SOURCE: "The Literary Genius of Alice Childress," in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984, pp. 129-33.

[In the following essay, Killens discusses various aspects of Childress's career, lauding her numerous accomplishments.]

There were the Childress plays up at the Club Baron in Harlem in the late forties and early fifties, including Florence, Just a Little Simple, Gold Through the Trees (a play about Harriet Tubman), every one of them an exuberant celebration of the Black experience with emphasis always on the heroic aspect of that experience in the constant struggle against racist oppression. One left the theater after an evening with Alice Childress imbued with pride and with the spirit to struggle. It was as if whenever Alice Childress sat before the typewriter she heard the voice of Frederick Douglass speaking to her down through the ages of a universal truth...