Acclaimed Playwright Ntozake Shange Was an Honorary Member of Alpha Kappa Alpha

Did you know that the acclaimed playwright and poet Ntozake Shange was an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.?

Shange was born Paulette Linda Williams on October 18, 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey, into an accomplished family; her father was a surgeon and her mother an educator and psychiatric social worker, and their home welcomed guests like Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. After her family moved to St. Louis, she was among the Black children bused to a white school in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, where she faced painful racism that would later inform her art.

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1970 and a master’s from the University of Southern California in 1973. In 1971, she shed the name she considered a relic of slavery and took a new one from the Xhosa and Zulu languages: Ntozake, “she who comes with her own things,” and Shange, “she who walks like a lion.”

In 1975, Shange changed American theater with For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf a groundbreaking “choreopoem” that wove together poetry, dance, and music to tell the stories of Black women’s pain, strength, and survival. The work moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway and earned the Obie Award, and it remains one of the most celebrated works of Black feminist theater; it was adapted into a film in 2010.

A prolific artist, Shange went on to write novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo and Betsey Brown, along with poetry collections and children’s books. Her honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Langston Hughes Medal, and a Shelley Memorial Award. Ntozake Shange died on October 27, 2018, at the age of 70, remembered as a fearless voice for Black women whose artistry reflected the scholarship and service celebrated by Alpha Kappa Alpha.

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