use of Constitution Hall by the hall’s owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). That controversy ended when the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted permission to hold the concert at the Lincoln Memorial, on April 9, 1939. The concert is regarded as a historic event in the history of racial equality in the U.S.
A controversy erupted later when the noted actress Ingrid Bergman performed the play, Joan of Lorraine, at a new theater owned by George Washington University. It was revealed that the university would not sell tickets to African-Americans in a separate, segregated section (something the DAR did permit).
Take a civil rights history tour of Washington, DC: http://washington.org/dc-itinerary/dc-itinerary-major-civil-rights-sites-1-day
Learn more: Howard Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (1995)
And more: Harry Jaffe, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington (1994)
Read: John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theater in the Twentieth Century (2003)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here