Alice Childress

Writer and actor

• Born: October 12, 1916
• Birthplace: Charleston, South Carolina
• Died: August 14, 1994
• Place of death: New York, New York

Although best remembered for her three young-adult novels, Childress also was an actor, playwright, lecturer, and champion of African American society and civil rights.

Early Life

Alice Herndon Childress (CHIHL-drehs) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 12, 1916. Because of her parents’ separation, at the age of nine she was sent to live in Harlem with her maternal grandmother. For the imaginative child, this was fortunate: Her grandmother took her to museums, art galleries, libraries, theaters, and concerts. The two would entertain themselves by making up stories about the people they saw passing by on the street beneath their windows. Her grandmother’s church also deepened her understanding of the people of Harlem as she listened weekly to their testimonials, detailing their aspirations and trials. However, the death of both Childress’s grandmother and mother in the late 1930’s cut short her formal education after three years of high school.

Always reticent about her private life, Childress never gave the date of her marriage to or divorce from Alvin Childress, an actor who appeared in the 1960’s television series Amos ’n’ Andy. She would, however, use his name throughout her career. At the age of nineteen, Childress gave birth to her only child, Jean. To support herself and her daughter, she worked at an assortment of mostly low-level jobs, as an assistantmachinist, photo retoucher, maid, saleswoman, and insurance agent, closely observing the range of humanity that would later be fictionalized in her writing.

Life’s Work

Childress first chose acting as a career. Although she was talented, there were relatively few good dramatic roles available for African Americans, particularly for those of obviously mixed race. Childress more closely resembled her Scotch-Irish great-grandmother than her African ancestors. Nevertheless, after 1941, Childress took a number of roles in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), where she worked for better conditions for the actors and helped to establish ANT as a significant cultural institution in were chosen. In 1944, she appeared on Broadway in an African American adaptation of the Polish play Anna Lucasta, earning a Tony Award nomination for her performance. The following year, she appeared as Sadie Thompson in an African American adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Rain.

During the 1940’s, Childress slowly shifted her attention from performing to writing. Still involved in theater, she accepted a challenge from colleague Sidney Poitier, who claimed that a workable play could not be written overnight. The result was her drama Florence (produced in 1949), introducing a number of her leading ideas. White writers, she believed, were deceiving themselves when they pretended to interpret African American lives. She complained that white dramatists grievously stereotyped African Americans.

In the decades that followed, Childress wrote a number of plays that were successfully performed. Notable was The Freedom Drum (1968), later retitled Young Martin Luther King, Jr. Critics and actors praised her ear for the poetic rhythms of black speech, the echoes in her dialogue of black church sermons and gospel music, and her strong sociopolitical message. Politically she was sympathetic to leftist causes. By 1971, she was ready to visit Russia, hoping to study Soviet life, art, and culture, and in 1973-1974, she traveled to communist China and Africa.

In 1957, Childress married Nathan Woodward, a jazz musician who sometimes provided music for her plays and with whom she lived for the rest of her life. Although she was working on memoirs at the time of her death, little is known of her private life. She lost her only child to cancer in 1990, four years before her own death.

While most of Childress’s early work was in theater, in later decades she gained a reputation as a skilled novelist. Her young-adult novels A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973) and Rainbow Jordan (1981) attracted the most attention. They detailed the trials of African American adolescents in the inner city. Although these books were widely admired, they also drew protests from parents who found their language and grittiness inappropriate for middle-class youths to read. The 1973 novel even was referenced in an obscenity case that reached the United States Supreme Court. Still, Childress was acknowledged as a pioneer in the “new realism” in literature for young people, a literature no longer limited to the portrayal of “perfect” nuclear, middle-class families. Now families in juvenile literature faced social realities such as poverty, racism, drug addiction, and sexual awakening. Childress was called upon to write the screenplay for a film version of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, which opened in 1978 and was compared by some critics to the tales of Charles Dickens.

During her long career, Childress published four novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of plays. She received many forms of recognition. Notably, she was the first African American woman to win the Obie Award for the best Off-Broadway play of 1954-1955 (Trouble in Mind). A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich was chosen as the American Library Association’s Best Young Adult Book and also received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and a Jane Addams Award. In 1977, Alice Childress Week was proclaimed in her hometown of Charleston. Childress found herself increasingly in demand as lecturer at a variety of universities, notably Fisk and Radcliffe, and was named artist in residence at the University of Massachusetts in 1984. Childress died on August 14, 1994, in New York City.

Significance

Childress is an often overlooked writer of the mid-twentieth century. She appeared too early to reap the full benefits of the Civil Rights movement and the interest it generated in African American artists. Her perceptive exploration of racial themes, her promotion of the talents of her people, and especially her practice of authenticity in juvenile literature paved the way for many authors who followed her. In her best-known books, Childress always sought to provide all her readers the vicarious, empathetic experience of life among minority families in the inner city. Her contribution to the African American theater—her defense of performers and exploration of themes of racial conflict—also is important.

Bibliography

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. The section on Childress includes evaluations by two literary critics, focusing on the dramatic structure of her work.

Haley, Elsie Galbreath. “Alice Childress.” In American Ethnic Writers, edited by the editors of Salem Press. Rev. ed. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2009. Biography and detailed critical overview of Childress’s literary output. Includes sources for further reading.

Jennings, La Vinia Delois. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. The most complete evaluation of Childress, including known biographical facts and critical examinations of each of her major works.

Jordan, Shirley M., ed. Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Includes a candid interview with Childress in which she expresses her strong feelings about prejudice.

Sadler, Myra Pollack, and David Miller Sadker. Now upon a Time: A Contemporary View of Children’s Literature. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. A lively discussion of the “new realism” in juvenile literature, clearly designating Childress a leader in the movement.