Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays

The Muslims Present Orgena

“…Unlike Du Bois, Louis X was not concerned with the white attendance at his pageant, nor their reaction. Du Bois's forays into drama, including his pageants and plays that he collected for his unpublished Playthings of the Night (1931), were designed to both instill black pride and engender a white acceptance of black culture (Lokke 2017). Du Bois stated he wanted the pageant to "get people interested in the development of Negro drama," teach "the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life through a new theatre," but also "reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing" (in Krasner 2002:82).…”