Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary Burrill, three black women educators and dramatists, stand at a critical moment of political and literary significance in black American dramatic theatre in the early twentieth century. As the Harlem Renaissance began, their plays appeared on urban and community stages, in opposition to a strategy of containment during and after World War I. In particular, their work confronted the social, moral and human consequences of lynching.

Black theatre in America emerged in the 1820s at the African Grove, a theatrical company founded and supported by a transatlantic class of black mariners in downtown New York. After the Grove grabbed wide attention with its novelty, white violence shuttered the theatre, but in its heyday, it featured black actors and actresses, introduced the work of a black playwright writing about insurrection in the Caribbean, and interpreted classics, including Shakespeare, as well as offering its own rendition of popular hits being presented elsewhere. After the closure of the Grove, black theatre lost its independent voice. Minstrel portraits of blackness, represented by whites with their faces ‘blacked up’, became enormously popular, and blacks were portrayed as inept, craven, greedy, criminal and undeserving of national belonging.

Yet even before the abolition of slavery, while minstrel depiction was still strong, William Wells Brown wrote Escape; or a Leap for Freedom (1859), a play set in Kentucky, which included a lynching scene. This would appear to be the earliest American dramatic reference for lynching, indicating its early significance to the black community even before slavery ended.