The Life and Work of Alice Childress

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Early Years

Alice Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1916. Her birth certificate names her as “Louise Henderson;” however, for unknown reasons, she used the name “Alice Herndon” until her marriage in the early 1930s. Her father, Alonzo, worked in insurance, and her mother Florence was a seamstress. After her parents separated in 1925, nine-year-old Childress was raised by her maternal grandmother, Eliza White, in Harlem, who encouraged her granddaughter to learn and write. Young Childress would spend hours at the public library. White enjoyed telling stories and encouraged this talent in her granddaughter; together they made up stories about people they watched from their window.

Childress did not complete high school or attend college. She was entirely self-educated, thanks to her grandmother’s influence and her own passion for learning. As a teenager, she saw a Shakespeare play, which sparked her interest in a theatre career. Her first mentor was acting teacher Venezuela Jones, who ran the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Youth Theatre and was the first Black woman playwright Childress ever met. W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a leading Black scholar of his time, also inspired Childress—particularly her interest in Africa. His wife Shirley Graham Du Bois encouraged Childress to write.

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Early Theatre Career

On June 1, 1935, Alice married actor Alvin Childress. Their daughter, Jean, was born later that year. The Childresses became members of the American Negro Theatre (ANT), a Harlem-based theatre for Black artists in 1939. There, Childress performed with future stars like Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Harry Belafonte. In 1944, ANT’s production of Anna Lucasta transferred to Broadway. She also worked a range of backstage jobs including lighting, sound, costume, and management for the company. ANT paid little to no money, so Childress supported her family by working a variety of low-paying jobs outside of the theatre.

In 1949 Childress found herself frustrated by the limited roles available to her as a Black woman who was also light-skinned. Her first play, Florence, was written overnight for ANT. She later left ANT and the acting field to focus on playwriting. Childress’s work experience—in jobs such as assistant machinist, photo retoucher, domestic, salesperson, and insurance agent—gave her insight that would inform her writing. Childress explained:

I deal with the people I know best, which are ordinary people...I write about the intellectual poor. People who are thoughtful about their condition, people who are limited in many ways, that have been cut off from having all that they want and desire, and know that this has happened to them. I think this character has been missing a great deal of the time. From much that we see, maybe people haven’t considered them interesting enough dramatically or important enough.

A chronology of Childress’s plays follows this biography.

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Playwright and Activist

Kathy A. Perkins, a scholar and also the lighting designer for Roundabout's production of Trouble in Mind, observes:

[Childress] called herself a ‘liberation writer’ and created strong, compassionate, often militant female characters who resisted socioeconomic conditions. Women such as Wiletta in Trouble in Mind…were rare in the African American drama of the civil rights era since they were among the few black characters to confront white antagonists onstage. Wanting to stage the racial conflict she saw happening around her, Childress was then one of the few African American playwrights to write for interracial casts.

While writing plays, Childress also engaged in real-world political activism. She worked with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts (CNA), a Harlem-based cultural support organization, which co-sponsored some of her early productions. Childress fought for theatre artists’ rights to receive advances and guaranteed pay for union actors in Off-Broadway productions. For Freedom, a progressive Black newspaper founded by actor-activist Paul Robeson, Childress wrote a column using the persona of “Mildred,” a domestic worker who shared her experiences of racism. She also taught classes at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Marxist institute for adult education. Together with her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, Childress founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice: a radical Black women’s civil rights group that fought against lynching, the rape of Black women by white men, Jim Crow, South African apartheid, and sexism. Childress’s association with these left-wing organizations put her on the FBI’s surveillance list for many years. While she was ultimately cleared of any association with the Communist Party, Perkins suggests that the FBI surveillance caused Childress to be protective of her biographical information for the rest of her life.

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Divorce and Remarriage

Little has been written about Childress’s marriage to Alvin Childress, but Childress openly disapproved of her husband playing the role of Amos on the television show Amos and Andy, which perpetuated Black stereotypes and was protested by the NAACP. Scholars speculate that tensions between the couple over the show brought their marriage to its end. In 1957, Childress married composer and musician Nathan Woodard. Woodard had played with Duke Ellington and other well-known bands, and he contributed music for many of her later works. This marriage endured through the rest of her life.

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Later Career

While Childress continued writing plays (mostly one-acts) through the 1960s and early ‘70s, her focus shifted away from plays with interracial casts and conflicts, instead focusing on stories about Black life that did not require white actors. She also turned to fiction writing and received much broader recognition for her novels than her work in the theatre ever provided during her lifetime. Her young-adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), which explored the struggle of Black youth in the inner city, received multiple awards: the American Library Association’s Best Young Adult Book, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and a Jane Addams Award. The book was adapted into a successful 1978 film, for which Childress also wrote the screenplay, starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. In 1979, she received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for A Short Walk, a novel about a Black woman’s life beginning in the 1900s in Charleston and ending in Harlem in the 1940s. 

Childress also received scholarly attention in her later life. Radcliffe College, where she had been an Associate Scholar from 1966 to 1968, awarded her an Alumnae Graduate Society Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1984. She received an Honorary Degree from the State University New York at Oneonta and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the State University of New York, both in 1990, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Theatre of Higher Education in 1993. Additionally, she was the subject of multiple biographies, articles, and graduate dissertations. As a self-educated woman without a high school diploma, Childress was proud of this recognition from the academic community. 

In 1990, Childress was leading a busy life of lecturing and college appearances when her daughter Jean died of cancer. Childress herself also died of cancer suddenly in 1994.

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Major Plays by Alice Childress

Links to purchase (or check out) available plays.

Available Plays

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References