SOURCE: “Ridgely Torrence's Negro Plays: A Noble Beginning,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. LXVIII, Winter, 1969, pp. 96-108.

In the following essay, Clum discusses the origins and the production of Torrence's Plays for A Negro Theater, and the critical responses to the three plays.

Among the significant moments in the history of the American theater, one remains relatively unsung. Its success at the box office was not great, its place in the memory of this generation of theatergoers virtually non-existent, but Ridgely Torrence's Three Plays for the Negro Theatre made a place for the Negro in our serious dramatic literature. Although Torrence's plays did not explore the social problems of the Negro in America, such as poverty and social inequality, in a way that would satisfy the Negro in our age of civil rights protests, they did for the first time present Negroes as human beings with all...