Background
Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue.
(A new edition of Alice Childresss classic novel about Af...)
A new edition of Alice Childresss classic novel about African American domestic workers, featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay First published in Paul Robesons newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One of the Family is a wry, incisive portrait of working women in Harlem in the 1950s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildreds outspoken accounts vividly capture her white employers complacency and condescensionand their startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind and refuses to exchange dignity for pay. Upon publication the book sparked a critique of working conditions, laying the groundwork for the contemporary domestic worker movement. Although she was critically praised, Childresss uncompromising politics and unflinching depictions of racism, classism, and sexism relegated her to the fringe of American literature. Like One of the Family has been long overlooked, but this new edition, featuring a foreword by best-selling author Roxane Gay, will introduce Childress to a new generation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807050741/?tag=2022091-20
( A Short Walk is a sweeping epic novel, which captures t...)
A Short Walk is a sweeping epic novel, which captures the movement of black Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Cora James, born to a black woman who has had a love affair with a white man, grows up poor in South Carolina, marries an abusivealbeit, wealthypreacher, and escapes from him by going north to Harlem. There she earns money dealing cards and performing in a number of traveling vaudeville shows. She survives the Great Depression, and experiences life as a wife, mother, lover, actress, and independent businesswoman. Torn between befriending Filipino and white neighbors, and the view of the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey movement, Cora survives divisive politics and learns that since "Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave... it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558615326/?tag=2022091-20
(Here is Rainbow Jordan: too brave to be a child, too scar...)
Here is Rainbow Jordan: too brave to be a child, too scared to be a woman. "Powerful, eloquent, revealing...the memory of this exceptional heroine is likely to linger a long time."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0380589745/?tag=2022091-20
(Bigotry surfaces at Minitown High when a popular male tea...)
Bigotry surfaces at Minitown High when a popular male teacher sexually assaults a delinquent fifteen-year-old girl and the only witnesses are a black boy and a gay student teacher.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399215107/?tag=2022091-20
Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue.
Though her grandmother had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing. 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. She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college.
She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. 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). 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; she won a Tony award nomination for her starring performance among a cast that also included Hilda Simms, Canada Lee, Georgia Burke, Earle Hyman and Frederick O'Neal.
In 1949 she began her writing career with the one-act play Florence, which she directed and starred in, and which reflected many of the themes that are characteristic of her later writing, including the empowerment of black women, interracial politics, and working-class life.
Her 1950 play, Just a Little Simple, was adapted from the Langston Hughes novel Simple Speaks His Mind and was produced in Harlem at the Club Baron Theatre. Her next play, Gold Through the Trees (1952), gave her the distinction of being one of the first African-American women to have work professionally produced on the New York stage. The success of these plays enabled her to bring Harlem’s first all-union off-Broadway contracts into practice.
When her play Trouble in Mind was produced at Stella Holt's Greenwich Mews Theatre in 1955 it won an Obie award for the best off-Broadway play of the 1955–56 season, making Childress the first African-American woman to be awarded the honor.
She completed her next dramatic work, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, in 1962. Its setting is South Carolina during World War I and deals with a forbidden interracial love affair. Due to the scandalous nature of the show and the stark realism it presented, it was impossible for Childress to get any theatre in New York to stage it. The show premiered in 1966 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and was also produced in Chicago. It was not until 1972 that it played in New York at the New York Shakespeare Festival, starring Ruby Dee. It was later filmed and shown on TV, but many stations refused to play it.
In 1965, Childress was featured in the BBC presentation The Negro in the American Theatre. From 1966 to 1968, she was a scholar-in-residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
In conjunction with her composer husband, Nathan Woodard, she wrote a number of musical plays, including Young Martin Luther King (originally entitled The Freedom Drum) in 1968 and Sea Island Song (1977).
Alice Childress is also known for her young adult novels, among which are Those Other People (1989) and A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich (1973). She adapted the latter as a screenplay for the 1978 feature film also entitled A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, starring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. Her 1979 novel A Short Walk was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
She died of cancer, aged 77, at Astoria General Hospital in Queens, New York. At the time of her death she was working on a story about her African great-grandmother, who had been a slave, and her Scots-Irish great-grandmother.
(A new edition of Alice Childresss classic novel about Af...)
(Bigotry surfaces at Minitown High when a popular male tea...)
(Active in the abolitionist movement and the underground r...)
( A Short Walk is a sweeping epic novel, which captures t...)
(Here is Rainbow Jordan: too brave to be a child, too scar...)
(A Hero Ain't Nothin But a Sandwich)
Quotations: Childress described her writing as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne. "
Childress was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho sorority.
She had used the names Louise Henderson and Alice Herndon before her marriage in 1934 to actor Alvin Childress. They had a daughter together, Jean R. Childress, and divorced in 1957, when musician Nathan Woodard became her second husband.