Emerging at the beginning of the New Negro Renaissance, Willis Richardson wrote serious drama portraying the lives of black people. Truly a pioneer, he was the first black to have a Broadway production of a nonmusical, one-act play-- The Chip Woman's Fortune (produced in 1923)--and the first to compile, edit, and write collections of black plays for young people: Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro (1930) and, with May Miller, Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935). Richardson wrote three of the twelve dramas in Plays and Pageants and five of those in Negro History in Thirteen Plays. In addition he encouraged others to write and to produce "Negro plays," and in all of his work, including children's plays and critical essays on contemporary theater, he attempted to interest his readers in high Negro drama which he described as "a mine of pure gold."

Convinced that neither the...