For every well-known showcase of Black Broadway – “Porgy and Bess,” 1935; “A Raisin in the Sun” 1959; last year’s “Purpose,” winner of both the Tony and Pulitzer — there are little-remembered milestones ranging over the past two centuries. The gallery below, in honor of Black History Month (which several federal agencies now have banned employees from celebrating),  samples the history of theater by, for and with Black Americans, taken from collections at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Museum of the City of New York

The flyer promoted a show by the African Company, the first professional Black theater troupe in America, started in 1820, and housed in the African Grove Theater in Greenwich Village. It produced Shakespeare’s plays and also original dramas, including one by founder William Alexander Brown, credited as the first play by a Black playwright produced in America: “The Drama of King Shotaway,” based on an insurrection by Black Caribbeans against the British in 1795 on the island of St. Vincent. (Somewhat confusingly, another playwright with a similar name, William Wells Brown, is credited with writing the first known play by a Black playwright to be published in the United States, in 1858: “The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom,” a combination comedy and melodrama about two slaves who secretly marry.)

It was at the African Grove where Ira Aldridge began his theatrical career Born in New York in 1807, he became one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his time (famous enough to have his portrait painted) — although only after he left America for Europe at the age of sixteen. Aldridge is said to be the first Black actor to have portrayed Othello, in 1825, some two centuries after William Shakespeare had created the character of “the Moor.” Over the next four decades, Aldridge toured widely and to great acclaim in Europe, (Adrian Lester portrayed him a decade ago in a play entitled “Red Velvet.“)

Many white actors have portrayed Othello, often in blackface. On Broadway, these have included Edwin Booth in the 1860s, and Walter Huston in the 1930s (father of director John Huston, granddaughter of actress Anjelica Huston.) But since the 1940s Broadway has seen a series of celebrated Black actors in the role, most famously Paul Robeson, then Moses Gunn in the 1970s, James Earl Jones in 1980s, Denzel Washington in 2025.

In much of the 19th century, the most popular form of entertainment in New York, as well as the rest of the country, were minstrel shows, which involved white performers portraying Black characters in blackface. But the history of minstrel shows is complicated. As early as the 1840s, minstrel shows made stars out of such African-American entertainers as Thomas Dilward, and William Henry Lane, nicknamed Master Juba, who toured with the otherwise all-white Ethiopian Minstrels billed as the “Greatest Dancer in the World.” Lane is considered the father of tap dance.
Yes, the black minstrel show performers were required to wear blackface themselves. Did they consider this degrading? A clue is that several of the biggest stars followed Ira Aldridge’s lead and moved to England.

The biggest Broadway star to emerge from minstrel shows was Bert Williams, who in 1911 launched a successful solo career that included becoming the only Black performer cast year after year in the Ziegfeld Follies. Williams was, according to his friend W.C. Fields, “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” Williams was probably the most popular African-American entertainer at the turn of the twentieth century, a man of many talents, and many firsts.He and his partner George Walker created four musicals on Broadway between 1901 and 1908, including “In Dahomey,” 1903-1904, Above, Hattie McIntosh, George Walker, Ada Overton Walker, Bert Williams, and Lottie Williams perform a cakewalk

Charles Gilpin in the stage production The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, 1920, a role that Paul Robeson would play in the movie adaptation. (Gilpin’s career is the subject of a recent movie, The Black Emperor of Broadway.)

A publicity still from “Shuffle Along,” a 1921 Broadway musical created by four Black men — it was composed by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissel and a book by the comedy duo of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles — and featuring an all-Black cast, including the Broadway debut of Paul Robeson, at age 23. ( George C. Wolfe remade the musical on Broadway in 2016 )

Paul Robeson in the 1924 Broadway production of “All God’s Chilun Got Wings” by Eugene O’Neill, and in the title role of “Othello,” in 1943

Langston Hughes’ play “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, produced on Broadway in 1935, tells the story of a mixed-race boy’s self-acceptance after his white father rejects him. It is unclear whether the lead Hurst Amyx, was himself mixed race.

The Harlem Renaissance was a fertile time for Black theater, climaxing in the dozens of productions by the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930’s.. click on photographs to read the captions:

Theater during the Black Lives Matter explosion in 2020, available online then (since in-person theater was closed.)

Plays on Broadway featuring Black performers in the seasons since have been a mix of revivals and original works, many of them written by Black playwrights Below: ”Topdog/Underdog,” the revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play; “The Piano Lesson,” the revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play; “Ain’t No Mo’,” by Jordan E Cooper, marking the playwright’s Broadway debut at age 27; “Ohio State Murders” with Audra McDonald by Adrienne Kennedy, marking the playwright’s Broadway debut at age 91, in the James Earl Jones Theater, one of the three Broadway theaters (re)named after Black theater artists. “Fat Ham,” James Ijames’s modern-day adaptation of “Hamlet,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. a revival of Ossie Davis’s “Purlie Victorious,” which added the subtitle “A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cabbage Patch.” ,Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja African Hair Braiding,” about a group of West African immigrants to New York, was the first Broadway show to use “African” in its title in 120 years.  
Last season, in addition to “Purpose and “Othello”: A revival of “Our Town” with one of the two main families portrayed by four Black actors (meaning that a focus was on an interracial marriage.), James Monroe Iglehart as Louis Armstrong in “A Wonderful World” and six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald as Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” the first Black Rose on Broadway (which sounds like a show title!) 

The current Broadway season so far has featured acclaimed performances by Black performers in a number of productions, including Joshua Henry in a revival of “Ragimte,” Namir Smallwood in “Bug,” Christiani Pitts in “Two Strangers…”.

Coming up largely Black casts for the Broadway transfer of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” a revival of “Proof” (with Don Cheadle, Ayo Edibiri and Samara Wiley all making their Broadway debuts) and the third Broadway production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” starring Taraji P. Henson making her Broadway debut. It is one of the ten plays by August Wilson in his Pittsburgh Cycle — one play set in each of the decades of the twentieth century — all of which have been produced on Broadway. Together they are unmatched in telling the twentieth century history of the Black American experience — a singular achievement of Black Broadway.