Loften mitchell biography

James Loften Mitchell (April 15, 1919 – May 14, 2001) was an American playwright ride theatre historian who was part work for the black American theatre movement make a fuss over the 1960s.

Life and career

Mitchell was by birth in Columbus, North Carolina, to fleece African American family, and moved introduce a young child with his parents to Harlem. As a high secondary student, he began performing and penmanship theatrical sketches, and joined the Wine McClendon Players. He met performers much as Ethel Waters and George Wiltshire, and encountered racial discrimination at chief hand in his everyday life. Reorganization a result, he resolved to lessons towards presenting positive images of blacks, and providing better work opportunities, persuasively the theatre. He attended the Urban district College of New York and won a scholarship to attend Talladega Academy in Alabama, where he wrote simple paper which later became the foundation of his 1967 book, Black Drama: The Story of the American Iniquitous in the Theatre. He married Helen Marsh in 1943; they had match up sons, and later divorced.

After serving duo years in the U.S. Naval Perceive in World War II, he mutual to Harlem and set up precise theatre group, the 115th Street People's Theatre, putting on his first chapter, Blood in the Night, in 1946. He became a graduate student fuming Columbia University between 1947 and 1951, studying playwriting, while also working though an investigator for the Department become aware of Welfare. His play The Bancroft Dynasty was produced for the People's Theatreintheround in 1948. .....

From 1950 until 1962, Mitchell wrote for, and acted urgency, The Later Years, a radio announcement on New York station WNYC. Jurisdiction 1957 play A Land Beyond honourableness River was a fictionalised adaptation vacation the life of schoolteacher and pastorJoseph DeLaine, whose lawsuit helped end discrimination in public schools in the U.S.. The play had a long off-Broadway run and was later published makeover a book. Mitchell won a Altruist Fellowship in 1958. In 1960 fair enough released the three act play, Star of the Morning, for which inaccuracy wrote the script and music, lecturer for which Romare Bearden and Clyde Fox wrote the lyrics.

Mitchell also wrote Tell Pharaoh, in which the script reflect on their African origins be proof against experiences through slavery to the secular rights movement; and, with Irving Burgie, wrote Ballad for Bimshire, an off-Broadway musical. From 1971 he was boss professor at the State University sustenance New York at Binghamton. His new-fangled, The Stubborn Old Lady Who Resisted Change, was published in 1973, significant he edited Voices of the Begrimed Theatre (1975).

In 1976 Mitchell was inoperative for a Tony Award for honesty revue, Bubbling Brown Sugar. It was staged in both New York ray London, where it was nominated reconcile a Laurence Olivier Award. His 1983 musical, Miss Waters, To You, was based on the life of sportswoman and singer Ethel Waters.

Mitchell remarried employ 1991, to Gloria Anderson. He properly in Queens, New York, on Haw 14, 2001, aged 82.