Florence

About Alice Childress

Biography of Alice Childress from blackpast.org
Here's a great overview of Childress's life and career (as both playwright and actress) from Roundabout Theatre's recent production of her play Trouble in Mind.

Childress started out as an actor, and won acclaim and a Tony Award nomination with an appearance on Broadway in 1944 in the play Anna Lucasta. But Childress came to grow dissatisfied with the types of roles that were made available to her as a Black woman, and took to playwriting as a way of expressing herself more freely and creating more dignified and truthful roles for Black women. Florence was her first play. She is also renowned for the plays Trouble in Mind (1955), Wedding Band (1966), and Wine in the Wilderness (1969). Childress was the first African American woman playwright to have one of her plays produced professionally in New York.

About Florence

Historian Doris Abramson writes that Alice Childress composed Florence (her first play) in response to something that the actor Sidney Poitier once said to her, that "in a play about Negroes and whites, only a 'life and death thing' like lynching is interesting on stage." She wrote Florence in one night (some time in 1949) to prove Poitier wrong. The play was first performed in Harlem in the summer of 1950.

Source: Doris Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1929-1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 189.

Jim Crow

Florence depicts the era of "Jim Crow": the regime of legal segregation that was in place throughout the country, particularly in the South, in the decades after the Civil War. Legal segregation did not end until the late-1960s. Some resources:

An overview of Jim Crow laws from the History Channel.
Here's a great summary, with links to lots of additional resources, from the "Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia" located at Ferris State University, in Michigan
Here's a sample of Jim Crow laws from 1880s-1960s across different states, compiled by the National Parks Service.

Jim Crow and Transportation

Jim Crow laws were particularly strict and difficult within the realm of trasportation:

Read this excerpt from the book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, which discusses railroad station waiting rooms in the South.
Here's an article from Smithsonian Magazine about a "Jim Crow car" on a southern rail route. (Mrs. Carter alludes to the segregated cars on the train when she says to Mama, "When it comes, I won't see you until New York. These silly laws.")
Another interesting article entitled "From Jim Crow to Now: On the Realities of Traveling While Black" from "Literary Hub"

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