The Black Arts Movement in Cleveland

By the time Charles Gilpin came to Cleveland in 1922 to perform Eugine O’Neil’s “The Emperor Jones,” he was one of the most popular African American performers in the nation.  A minstrel performer, comedic actor, singer, and dancer, Gilpin was an influential figure in the culmination and proliferation of African American theater in Cleveland.  His performance at the Settlement House was viewed by many within Cleveland’s African American community as demeaning.  Nevertheless, the Dumas Players watched the play and met with Gilpin afterward to talk.  The Dumas Players listened to Gilpin urging them to be one of the best African American theater groups in the country.  “You can make this a real Negro theater, maybe the best in the world.  You can do it. If there aren’t any plays get somebody to write them for you.  Within your bodies and soul lie the immense possibilities of your race, and it is up to you to make successes. . .”[1]  It was that night the Gilpin Players were formed.  Changing their name from the Dumas Players to the Gilpin Players in honor of Charles Gilpin, the Settlement House performers grew slowly, but steadily. 

There first performance was called “Granny Maumee.”  It was a stark one-act play about an embittered blind mother, ready to use her voodoo from her royal African past against the white man.  The white man is represented by a mob who burns her son alive.[2]  By their fifth season the Gilpin Players were comprised of thirty active members and had performed forty-three plays.  By 1929, membership was up to forty-five and they had performed seventy plays.[3]  Charles Gilpin, along with an individual by the name of Langston Hughes, helped create and perpetuate what became known as the Harlem Renascence.

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[1] Reuben Silver, “A History of the Karamu Theater of Karamu House, 1915-1960,” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1961), 110-111.

[2] Ibid, 92.

[3] Ibid, 131