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The turn of the twentieth century constituted, in the famous term of historian Rayford Logan, a "nadir" in the status and civil rights of African Americans;1 the passage of Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 institutionalized segregation; white southerners used violence and legal tricks to extirpate African American suffrage until the Fifteenth Amendment remained "in name only"; and anti-black race riots erupted in cities including Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), and Springfield, Illinois (1908).2 Lynching terrorized African American communities throughout the United States, with one person lynched every fourth day between 1900 and 1909, and nine out of ten of these victims were African American.3
This physical and legal violence coupled with and depended on cultural violence, and sometimes the connection was direct; for example, a dramatization of Thomas Dixon's 1905 white supremacist novel, The Clansman, was staged in Atlanta immediately before the 1906 riot, and many scholars believe that the theatrical production fomented the violence.4 However, such explicit connections were exceptional; more commonly, racist violence occurred alongside with and received justification from a rising mass culture-particularly advertising-that dehumanized African Americans and naturalized white supremacy.5
The African American poet Angelina Weld Grimké understood the connections between physical and cultural violence. An anti-lynching activist since her teens, Grimké wrote Rachel, a 1916 propagandists drama that attacked both anti-black violence and racist imagery.6 Rachel earns prominence in the history of American drama not merely because it was the first non-musical play that was written, professionally produced, and performed by African Americans, but more importantly because it deeply influenced African American theatre.7 Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch credit the play with "spark[ing]" the debate, most often associated with Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, on whether African American plays should aim to produce propaganda or "art for its own sake"; David Krasner reads the play in light of Walter Benjamin's work on mourning and allegory to argue that Grimké's drama "constructs the spiritual quest of redemption for those seeking answers to indescribable terror"; and Judith L. Stephens shows that Rachel inaugurated the genre of the anti-lynching drama, which was to include at least eleven extant plays written by African American women between 1916 and 1933.8 Most recently, Koritha Mitchell argues persuasively that Grimké...