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Excerpt from Goat Alley: A Tragedy of Negro Life In a dingy little hall on a side street Mr. Ernest Howard Culbertson began rehearsals of "Goat Alley," his tragedy of Negro life in a Washington slum. The actors were, with one exception, amateurs - colored working people who gave their time and services for the sake of what they felt to be an artistic expression of the life of their race. The author had no sociological intention; he had no ambition to be a propagandist. He had not even a special interest in the racial problem. He thought that he had come upon an action that has the quality of tragic inevitableness. He thought, furthermore, that tragedy does not reside in pomp and circumstance, but in the profound realities of human helpfulness and human suffering, and that poor Lucy Belle struggling to maintain her spiritual integrity in Goat Alley was a protagonist worthy of the sternest art and the largest sympathy. He built up his action from within. He saw that the Negro cannot yet hope, like the white man, to transcend common standards. He must first reach them. Hence the Negro girl's struggle for her own integrity is not yet the struggle of Nora or Magda - the struggle to be true to her self; it is the struggle to remain true to the man of her real choice. To transcend a necessary order one must first have achieved it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Honorable Mention, 2016 Errol Hill Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theater, Drama and/or Performance Based on a vast amount of archival research, Adrienne Macki Braconi’s illuminating study of three important community-based theaters in Harlem shows how their work was essential to the formation of a public identity for African Americans and the articulation of their goals, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the Civil Rights movement. Macki Braconi uses textual analysis, performance reconstruction, and audience reception to examine the complex dynamics of productions by the Krigwa Players, the Harlem Experimental Theatre, and the Negro Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Even as these theaters demonstrated the extraordinary power of activist art, they also revealed its limits. The stage was a site in which ideological and class differences played out, theater being both a force for change and a collision of contradictory agendas. Macki Braconi’s book alters our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, the roots of the Civil Rights movement, and the history of community theater in America.

Forgotten today, established Black communities once existed in the alleyways of Washington, D.C., even in neighborhoods as familiar as Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom. James Borchert's study delves into the lives and folkways of the largely alley dwellers and how their communities changed from before the Civil War, to the late 1890s era when almost 20,000 people lived in alley houses, to the effects of reform and gentrification in the mid-twentieth century.