Playwright Willis Richardson was born in Wilmington, NC on Nov. 5, 1889. When he was nine years old, on Nov. 10, 1898, a group of White men overthrew the predominately Black-led government, terrorizing and killing some local citizens in the process. This event became known as the Wilmington Massacre. Soon afterward, his family moved to Washington, D.C. There he attended elementary schools from 1899 to 1906. Later Richardson attended and graduated from M Street School (later Dunbar High School the first public high school for African-Americans in the United States) in 1910.
While attending high school there, he was encouraged to write plays by one of his teachers, Mary P. Burrill, a playwright herself. She was influential in having Richardson’s first play read and evaluated by Alain Locke. Angelina Grimke, also an English teacher at the school, reviewed some of his poems. It was her play, "Rachel,” that would give him his impetus to seek a career as a dramatist. Rachel depicts an educated, sensitive young woman whose family has migrated to a northern city in order to escape the racial violence of the South. She comes to understand the realities of American racism when she learns the long-withhold truth, that her brother and father were lynched.
Forced to turn down a scholarship to Howard University, because of his family’s finances, Richardson entered government service on March 7th 1911. He was appointed a skilled helper in the Wetting Division of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. After receiving numerous promotions, he was appointed custodian of presses effective 17 Sept. 1936, where he worked until his retirement in 1954. It was at the Bureau that he met his future wife, Mary Ellen Jones, in 1912. This job afforded him a secure source of income and ample time to write. They were married two years later on September 14, 1914.
Richardson made a firm commitment to study the technique of dramatic writing. From 1916 to 1918 he prepared himself for playwrighting by taking correspondence courses in poetry and drama. His accomplishments and the “firsts” in his career were many. “The Deacon’s Awakening” was his first play published in Crisis, November 1920. Richardson became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway when "The Chip Woman's Fortune" opened at the Frazee Theatre on May 15th 1923, where it played 31 performances. It shared the bill with Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” and Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.”
“The Chip Woman’s Fortune”, a non-musical was the first serious drama by an African American that appeared on Broadway. It is for this first milestone that Richardson is most remembered. Earlier this play had opened in Chicago as a production of the Ethiopian Art Players on Jan 29th 1923. It also opened in Washington, D.C. on April 23rd, and on May 7th at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem. In the early twenties Black drama groups were searching for plays by Black writers. Richardson was the first to fulfill this need with his Black history plays and plays that "emphasized the physical strength, the nobility, and the courage of his heroes."
Active in literary circles in the District of Columbia, Richardson wrote plays, as well as fairy tales and histories. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays. He urged Black Americans to seek their dramatic material in their own lives and circumstances. Richardson was awarded the Amy Spingarn Prize, in the drama contest conducted by The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1925, with Eugene O'Neill as one of the judges. He won a second time in 1926 and received honorable mention in the Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life (the National Urban League's official publication), drama contest in 1925.
Other dramas by Richardson included “Mortgaged,” produced in 1924 by the Howard University Players. Except for the plays written by Howard University students, this was the first play written by a Black dramatist that was staged at the University. W.E.B Du Bois’s philosophies greatly influenced Richardson and he based his play, Mortgaged, on Du Bois’s “talented tenth” philosophy. His folk drama, “Compromise: A Folk Play,” published in 1925, and “A Pillar of the Church” was the first play by a Black dramatist to be presented by the Gilpin Players in Cleveland. The Gilpin Players also produced Richardson's Compromise at the Karamu Theater on 25 Feb. 1925.
In 1926 he won first prize in Crisis’ plays category for “Boot-Black Lover". The influence of DuBois on Richardson went beyond publishing his essays on the theatre. Indubitably Richardson’s political concerns caught the attention of DuBois. Dr. DuBois requested and published Richardson’s first children’s play in "The Brownie’s Book", a children's magazine he helped to found. The Ethiopian Art Players, who took the play to Broadway, were seeking African-American playwrights. DuBois put them in touch with Richardson. DuBois also published Compromise again, in The Crisis, July, 1927, to generate more interest in it and its author.
Willis Richardson was a regular between 1926-1936 with the “Saturday Nighters”. The “Saturday Nighters,” were a progressive circle of performers, writers, artists and thinkers who met for Saturday night discussions at the house of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Johnson served her guests cake and wine, and gently encouraged her visitors to contribute or leave the group. Many of the Harlem Renaissance's most prominent dignitaries were there. They included Alain Locke, Angeline Weld Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Willis Richardson was a member of the Dramatists' Guild of the Authors' League of America, and the Harlem Cultural Council.
In 1928 his drama, “The Broken Banjo: A Folk Tragedy,” was published in The Crisis, and won first prize of $75 in the Crisis’ Drama Awards. He received an honorable mention for plays in the Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life (the National Urban League's official publication), Contest for “The Fall of the Conjurer.” For Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Richardson compiled and edited his first anthology “Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro” (1930). James Lesesne Wells executed the illustrations for this anthology In 1935, with May Miller, he co-edited “Negro History in Thirteen Plays.”
In his plays and in the anthologies he edited, Richardson attempted to dramatize Black heroes and to give a realistic view of African American life. As early as 1919 in a Crisis magazine essay, he stated his philosophy and purpose of the plays he hoped to write: "the kind of play that shows the soul of a people." His plays reflected this philosophy throughout his writing career. Richardson has been hailed as the Father of African-American community theater. He was one of the most significant playwright and drama anthologist during the 1920s and 1930s during the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.