A CONTINUUM OF ARTISTRY Howard performers have set national standards for generations. Photo courtesy Department of Theatre Arts.
A TALENTED LINEAGE Howard students continue the theatre legacy at Howard. Photo courtesy Department of Theatre Arts.
English instructor (and future legendary scientist) Ernest Everett Just, who organized the College Dramatic Club in 1909. A decade later, the club and the university’s ambitions were reimagined by dramatist and educator Thomas Montgomery Gregory. In 1919, Gregory formalized a credit-bearing Dramatic Art curriculum and renamed the troupe the Howard Players, making Howard one of the nation’s most vital incubators of authentic Black drama between the wars. Under Gregory and his successors, the Players specialized in “plays of Negro life,” commissioning and staging new work from students and contemporary writers. Their credits chart an astonishing map: Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” with Charles Gilpin in his signature role; early productions of works by James Baldwin (“The Amen Corner”) and Owen Dodson; and a repertoire spanning Ibsen, Chekhov, and original African diaspora reinterpretations like “Medea in Africa.” This was an institution training actors and technicians, but also a laboratory where Black aesthetic possibilities were iterated in public. “The founders of Howard’s Department of Drama understood, with remarkable foresight, that narrative was not just art — it was a unifying and defining force for Black identity,” said Salter. “Surrounded on campus by the work of thinkers like Alain Locke, whose vision of the New Negro demanded new dramatic expression rooted in the specificity of an African American world view, and sociologists such
THE HOWARD PLAYERS, VINTAGE HOWARD UNIVERSITY PHOTOGRAPH
THIS CREATION, INNOVATION, AND STEWARDSHIP OF THE BLACK DRAMATIC NARRATIVE IS THE LEGACY WE INHERIT, TRANSFORM, AND PASS ON.
Walk the halls of Lulu Vere Childers Hall on a weekday afternoon and you hear it all at once: the spill of a vocal warm-up through an open studio door, the staccato of tap shoes testing an eight-count, the focused hush of students marking a scene in the house of the Ira Aldridge Theater. This density of sound is not just ambience; it is the soundtrack of a lineage. At Howard University, theatre arts have never been an extracurricular afterthought. It is a tradition that predates motion pictures, helped catalyze a national Black theatre movement, and still functions as a pipeline of artists, administrators, and ideas into stages and screens worldwide. “From the early curricular inclusion of theatre arts to the box office success of Chadwick A. Boseman (BFA ’ 00 ) in ‘Black Panther,’ each generation of Howard faculty, students, and staff dedicated to Theatre Arts has made major cultural contributions to the American landscape and the global Black liberation movement,” said Nikkole Salter, MFA, an alumna of the theatre program and the current chair of the Department of Theatre Arts. “The Howard Players, through their international tours, demonstrated early on that cultural ambassadorship is a form of foreign diplomacy, while the university itself recognized the power of performance training to cultivate the communication skills essential to leadership, advocacy, and change. This creation, innovation, and stewardship
THEATRE
WHERE ARTISTRY MEETS LEGACY A HISTORY OF THEATRE ARTS
of the Black dramatic narrative is the legacy we inherit, transform, and pass on.”
The Roots: Speech, Story, and the Birth of the Players
AT THE MECCA by larry sanders
Howard’s present-day Department of Theatre Arts (formerly the Department of Drama) can trace its ancestry to the university’s humble beginnings. By the 1870s, oratory contests were annual events; in 1874, the university began awarding academic credit for public speaking, elevating performance from pastime to pedagogy. Coralie Franklin Cook, an early pioneer in the field and a Howard faculty member by 1899, expanded instruction beyond recitation into breath, posture, tone, and inflection, treating voice and body as instruments worthy of serious study. The first modern theatre cohort emerged under
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Howard Magazine
Fall 2025
Fall 2025
Howard Magazine
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