How LeMoyne-Owen College grew Memphis’ Black theater scene

It’s small, but the Black theater scene in Memphis has been notable for 50 years.

Levi and Debroah Frazier founded the Blues City Cultural Center, a nonprofit that stages local plays, arts shows and workshops for aspiring creative writers, in 1979.  Ekundayo Bandele founded the Hattiloo Theatre, an independent Black repertory theater that is one of only four similar institutions in the country, in 2006.  

“It has been very difficult for African Americans to put on their plays on Broadway and major theater districts,” Deborah Frazier said in a video in 2022, reflecting on Black theater’s survival. “And right now, because of the turmoil that is happening in our country — for a moment — people are looking for Black playwrights, Black directors, Black artists to come in and do work.”

That work started with youth programs, nonprofits and college campuses in the 1970s, which helped to nurture some of the artists who built the foundation for the present day. At LeMoyne-Owen College, “Black pride” became a guiding principle for the school’s arts programs, especially the performing arts. 

Local media often gave more coverage to larger theater programs like the University of Memphis, Rhodes College and Theatre Memphis. But as a center for Black culture in Memphis, LeMoyne-Owen played a vital role in creating momentum for Black theater. The campus provided a sympathetic and accessible space for new approaches to theater when the most well-known theater programs in the city were majority white.

Performing arts meet the civil rights movement

On June 13, 1967, a multiracial group of actors and theater technicians called the Free Southern Theater arrived at LeMoyne-Owen as part of a traveling tour across the South. In journal entries from the tour, FST member Thomas Dent reflected on the school’s place in the surrounding neighborhood. “You can see startlingly new buildings interspersed with old red brick and wooden ones,” he wrote. “Surrounding the campus are the shacks and government projects of the Black ghetto. You can look out at the shacks of Memphis through plate-glass windows in the new student activities building.” 

The Free Southern Theater, founded in 1964, hoped to connect the performing arts to the nationwide Civil Rights Movement. Several of its founding members were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

“One half of the people in the South are oppressed economically, politically, and culturally by the other half,” reads a statement of purpose printed in the FST’s theater programs. “For those who are slapped in the face by ignorance from newspapers and other mass media because of their color or because of their beliefs, the Free Southern Theater exists for them as a mirror for their beliefs and as a reflection of their colors.” 

The FST performed free of charge and “held workshops after each performance to help the audience dissect the meaning of the play and how it applied to their lives.”

The FST visited LeMoyne-Owen twice in the 1960s, as well as schools, churches and improvised stages in five other Southern states. Not long afterwards, Memphis’ Black power movement took root in the neighborhood, directly inspired by SNCC’s work in the South. It’s no coincidence that these events happened in the same place. “The same South Memphis neighborhood where LeMoyne College trained the future black middle class was also classified as the poorest area in the county,” Shirletta Kinchen wrote in her 2016 book, “Black Power in the Bluff City.”

Black power activists in South Memphis tried to create spaces for Black arts and culture. When students at Carver High School staged a militant protest shortly after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the lack of a Black theater curriculum was one of their grievances. Members of the Invaders were present at Carver that day to advocate on the students’ behalf, including former Owen Junior College student John B. Smith. Police later accused them of inciting a riot.

That summer, young organizers used public funding to start the Neighborhood Organizing Project , a summer youth program that taught classes in Black history, arts and politics. Students from LeMoyne College and Owen Junior College were among the NOP’s supporters, but the program was plagued by funding problems and controversy. Politicians and local media suggested that Black power groups were using the language of “Black pride” and “Black is beautiful” to create racial unrest.

Anti-poverty programs also provided resources for youth drama programs that promoted Black culture and history. The Black Knights, a community organization based in North Memphis, staged community theater productions with University of Memphis drama students and working-class Black youth. Erma Clanton, a drama teacher at Melrose High School, hosted summer drama classes at LeMoyne-Owen in 1969 through Memphis Area Project South. Students not only put on plays but also received a weekly stipend. Clanton later taught drama at the University of Memphis, where her program “An Evening of Soul” drew big local crowds and a co-sign from Stax Records star Isaac Hayes.

Black people and their experiences

LeMoyne-Owen didn’t just host community theater programs from outside campus. LeMoyne College was a charter member of the National Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, one of the first theater organizations for historically Black colleges and universities. The campus had regularly employed drama instructors long before its 1968 merger with Owen Junior College. Student groups sometimes staged plays in the physical education building, Bruce-Johnson Hall, until the Alma C. Hanson Student Center was built in 1965. 

Yet even after the merger, the combined LeMoyne-Owen had no formal drama department, and its campus theater troupe, the LeMoyne-Owen College Players, was an extracurricular club. White theater director James R. Lee staged plays from white and Black playwrights that ranged from social commentary to experimental performances. He also arranged “theater exchanges” with nearby schools like Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) and Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee (now a branch of the University of Memphis), in which students would perform at each other’s campuses.

After King’s assassination and a brief occupation by militant students at the school, the LeMoyne-Owen community sometimes used theater to discuss Black social issues with Black audiences. In 1969, student leadership sponsored a two-week “Period of Inquiry” that included lectures, panel discussions and short theatrical skits about Black identity. The three skits portrayed negative stereotypes often applied to Black people by white society to promote intraracial cooperation and self-respect. Actor Hughley Moore, Jr. told the Memphis Press-Scimitar that “by showing what Black pride is not, we hope to demonstrate the avenues of expression that Black pride may take from a positive angle.”

LeMoyne-Owen’s broader approach to theater began to shift in 1972. That’s when the school hired I.D. Thompson as a speech and drama instructor. Born in Mississippi, Thompson earned his undergraduate degree at Jackson State University and became one of the first Black graduate students in the University of Mississippi’s graduate program in theater arts. Thompson later reflected that “teaching came unexpectedly” because he’d originally sought a career in professional theater. But when LeMoyne-Owen called, he took the chance to rebuild the school’s theater program from the ground up.

After his first on-campus production, Thompson set goals for his time as a first-time teacher: “I wanted to have a packed house for my productions; to bring national recognition to the campus; and to elevate [the] area of dramatic arts in Memphis.” 

He not only directed most of the school’s plays, but also frequently designed costumes, sets and makeup on his own — all without extra pay. In 1975, the Memphis Press-Scimitar referred to Thompson as “one of three Black directors in the city.”

He also shifted the kinds of plays that LeMoyne-Owen staged. Thompson’s productions throughout the ‘70s focused heavily on Black playwrights and stories of Black working-class life. Many were off-Broadway productions that had received critical acclaim or filmed adaptations. “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” a Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Lonne Elder III, depicts a Harlem family that turns to bootlegging to support their struggling barbershop. Willis Richardson’s 1923 play “The Chip Woman’s Fortune,” which highlighted the lives of “ordinary Black people” during Jim Crow, was the first non-musical play by a Black playwright to be staged on Broadway. 

“Black drama must be related directly to its source — Black people and their experiences,” Thompson told the Press-Scimitar. “You can’t put a play that reflects a white lifestyle in front of a Black audience and expect them to respond. It’s not part of their experience.” 

Thompson also wrote plays of his own. In 1973, he debuted a play called “The Promise,” which told the story of police shootings at Jackson State University. On May 15, 1970, while Thompson was an undergraduate student, protests by Black youth in Jackson grew into a heated confrontation with law enforcement. Officers fired on a group of unarmed students outside of a dorm room, killing two students and wounding 12. LeMoyne-Owen students like Lucy Shumpert and Moses Pearce also staged plays of their own on campus, and several students were recognized by NADSA for screenwriting, acting and directing during Thompson’s tenure.

Above all, Black pride

In 1977, Thompson decided to return to his home state, Mississippi. Over the next 20 years, he taught drama at Mississippi Valley State University, Tougaloo College and Jackson State University — all HBCUs. He eventually became a principal and motivational speaker. The “Black pride” that guided LeMoyne-Owen’s theater program was reflected in the city at large, as more Black theater groups emerged during and after Thompson.

According to James Smethurst’s book, “Behold the Land: The Black Arts Movement in the South,” LeMoyne-Owen graduates helped found the first Black repertory theater in Memphis, the Beale Street Repertory Company, in 1974. The Beale Repertory Company eventually evolved into a writers workshop, and later the Blues City Cultural Center. Harry Bryce, a poet and dancer who studied at LeMoyne-Owen, founded a Black dance company in 1975 and became artistic director of the Memphis Black Repertory Theatre in the 1990s. In 1977, Florence Roach and Mattie Pearl (or “M.P.”) Carter, two Black teachers at Memphis City Schools, founded the Mid-America Performing Arts Workshop, a nonprofit that produced community theater productions with Black casts. 

In a review of one of their most well-known productions, a Broadway musical titled “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” the Press-Scimitar noted that the troupe’s performance addressed “rising rents, unemployment, long hours, poor living conditions, busing and — always and above all — Black pride.”

Justin A. Davis is a freelance journalist, music critic and former grassroots organizer. He’s covered politics, pop culture and history for outlets like Scalawag magazine, Waging Nonviolence, Post-Trash and Science for the People. He lives in Memphis.

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