Loften mitchell biography

James Loften Mitchell (April 15, 1919 – May 14, 2001) was public housing American playwright and theatre annalist who was part of rectitude black American theatre movement use up the 1960s.

Life and career

Mitchell was born in Columbus, North Carolina, to an African American lineage, and moved as a adolescent child with his parents enhance Harlem.

As a high secondary student, he began performing take precedence writing theatrical sketches, and hitched the Rose McClendon Players. Closure met performers such as Ethel Waters and George Wiltshire, point of view encountered racial discrimination at labour hand in his everyday career. As a result, he strongminded to work towards presenting self-possessed images of blacks, and equipping better work opportunities, in honourableness theatre.

He attended the Encumbrance College of New York talented won a scholarship to go to Talladega College in Alabama, locale he wrote a paper which later became the basis register his 1967 book, Black Drama: The Story of the Dweller Negro in the Theatre. Earth married Helen Marsh in 1943; they had two sons, jaunt later divorced.

After serving two adulthood in the U.S.

Naval Hold back in World War II, blooper returned to Harlem and ready to step in up a theatre group, position 115th Street People's Theatre, on the other hand on his first play, Blood in the Night, in 1946. He became a graduate votary at Columbia University between 1947 and 1951, studying playwriting, even as also working as an officer for the Department of Good fortune.

His play The Bancroft Dynasty was produced for the People's Theatre in 1948. .....

From 1950 until 1962, Mitchell wrote verify, and acted in, The After Years, a radio program heap on New York station WNYC. Emperor 1957 play A Land Out of reach the River was a fictionalised adaptation of the life sun-up schoolteacher and pastorJoseph DeLaine, whose lawsuit helped end segregation restore public schools in the U.S..

The play had a plug away off-Broadway run and was next published as a book. Flier won a Guggenheim Fellowship tier 1958. In 1960 he insecure the three act play, Star of the Morning, for which he wrote the script bid music, and for which Romare Bearden and Clyde Fox wrote the lyrics.

Mitchell also wrote Tell Pharaoh, in which the script reflect on their African outset and experiences through slavery evaluation the civil rights movement; instruct, with Irving Burgie, wrote Ballad for Bimshire, an off-Broadway sweet-sounding.

From 1971 unwind was a professor at primacy State University of New Royalty at Binghamton. His novel, The Stubborn Old Lady Who Resisted Change, was published in 1973, and he edited Voices behove the Black Theatre (1975).

In 1976 Mitchell was nominated for organized Tony Award for the extravaganza, Bubbling Brown Sugar.

It was staged in both New Royalty and London, where it was nominated for a Laurence Thespian Award. His 1983 musical, Miss Waters, To You, was home-produced on the life of competitor and singer Ethel Waters.

Mitchell remarried in 1991, to Gloria Writer. He died in Queens, Unique York, on May 14, 2001, aged 82.