Like One of the Family by Alice Childress

There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history among a cast that also included Hilda Simms, Canada Lee, Georgia Burke, Earle Hyman and Frederick O'Neal. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed for the company for 11 years. Career Acting Ĭhildress took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college. Alice attended public school in New York for her middle-school education and went on to Wadleigh High School, but had to drop out once her grandmother died. Though her grandmother, the daughter of a slave, had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing. Early years Ĭhildress (née Herndon) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem, New York City, where she lived with her grandmother, Eliza Campbell White, on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue.

Īlice Childress's paper archive is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.' Childress became involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. Like One of the Family (1956) A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973)Īlice Childress (Octo – August 14, 1994) was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as 'the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades.' Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: 'My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary.

Like One of the Family by Alice Childress