Trouble in Mind

Alice Childress (1916-1994) was a prominent Black playwright, novelist, and actress whose career spanned over four decades. She was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but moved to Harlem, New York, at the age of nine to live with her grandmother following the split of her parents. There, her grandmother (the daughter of an enslaved person) encouraged Childress to pursue the formal education she never had access to herself. She attended public school through middle school and part of high school, though she had to drop out after her grandmother passed away. Childress did not attend college, but instead immediately started her career in theater.

Childress had an expansive career as an actress before she became a playwright. Most notably she was in the cast of the American Negro Theater’s (ANT) production of Anna Lucasta, which transferred to Broadway in 1944 and went on to become the longest running all-Black play on Broadway. In 1949, she wrote her first play, a one-act named Florence, and she directed and starred in the first production of it. In 1950 she adapted Langston Hughes’ novel, Simple Speaks His Mind, into a play called Just a Little Simple, and she gained further notoriety with her 1952 work Gold Through the Trees.