James Theodore Ward (September 15, 1902 – May 8, 1983) was a leftist political playwright and theatre educator during the first half of the 20th century and one of the earliest contributors to the Black Chicago Renaissance. Often referred to as the "dean of black dramatists," Ward was well known for tackling controversial topics related to African-American urban life during the Great Depression. His staged works were lauded for their innovative depiction of the black experience, most notably for doing away with the spiritual ballads and feverish dancing that dominated "Negro theatricals" of his time in favor of a more nuanced, naturalistic approach to plot and character.
A prolific writer, Ward composed more than thirty plays and co-founded the Negro Playwrights Company with Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright. His best known works are the drama Big White Fog (1938), produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago as well the musical Our Lan' (1947) which premiered on Broadway at New York's Royale Theatre.
Life
Early life
Ward was born in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, the sixth of eleven children to Everett Ward and his wife Mary Louise (née Pierre). His father had been born into slavery but, upon being granted freedom, became a schoolteacher and part-time salesman to support his growing family. As a result of his father's occupation, Ward was well-educated as a young boy and became interested in writing plays at a very early age. Ward's devout father staunchly disapproved of these artistic ambitions, however, and he once burned one of the boy's early manuscripts calling it, "the work of the devil."
When Ward was 12 years old, his mother died unexpectedly during childbirth and, in the ensuing chaos, the young man left home to travel around the United States by freight train. He headed north, supporting himself with occasional work as a boot-black, hotel bellboy, and barber-shop porter, but eventually ended up in jail for bootlegging in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ward rediscovered his love for writing, and eventually amassed an impressive corpus of poetry, short stories, and essays that helped him to gain entry into an extension program at the University of Utah in 1930. While there, his professor, Louis Zucker, encouraged Ward to apply for the prestigious Zona Gale Fellowship in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin. Ward's essay won the prize, and he departed for the one-year program in Madison, where he studied literature and dramatic arts in addition to working as a script writer and voice actor for WIBA-Radio Madison. Although Zona Gale personally extended Ward's fellowship and arranged for him to stay and enter a degree program despite his lack of a high-school education, the young man declined, citing the unendurable isolation suffered by a black man in an all-white school.
The Federal Theatre Project
Following his departure from the University of Wisconsin in 1933, Ward relocated again, this time to Chicago's South Side, where he used some connections in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to become the recreation director for the Abraham Lincoln Centre. Though his first position involved teaching speech and dramatic writing to area youth, Ward eventually gained a position with the Negro Unit of Chicago's branch of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). A New Deal program to fund theatre and other live artistic performances in the United States during the Great Depression, the FTP was one of five Federal One projects sponsored by the WPA that shared a primary goal of creating new jobs for out-of-work artists, writers, and directors; however, these government subsidized programs also served several secondary aims, namely entertaining poor families and creating socially relevant artworks for a changing America.
Ward participated first as an actor with the FTP, but eventually began working on a short theatre piece that he had been inspired to write in 1934 after attending a lecture on the suppression of African-American voting rights in the South at the John Reed Club, a semi-national, Marxist gathering for writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist John Reed. After major revisions, Ward entered his one-act play called Sick 'n Tiahd (1937) in the Chicago Repertory Company's annual theatre contest, where it earned second prize, coming in close behind Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Green's work, Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936).