In 1915 Anita Bush, a young African American actress, founded the Anita Bush stock company with a total of six actors including herself. It was the first major stock company comprised exclusively of black actors. In a time when black performers were expected conform to racist stereotypes that cast them as unintelligent or lacking in integrity, she worked to create legitimate dramatic vehicles for her actors. Working to this end she produced high-quality dramatic content that worked against lowered expectations and paved the way for African American performers, writers and producers to enter the mainstream of the U.S. theater and film tradition.
Founded with a small group of black actors in New York City, the Anita Bush stock company was renamed the Lafayette Players with their move from the Lincoln Theater in Harlem to the Lafayette Theater, and the name stuck. With the success of the initial endeavor, different cities reached out to Anita Bush and asked for help in establishing chapters of the company in their communities. By the time of the company’s close in 1932 over 300 actors called themselves Lafayette Players. The success of the travelling shows became an object lesson for black and white producers alike in the determination of substantial audiences for more serious fare in black communities. Black audiences had never seen uncondescending drama, and the group’s purpose became twofold: to entertain and to educate. Anita Bush and the Lafayette Players demonstrated that good drama had an audience in black communities.
Many of the players went on to work in silent race film, most notably Evelyn Preer. Preer began her career with a singing and dancing troupe before enlisting with the Lafayette Players. She became the biggest black star of the day and went on to cross over into mainstream film working for Paramount in a number of films. Her roots, however, remained firmly planted in the black theater community. Her work in black film changed the way black actresses were perceived and paved the way for other leading ladies of color.
With the onset of the Great Depression, opportunities for black actors and black theater dried up, and with it the Lafayette Players were forced to disband. Many of the members of the group went on to long careers in theater, film and eventually television. Evelyn Preer died young after a bout with pneumonia in the same year. While their contributions to the acceptance of black actors and black theater is not often cited in historical texts, the Lafayette Players paved the way for serious black actors and producers in the United States by effectively changing the conversation about what these artists were capable of and what their audiences had appetites for.
The Lafayette Players, and the history of Black theatrical companies, are so important to the story of filmmaking! It would be cool to trace how much theatrical companies tended to work together later on in the film industry.
Knowing that there was a group like the Lafayette Players is inspiring because it shows that the black community wasn’t entirely helpless and victim against white filmmakers. Cinema at the time was a massive influence on how black people were stereotyped based on depiction of black characters, so it was crucial for actors like Anita Bush to represent the race in a more realistic light. My reading on black spectatorship is based on films that were made for white audiences, but I think all that was needed for black people to find an uplifting message within the films was something mainstream that understood what they truly wished to consume as an audience.
As Dr. Posner commented, it would be cool to trace some of these theatrical companies. I think it’s a really good idea to give attention to some of these forgotten heroes like Anita Bush who helped fight an oppressing systematically racist film industry by paving her own road and becoming a role model for a lot of African Americans in those times. It is a wonderful idea to trace the integration of Lafayette players and other black theatrical companies into the film industry as a whole and the affects it had and the pushback they surely felt from an industry fixated on racial stereotypes when portraying African Americans.