Conclusion: The end of “Butter Side Up”

Abstract

By 1927, several events had left their indelible mark on African American theatre and performance. Florence Mills had died, Charles Gilpin was no longer active, Marcus Garvey had been deported, and Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois were showing diminishing interest in theatre and drama. In the late 1920s, Locke and Du Bois added little to what they had already said about folk art and the role of propaganda. During 1927, “talkies” were invented and rapidly became popular, attracting a great deal of talent from the theatre. A new crop of actors and performers came on the scene, among them Paul Robeson, Bill “Bo Jangles” Robinson, and Rose McClendon. S. H. Dudley had, for the most part, withdrawn to his horse farm in Maryland. Playwrights Willis Richardson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Angelina Weld Grimké would become less productive after 1927, and only Zora Neale Hurston continued, extending her prolific career into the 1930s and 1940s. New writers, however, soon emerged. Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman brought with them a different agenda and a new set of objectives.

In the 1920s a revised form of romantic racialism became something of a national fad, resulting in part, curiously enough, from patronizing white encouragement of the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance.

— George M. Fredrickson (1987)¹