Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940. The following year Wright and Paul Green, working in Bynum Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, adapted the novel for the stage. It premiered in New York City at the Mercury Theatre directed by Orson Welles, produced by John Houseman, with Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas. In 1977 the UNC Department of Dramatic Art produced the Green/Wright adaptation to inaugurate the Paul Green Theatre. In 2019 PlayMakers Repertory Company opens its Legacy | NOW season with Nambi E. Kelley’s new adaptation of Native Son.
Both the play and the novel on which it is based are rooted in the Black Chicago Renaissance from the 1930s until the 1950s. Less well-known than the Harlem Renaissance the Chicago Renaissance, arguably, had more lasting effect. Both Harlem and Chicago were major destinations for southern migrants. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was also an urban industrial center that attracted migrants from across the globe. Where the Harlem Renaissance was primarily aesthetically oriented, the Chicago Renaissance incorporated a working-class and internationalist perspective. As do Wright’s novel and Kelley’s play, Black artists in music, dance, and the visual and literary arts focused on the centrality of race and sex in the distribution of power and the social construction of privilege as they sought to rid “blackness” of its negative connotations.
The Black Chicago Renaissance was affected by local, national, and international events from the Scottsboro boys “rape” trial in 1931 to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The period can be bookended by the deaths of two Chicago black males. On July 27, 1919 a teenager named Eugene Williams unwittingly swam across the invisible line that separated black and white beaches on Lake Michigan and was beaten to death. In what came to be known as the “Red Summer of 1919”, his murder touched off the deadliest race war in Chicago history as marauding white gangs stormed into black neighborhoods, forcing black residents to defend themselves. Thirty-eight men and women, both black and white, died and more than five hundred were injured. On August 28, 1955 Emmet Till’s body was pulled out of Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to leave her son’s casket open provided some of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement, adding cries against social injustice in multiple forms to those found in Native Son.
The Black Chicago Renaissance was an artistic response to the conditions of black life in the city, both a celebration of blackness and a means of escape from a harsh environment. There is a direct connection between the work of artists in the Chicago Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s when Stokely Carmichael declared “Black is Beautiful” to the Black Arts Movement spawned by playwrights such as Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, and Amiri Baraka, and to myriad black writers, artists, playwrights, and filmmakers as they explore the spaces and places claimed by bodies of color today. Join director Colette Robert, her design team, and cast as PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of Native Son thrusts you into Bigger Thomas’ world and, amidst all of its pressures and contradictions, seeks a way for Bigger to fly.