Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:02:48.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Religious and Racial Meanings of The Green Pastures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Curtis J. Evans
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures play was one of the longest running dramas in Broadway history. Responses to the play by blacks and whites demonstrate its contested nature. Whites generally lauded the drama for its simplicity and its childlike depiction of black religion in the rural South. African Americans, though hopeful that its allblack cast would lead to more opportunities for blacks on stage, were divided between a general appreciation of the extraordinary display of talent by its actors and worries about the implications of a play that seemed to idealize the rural South as the natural environment of carefree overly religious blacks. Connelly's widely popular drama became a site of cultural debates about the significance of black migration to the urban North, the nature and importance of religion in black communities, and the place of blacks in the nation. Precisely when black social scientists were urging rural black Christians to abandon an otherworldly and emotional religion, white dramatists and literary artists were making more widely available what they saw as a picturesque and deeply rooted aspect of black folk culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Winter 2008 , pp. 59 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Connelly, Marc, “The Green Pastures” in A New Edition of the Pulitzer Prize Plays, ed. Coe, Kathryn and Cordell, William H. (New York: Random House, 1940), 606–7Google Scholar.

2. Fitzhugh Brundage, W., Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 245 Google Scholar.

3. Dray, Philip, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), 303 Google Scholar.

4. See Weisenfeld, Judith, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 Google Scholar). Weisenfeld devotes an entire chapter to Connelly's work, focusing particularly on the film version of the play. The first draft of this essay was written long before her book was published, and my conclusions were formed independently of her book, though I find nothing in her work that contradicts the arguments that I make. Weisenfeld's more general arguments about the reproduction and representation of images of blacks in films complements and confirms many of my own contentions, though she has a different focus than my work. She claims that demographic shifts in the African American population “from rural to urban captured artistic imaginations, as did the potential consequences of this transformation for African American claims to modernity and to citizenship” (5). This is a central emphasis of my essay in my attention to white and black interpretations of Connelly's play. I am also interested in Weisenfeld's analysis of Connelly's and other white artists’ claims to represent the “natural qualities” of blacks or black culture authentically. I look at the implications of these assertions for black interpreters.

5. Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals (New York: Life, 1957 [1929]), 9 Google Scholar. Jack Poggi's work on theater in the United States has shown that “Broadway was in severe depression by the 1930–31 season.” Even though ticket costs increased, the risks incurred to produce a play grew (a play that ran for fewer than a hundred performances in the 1920s was generally deemed to have lost money), and there was increased competition from movies, which began using sound more widely by the 1930s. The Green Pastures was still a big hit. See Poggi, Jack, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 55–56, 58, 71–75Google Scholar.

6. Austin, Mary, “‘Green Pastures’ Reveals New Field for Dramatist,” World, March 9, 1930 Google Scholar, in Tuskegee Institute News Clippings (TINC).

7. Johnson, James Weldon, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist” (1928), in James Weldon Johnson: Writings, ed. Andrews, William L. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 753–55Google Scholar.

8. Bone, Robert A., The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 64–66 Google Scholar.

9. Bass, George Houston and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., eds., Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 15 Google Scholar.

10. Gregory, Montgomery, “The Drama of Negro Life,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Locke, Alain (New York: Touchstone, 1992 [1925]), 159 Google Scholar.

11. Huggins, Nathan I., Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 9 Google Scholar.

12. Ibid.

13. See Robeson, Paul, “Recollections of O’Neill's Plays” (1924), in The Opportunity Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from Urban League's Opportunity Magazine, ed. Wilson, Sondra Kathryn (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 353 Google Scholar.

14. Johnson, James Weldon, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author” (1928), in James Weldon Johnson: Writings, ed. Andrews, , 746 Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., 751–52.

16. Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, David Levering (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 94–95 Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., 92–95.

18. Lewis, David Levering, When HarlemWas in Vogue (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1979]), 99, xvii, xxi-xxiiGoogle Scholar.

19. Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1967), 23–24, 26–33Google Scholar.

20. Huggins, , Harlem Renaissance, 102 Google Scholar; Kellner, Bruce, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 195–99Google Scholar. For Van Vechten's own comments, see “The Reminiscences of Carl Van Vechten” (1960), in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, 20–21, 193–98.

21. Fisher, Rudolf, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” in Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. Lewis, , 110–17Google Scholar.

22. Lewis, , When Harlem Was in Vogue, xx Google Scholar.

23. Johnson, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” 753.

24. Johnson, James Weldon, Preface to The American Book of American Negro Poetry (1921), in James Weldon Johnson: Writings, ed. Andrews, , 688 Google Scholar.

25. Johnson, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” 763–75.

26. On dramas produced by African American playwrights from the 1920s onward, see Abraham, Doris E., Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969 Google Scholar).

27. “‘Green Pastures’ Back in Gotham,” New York Times, March 14, 1935, and “Finis to ‘Green Pastures,’” New York Times, March 8, 1936, in TINC. On the change in racial attitudes, see Cripps, Thomas, ed., The Green Pastures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 25–27 Google Scholar.

28. For the details in this and the following paragraph, I have relied on Daniel, Walter C., “De Lawd”: Richard B. Harrison and the Green Pastures (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986 Google Scholar), chap. 6. See also, “Negro Ban Lifted on Green Pastures,” New York Times, February 10, 1933, in TINC.

29. Connelly, “Green Pastures,” 599.

30. Connelly, Marc, Voices Off Stage: A Book of Memoirs (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), 148 Google Scholar.

31. Connelly, “Green Pastures,” 599.

32. Cripps, , Green Pastures, 16–19 Google Scholar; and Eaton, Walter Prichard, “A Playboy Makes Good,” New York Herald Tribune, March 23, 1930, in the Alexander Gumby Collection (AGC)Google Scholar.

33. Connelly, “Green Pastures,” 630.

34. Ibid., 645.

35. “Marc Connelly,” in American National Biography, vol. 5, ed. Garrity, John A. and Carnes, Mark C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 342–43Google Scholar.

36. Cripps, , Green Pastures, 16–19 Google Scholar; Eaton, , “A Playboy Makes Good”; and Nolan, Paul T., Marc Connelly (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), 80 Google Scholar.

37. Connelly, , Voices Off Stage, 144–54Google Scholar.

38. “Popular Arts Project, Marc Connelly” (1959), in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, 19. 39. Ibid., 23.

40. “The Reminiscences of Marc Connelly” (1979), in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, 38.

41. Marc Connelly, “Author's Note,” in “Green Pastures,” 599.

42. Brooks Atkinson, J., “New Negro Drama of Sublime Beauty,” New York Times, February 27, 1930, in TINCGoogle Scholar.

43. Azrael, Louis, “Loveliness of Drama Confusing,” New York Telegram, March 1, 1930, in AGCGoogle Scholar.

44. Bolitho, William, World, March 1, 1930, in AGCGoogle Scholar.

45. Bolitho, William, World, March 15, 1930, in AGCGoogle Scholar.

46. Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1976]), 271–73Google Scholar

47. Krutch, Joseph Wood, “The End of Spiritual Comfort,” in The Culture of the Twenties, ed. Baritz, Loren (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970), 360 Google Scholar. This article by Krutch originally appeared as “The Modern Temper” in 1927 in the Atlantic Monthly. It was expanded (with the same title) to book length in 1929.

48. Ibid., 359.

49. Ibid., 360.

50. Ibid., 364–65.

51. Krutch, Joseph Wood, “Miracle,” Nation, March 26, 1930, in TINC.Google Scholar

52. Dumenil, Lynn, Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 185–91Google Scholar.

53. For the quotation, see Nolan, , Marc Connelly, 85 Google Scholar.

54. See Bolitho, , World, March 1, 1930 Google Scholar; and Krutch, “Miracle.”

55. Lippmann, , Preface to Morals, 30–31 Google Scholar.

56. Massood, Paula J., Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 29 Google Scholar.

57. Cripps, , Green Pastures, 12 Google Scholar.

58. Perhaps what Ovington really meant was that few white critics criticized the play in the way that blacks did.

59. Ovington, Mary, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder, ed. Luker, Ralph (New York: Feminist Press, 1995), 103–4Google Scholar. Ovington and others never quite specified how the play “made” converts, nor was it ever seriously considered that admiring whites would somehow actually adopt the religious beliefs and practices of unlettered blacks in the rural South.

60. Ibid., 104.

61. Ibid.

62. “Leaving the Southern Phase,” New York Times, January 1, 1934, in TINC.

63. Columbia Record, March 1, 1930, in TINC.

64. Augusta Herald, October 24, 1933, in TINC.

65. “The ‘Green Pastures’ Should Be Hissed Off Stage, Says Preacher,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 24, 1931, in TINC. 66. African American anthropologist Allison Davis, while doing research among blacks in New Orleans in the late 1930s, discovered a popular religious pageant, “Heaven Is My Home,” that had first appeared in black churches in the region in 1934. Although Davis does not mention any connection between this pageant and The Green Pastures, it is difficult to imagine that the former was not influenced by the latter. This pageant was probably a small-scale southern version of The Green Pastures. The image of the naturally religious and docile black, with the specific southern nostalgia for a romanticized antebellum past, proved potent and had an enduring influence. See Allison Davis, “The Negro Church and Associations in the Lower South” (1940), manuscript in the Carnegie-Myrdal Project Collection; quotations from the Lamont Library Microfilm Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, Cambridge, Mass. For an astute analysis of the plantation image of blacks and fantasies of a white and glorious southern past, see Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 85–119, 258–79Google Scholar.

67. Du Bois, W. E. B., “Dramatis Personae,” Crisis, May 1930, 162, 167Google Scholar.

68. Burrill's words were cited in Maine's Lewiston Journal, November 6, 1930, in TINC.

69. Ibid.

70. “The Hell in ‘Green Pastures,’” Black Dispatch, January 1, 1934, in TINC.

71. Ibid.

72. Schuyler, George S., “Mr. Geo. Schuyler Says a Few Words,” Pittsburgh Courier, October 8, 1930, in AGCGoogle Scholar.

73. Quotations and summary taken from Boyd, Valerie, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 220 Google Scholar.

74. Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, September 25, 1931, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 226.

75. Huggins, , Harlem Renaissance, 299–300 Google Scholar; and “Last Days for ‘Uncle Tom,’” New York Times, July 13, 1931, in TINC.

76. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, ed. Hedrick, Joan D. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 185 Google Scholar. See also Hedrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 278–79Google Scholar.

76. Broun, Heywood, “It Seems to Me,” New York Telegram, February 27, 1930, in AGCGoogle Scholar.

78. Lewiston Journal, November 6, 1930, in TINC.

79. See William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from the Liberator, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Bedford Books, 1994), 127–31, 137.

80. Delany to Douglass, Frederick, in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 29, 1853, in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Levine, Robert S. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 232–23Google Scholar.

81. See “The Great Migration,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Perseus Books, 1999), 869–71.

82. Connelly made two separate trips to the South, both totaling no more than two or three months.

83. Woodson, Carter G., The Rural Negro (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930), xv–xvi Google Scholar; Mays, Benjamin E. and Nicholson, Joseph William, The Negro's Church (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company Publishers, 1988 [1933]), v–vii, 295–313Google Scholar; and Mays, Benjamin E., The Negro's God, vii–viii Google Scholar. See also Sernett, Milton, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N. Car.: Duke University Press, 1997), 225–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. Woodson, , Rural Negro, 159 Google Scholar.

85. Ibid., 149–79, 227–41. For specific criticisms of rural churches, black and white, and the context of the debates, I have found the following helpful: Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, chap. 8; and James. H. Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900–1950,” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 645–68. See also the following two important primary sources of black rural churches: C. Horace Hamilton and John M. Ellison, The Negro Church in Rural Virginia, bulletin 273 (Blacksburg: Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station, 1929); and Richardson, Harry V., Dark Glory: A Picture of the Church among Negroes in the Rural South (New York: Friendship Press, 1947 Google Scholar).

86. Clark Gilpin, W., A Preface to Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97–98 Google Scholar.

87. Mathews was one of the leading defenders of liberal Protestantism and of a social form of Christianity.

88. Gilpin, , A Preface to Theology, 98 Google Scholar; and Sernett, , Bound for the Promised Land, 228–30Google Scholar.

89. See Mays, and Nicholson, , Negro's Church, 59–93, 198–229;Google Scholar Mays, Negro's God, vii. On the production of The Negro's Church, see also Kim Leathers, “A Historical Survey of the Sociology of the Black Church” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1999), 92–95.

90. Mays, and Nicholson, , Negro's Church, 259–261 Google Scholar.

91. Mays, , Negro's God, 1–97, 156–61, 245–55.Google Scholar

92. Ibid., 245–55.

93. Crisler, B. R., New York Times, July 17, 1936 Google Scholar.

94. Beside the standard works on religion and the many analyses of the cultural and social context of the 1920s, see Dumenil, , Modern Temper, and also Hoffman, Frederick J., The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965 Google Scholar).