Playwright explored African-american life
Despite discrimination, also led wa y in radio, tv, and as university teacher
William Branch, a leading black playwright of the 1950s who helped bring the African-american experience to the off- Broadway stage, then turned to radio and television as a writer, director and producer of works that explored the complexities of race in America, died Nov. 3 at a palliative care centre in Hawthorne, N.Y. He was 92.
The cause was cancer, said his daughter, Rochelle Branch.
Branch, the son of a charismatic minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, initially pursued acting, appearing alongside Sidney Poitier in an all- black 1951 production of Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
But he found that there were few serious dramatic roles for black actors and decided that rather than wait for African- American playwrights to gain increasing recognition, he would try to join their ranks and write the sort of parts that he sought to play. “What I am interested in is the wide diversity, along with the many basic commonalities, of the black experience in America,” he said.
His first play, a one- act drama called A Medal for Willie, premièred in 1951 at the Club Baron in Harlem, more than a decade before the Black Arts Movement got underway. Produced by the left- wing Committee for the Negro in the Arts, it was inspired by a short newspaper article about a three- star general dispatched to present a posthumous award to a dead soldier’s family, a story Branch had clipped and carried around in his wallet.
The play emphasized the way in which young Cpl. Willie Jackson is praised as a hero in death, after long being treated with contempt or neglect by a racist, heavily segregated society. “I can’t help thinkin’ Willie died fightin’ in the wrong place,” his mother says, interrupting the medal ceremony to add: “Willie shoulda had that machine gun over here!”
Branch, then 24, was inducted into the Army the morning after Willie premièred and spent much of the next two years in Germany, working on his plays while serving with an educational training unit. His later works included In Splendid Error (1954), which starred William Marshall as Frederick Douglass debating fellow abolitionist John Brown, and Light in the Southern Sky ( 1958), about educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune.
As before, however, Branch soured on his career prospects and decided on a change, switching his focus to radio and television — even as he quipped that the best offer he could get from NBC was a janitor’s job. Working with Jackie Robinson, who broke the colour line of Major League Baseball, he ghostwrote a syndicated column for the New York Post in the late 1950s and directed The Jackie Robinson Show, a radio interview program with guests including former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
In the 1960s, he directed and wrote for The Alma John Show, a syndicated radio program, and was a producer and writer for public television specials, including for what is now WNET in New York. Partnering with filmmaker William Greaves, he co- created the 1968 documentary Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, which received an Emmy nomination and American Film Festival blue ribbon.
“We had difficulties once ‘Still a Brother’ was finished because ( National Educational Television) had not expected that kind of film,” Greaves once said.
Narrated by Ossie Davis, the actor, playwright and civil rights activist, the documentary featured interview subjects such as Horace Morris, an organizer with the National Urban League who was in Newark, N. J., amid the 1967 riots, during which police reportedly shot up his car, fatally wounded his stepfather and injured his brother. “No matter how far up the economic ladder you climb, there’s still the oppressive prejudice of the white man ... You’re still a brother,” said Morris.
Branch later wrote and produced TV specials for NBC News, led his own media consulting firm, taught drama and literature, and edited a pair of theatrical anthologies, winning an American Book Award for Black Thunder: An Anthology of Contemporary African- American Drama (1992).
In large part, he said, his interest in drama stemmed from his father.
“Years later when I had an opportunity to study drama formally, I realized that in my father’s church were the basic elements of what was called drama,” he told the scholarly journal African-american Review in 2004. “To this day, in my memory, my father remains the most awesome ‘ stage’ figure I have ever seen. He didn’t call himself an actor, but let’s face it: black preachers are very effective actors.”
The sixth of seven sons, William Blackwell Branch was born in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 11, 1927. An older brother, Frederick Branch, was later the first African-american officer in the Marine Corps.
The family moved frequently because of his father’s preaching. A standout orator, William Branch won competitions and scholarships that helped him attend Northwestern University near Chicago, where he was nonetheless “denied housing on campus because he was black and wasn’t allowed to eat in the cafeteria,” his daughter said.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1949, later receiving a master’s in dramatic arts from Columbia University in 1958 and doing postgraduate work at Yale University.
Branch received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959; served on the board of the American Society of African Culture, a cultural exchange group that was secretly funded by the CIA; and taught at schools including the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Cornell University and what is now William Paterson University in Wayne, N. J.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include two grandchildren.
While Branch said he was delighted by the success of black playwrights in younger generations, notably August Wilson, he was reluctant to suggest that equality had been achieved.
“Even though things are somewhat better than the past, racism is not dead — certainly not dead in the theatre either,” he told the African- American Review. “There is a long, long way to go before there is anything like equality of opportunity.”
To this day, in my memory, my fat her remains the most awesome ‘ stage’ figure I have ever seen. He didn’t call himself an actor, but let’s face it: black preachers are very effective actors. — William branch, African-american playwright