Biography

Johnson was born in Atlanta on September 10, around the year 1877, to Laura Jackson and George Camp. Johnson graduated from Atlanta University Normal College in 1896. She also studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and at the Cleveland College of Music, both in Ohio. Johnson’s first collection of poems, “The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems,” established her as one of the notable African American woman poets of her time…In addition to poetry, Johnson wrote several plays. During the fall of 1926, her play Blue Blood was performed by the Krigwa Players in New York City and was published the following year. In 1927 Plumes, a folk tragedy set in the rural South, won first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the National Urban League’s African American magazine Opportunity. Johnson wrote a number of plays dealing with the subject of lynching, including Blue-eyed Black Boy, Safe, and A Sunday Morning in the South. (Full Bio)

Plays

A Sunday Morning in the South (1925)

On a Sunday morning in a Southern town in 1924, a grandmother, Sue Jones, and her two grandsons, nineteen-year-old Tom and seven-year-old Bossie, are sitting down to breakfast before church. A fellow parishioner, Liza Griggs, joins them; as they eat they discuss the news that a white woman was sexually assaulted the previous night at Pine Street Market, and talk about how quick to lynch black people the town whites were. An officer shows up with a white woman, who tentatively identifies Tom, the elder grandson, as the man who attacked her. Even though Tom has an alibi, he goes with the officers. Sue sends Tildy to seek help from the Judge’s daughter, whom Sue had nursed as a child. Minutes later, however, Tildy returns with the news that Tom has already been lynched. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 8 (4f, 4m)

Characters: Sue Jones, Tom Griggs, Bossie Griggs, Liza Griggs, Matilda Brown, White Girl, First Officer, Second Officer

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Blue Blood (1926)

Blue Blood treats the subject of white men’s sexual exploitation of black women as two black mothers discover that their children, who are about to be married, have the same white father. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 4 (3f, 1m)

Characters: May Bush, Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Temple, Randolph Strong

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Paupaulekejo (c. 1926)

Paupaulekejo, a tale of interracial love and tragic death, contrasts ‘African’ characters and culture with English Christian missionaries and biblical teachings. The play takes an ironic look at Christianity through a plot constructed to determine whether an all-encompassing ‘Christian love,’ as taught by the missionaries, is capable of transcending strictly enforced racial and sexual boundaries between black men and white women. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 6+ (2f, 4m)

Characters: Paupaulekejo, Zoagoa, Claire, Dudley McKenzie, Edward Lonsdale, Sahdji, Warriors, Witch Doctor, Wives

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Plumes (1927)

Plumes tells the story of a poor woman named Charity attempting to care for her deathly ill daughter, Emmerline. She has fifty dollars and must decide whether to spend that sum on an operation for her daughter–which may or may not save her life–or on a proper funeral. Charity’s friend reads her fortune in her coffee grounds and delivers the prophecy that there will be a funeral. Charity must decide whether or not to believe these superstitions over the word of the white doctor, whom she clearly does not trust. At the end of the play, before Charity comes to a decision, Emmerline’s condition worsens, and she dies. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 4 (3f, 1m)

Characters: Charity Brown, Emmerline Brown, Tildy, Dr. Scott

Publication Info: Zora Neale Hurston, Eulalie Spence, Marita Bonner, and others : the prize plays and other one-acts published in periodicals. Edited by Jennifer Burton. Hall, 1996. (Link)

SAFE: a play on lynching (c. 1929)

Set in a southern town in 1893, all of the action transpires within the domestic space of the African-American Pettigrew family, which consists of Liza, who is nine months into her pregnancy, her husband, John, and her mother, Mandy Grimes…their neighbor Hannah Wiggins pays them a visit to tell them that a lynching mob is forming in town. As the lynch mob passes (offstage) the house, the women hear [a young man] calling for his mother, and Liza goes into labor, which prompts Mandy to send Hannah out the back door to fetch the doctor. Meanwhile, Mandy strives to allay Liza’s fears, telling her not to think about [the lynched man] at this time but rather her “own little baby—you got him to think about—You got to born him safe!” (Source)

After learning that the child she birthed is a boy, Liza kills her baby instead of letting him live in such a dangerous world. 

Cast Requirement: 5 (3f, 2m)

Characters: Liza Pettigrew, John Pettigrew, Mandy Grimes, Dr. Jenkins, Hannah Wiggins

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Blue-eyed Black Boy (1930)

Pauline Waters sits in a rocking chair with a bandaged foot talking to her daughter Rebecca. They are worrying about Jack Pauline's son who has not arrived home from work yet. Pauline wonders why Jack has blue eyes. Doctor Thomas Grey arrives to change the bandage on the foot. He is engaged to Rebecca. A neighbor rushes in and says that Jack has been arrested for brushing up against a white woman who had accused him of attacking her. A group of white men had beaten Jack up before the police could take him away. The noisy crowd they can hear outside is a lynch mob. Pauline takes down a box and from it takes a ring that she gives to the Doctor. She tells him to go to the Governor with the ring and tell him that his son is about to be lynched. The Governor sends in troops. (Source) 

Cast Requirement: 4 (3f, 1m)

Characters: Pauline Waters, Rebecca Waters, Dr. Thomas Grey, Hester Grant

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1935)

Frederick Douglass is about his personal qualities that are not as much in the public eye: his love and tenderness for Ann, who he met while still enslaved, and then was married to in freedom for over four decades. Other themes include the spirit of survival, the need for self-education, and the value of the community and of the extended family. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 4 (1f, 3m)

Characters: Fred Douglass, Ann, Budd, Jake

Publication Info:The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

William and Ellen Craft (1935) 

William and Ellen Craft describes the escape of a black couple from slavery, in a work about the importance of self-love, the use of religion for support, and the power of strong relationships between black men and women. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 4 (2f, 2m)

Characters: William Craft, Ellen Craft, Aunt Mandy, Sam

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Starting Point (1938)

Starting Point portrays a working-class family's struggle for a better life. Aging black parents in the South saved their money from the father's job (working for a white employer as a messenger) so that their son, Tom, could go to college. Despite their high hopes for their son's success, Tom quits school, becomes involved with the illegal "numbers racket," and returns home with his new wife, a blues singer. It is only through the honesty and persistence of the young wife that the truth about the son's life is finally told. Tom recovers his self-respect but finds himself at a new ‘starting point’ in life as he agrees to take over his father's job as messenger. Starting Point is notable for representing a modern urban black family and for the character of Belle, one of the earliest portrayals of the female blues singer in American drama. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 4 (2f, 2m)

Characters: Henry Robinson, Tom Robinson, Martha Robinson, Belle

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

AND YET THEY PAUSED (1938)

The play follows a church congregation in Mississippi waiting to hear if Congress is passing an anti-lynching bill. Members of the group tell the Reverend about Joe Daniels, a young African American man that was beaten and thrown out of town for bootlegging, who has been blamed for killing a white storekeeper the night before. They later witness him being lynched and describe what they are watching as the mob outside attacks Daniels with a blow torch. Congress is drawing out the process of deciding whether or not to pass the bill until they get notice of this new lynching and the Senator insists that the bill must be passed. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 11+

Characters: Reverend Timothy Jackson, Deacon Brown, First Sister, Joe Daniels, Boy, Henry Williams, Elder, Reporter, Guard, Telegraph Boy, Senator, Church Group, Senate Group

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. University of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

A Bill to Be Passed (Date unknown)

A Bill to be Passed (six-teen pages, plus three pages of songs), portrays the successful passage of the [federal anti-lynching] bill in the House and ends with a call to continue the struggle for passage in the Senate. A brief (four-and-one-half-page) additional ending scene by Robert E. Williams (currently unknown, but possibly an NAACP staff member) is attached to Johnson's [And Yet They Paused] and represents the historic filibuster carried out by Southern Senators to defeat the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. Williams's scene ends with a commentator as well as the character of Walter White, then Executive Secretary of the NAACP, urging audience members to fight on.

Cast Requirement: 11+

Characters: Reverend Timothy Jackson, Deacon Brown, First Sister, Joe Daniels, Boy, Henry Williams, Elder, Reporter, Guard, Telegraph Boy, Senator, Church Group, Senate Group

Publication Info: The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: from the new Negro renaissance to the civil rights movement. Edited by Judith L. Stephens. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2006. (Link)

Resources

Other Writings by Johnson

Poetry

• The Heart of a Woman (1918)

• Bronze (1922)

• An Autumn Love Cycle (1928)

• Share My World (1962)