Trailblazing Playwright and Novelist Alice Childress Was a Member of Sigma Gamma Rho

Did you know that Alice Childress, the pioneering playwright, novelist, and actress, was a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.? She stands among the sorority’s most celebrated literary figures.

Alice Childress was born on October 12, 1916, in Charleston, South Carolina, and moved to Harlem as a child, where she was raised by her grandmother. Though she never finished high school or attended college, she educated herself, nurtured by her grandmother’s love of reading and her own determination. In 1939, she joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem, where she performed for more than a decade and appeared in the acclaimed production Anna Lucasta.

Childress soon turned to writing, and in doing so she made history. Her first play, Florence, was written in a single night in 1949, reportedly on a dare from her friend Sidney Poitier. A few years later, with Gold Through the Trees (1952), she became the first African American woman to have a play professionally produced on the New York stage. She would go on to become known as the only African American woman to write, produce, and publish plays across four decades.

Her landmark drama Trouble in Mind, a searing look at racism in the theater world, was a hit when it opened off-Broadway in 1955. Producers wanted it on Broadway, but Childress refused to change the ending, and the transfer collapsed; had it opened, she would have been the first African American woman with a play on Broadway. The play finally reached Broadway in a celebrated 2021 revival. Childress also earned wide acclaim for her fiction, including the young adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (1973), the story of a teenager struggling with addiction, which she adapted into a 1978 film starring Cicely Tyson.

Alice Childress died on August 14, 1994, at the age of 77. Her papers are preserved at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and her fearless body of work reflects the Sigma Gamma Rho motto, “Greater Service, Greater Progress.”