Richard Berry Harrison Biography

actor, was born in London, Ontario, Canada, the son of Thomas L. Harrison and Ysobel Benton, fugitive slaves who escaped from the United States via the underground railroad. As a boy, Harrison augmented the family income by selling papers outside the local theater, where he first saw professional actors perform.

Following his father's death and the family's move to Detroit, Michigan, Harrison helped support his five younger siblings by working as a bellhop and porter. With the assistance of Chambless Hull, a theater manager, Harrison was admitted to the Detroit Training School of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1887. Prevented from working in the legitimate theater by racial discrimination, Harrison made his first appearance in 1891 as a dramatic reader, touring the United States and Canada with a repertoire that included Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Damon and Pythias, as well as the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Burns, Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tennyson, Hugo, and Shakespeare.

In 1893, while preparing a program for the Chicago Exposition, he met the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The two became good friends, touring the country to promote Dunbar's book, Oak and Ivory. It was while reading Dunbar's poetry that Harrison gained experience with the dialectical speech that he

would use later in his career. In late 1900 Dunbar wrote two plays for Harrison, Robert Herrick and Winter Roses. He also served as Harrison's best man when he married Gertrude Janet Washington in 1895; the couple had a daughter, Marian Ysobel, and a son, whom they named after the poet.

Near the turn of the century Harrison went into railroad service as a Pullman-car porter and waiter, becoming a superintendent of mail for the Santa Fe Railroad in Los Angeles. It was there that he was hired by L. E. Behymer as a reader for the Behymer Lyceum Bureau (later the Great Western Bureau). Harrison had a long career touring his one-man show, giving readings and lectures at tents, churches, schools, social functions, and celebrations throughout Canada, the southern United States, and Mexico. During World War I, Harrison was involved with work for various African-American church schools, including fundraising and teaching courses in

elocution. He established summer courses in New York for young black men and women as part of his work with the Greater New York Federation of Churches. In 1922, after having taught at Branch Normal in Arkansas, Flipper-Key College in Oklahoma, and the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia, Harrison convinced J. B. Dudley, the president of North Carolina A & T in Greensboro, North Carolina, to establish a summer drama school for teachers.As the chair of dramatics for seven years, Harrison helped the enrollment of the program grow from seventeen to over 200 students.

During the winter months, Harrison continued his work as a lecturer, educator, and reader, making his headquarters in New York City. In 1923 he appeared at the Lafayette Theatre as the leading role in Pa Williams' Gal, a commercially unsuccessful play by actor Frank Wilson. Harrison was the solo reader for a backer's audition of Garland Anderson's play, Appearances, at the Waldorf Astoria Grand Ballroom in 1925 and may have appeared in a revue along with Paul Robeson, Will Mercer Cook, and Carl White.

In 1929 Harrison received a call from a casting agent at the Immense Thespians, Inc., in Harlem, one week before rehearsals for Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures were to begin. Although he was offered the role of the Lord immediately, Harrison, a deeply religious man, hesitated before accepting the immense responsibility of playing God on stage. His fears of committing a sacrilegious act were calmed by Episcopal bishop Herbert Shipman, and Harrison accepted the task of performing a black God for a nearly all-white audience. Having little experience with performing as a cast member in a fully mounted professional production, Harrison worked throughout the five-week rehearsal period with acting coach Danton Walker.

The resulting production, which opened on 26 February 1930, was one that New York audiences immediately recognized, in Brooks Atkinson's words, as having "ethereal beauty." No small amount of this praise was due to Harrison's appearance as "De Lawd." Although Harrison's name did not join the title of the play on the marquee until five years later, Heywood Broun attested to the debt that was owed him: "You can run along Broadway night after night, sprinting from show to show, and see no better rounded and complete performance than that given by Richard Harrison." Following a long run in New York, Harrison set out on four consecutive national tours of the play, creating a steady stream of admirers. While on tour, Harrison was frequently sought by church groups, social organizations, schools, and literary societies to give readings and lectures, a responsibility he accepted with grace and humility.

On 22 March 1930 Harrison was presented with the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually by the president of the NAACP to an American citizen of African descent for the most distinguished achievement of the year in any honorable field of human endeavor. The New York Herald Tribune capsulized the singular accomplishment of

Richard Harrison: "To give this recognition to Mr. Harrison seems peculiarly appropriate. . . . It is peculiarly fitting that this triumph should come to a man who worked for so many unrecognized decades as dramatic reader and entertainer, interpreting to the mass of his own people the finest things in English literature. In his sixty-seventh year he receives this recognition for a role which caps a lifetime of service."

While on tour, Harrison was given the keys to the cities of Chicago and London, Ontario, by their respective mayors. The tours were not entirely without difficulty, however. In many of the cities in which the all-black company performed, Jim Crow laws made it impossible for them to attain any but third-class accommodations. The most publicized controversy occurred in Washington, D.C., where The Green Pastures was scheduled to open at the segregated National Theatre. Harrison received pressure to boycott the performance by influential members of politics, literature, and scholarship and by organizations such as the NAACP. Refusing to make his

art an instrument of politics, Harrison performed as scheduled, despite threats of physical violence against him and the cast. Soon after the show returned to New York City in 1935, Harrison became ill, "plumb tuckered out," and suddenly died. Thousands paid their respects at a service in New York before his body was returned to his family in Chicago for burial.

Throughout his life, Harrison had suffered professionally because of his race. Unable to gain employment in any of the legitimate theaters, he supported his family and his art by working in menial jobs and maintaining the grueling schedule of performing his one-man show. He dedicated himself to the betterment of his race by the establishment of elocution and speech programs across the southern states. It was his goal to establish a college of dramatic arts for black actors and to further the visible contributions of black artists to the theater. Despite his own struggles to succeed as an actor, and his subsequently enormous success in his only starring professional role, Harrison remained a gentle and humble man, unimpressed with his own success and dedicated to creating a better future for those who followed.

Courtesy of ANB Biography of the Day