Even when she was forced to teach between jobs she

Even when she was forced to teach between jobs, she kept her focus
on drama—and breaking down racial barriers. Between 1939 and 1941
she taught dramatic arts at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Car-
olina, where in that short period she made a historical first
Paula Giddings / 65

for the school and Blacks. Bennett was invited to participate in the North
Carolina Drama Festival, an annual event sponsored by the association
of drama departments from colleges and high schools throughout the
state. Adams’s group were invited as guests, as there were no Black
affiliates in the association, and therefore they were not an official part
of the competition. But when the invitation came, she thought it an
“excellent opportunity to propagandize these young white people.”
12
She selected Paul Peters’s Letter to the President , a drama about a Black
sharecropper whose frustration at being unable to support his family
by farming under that exploitive system violently retaliates against the
White farm owner. The title of the one-act play came from a scene in
which the young daughter of the sharecropper writes a letter to the
President begging him to somehow stop the lynch mob that has gathered
outside their cabin door. In the end, the mob succeeds in burning down
the cabin, consuming the entire family within its flames.
Although the Bennett group was technically ineligible to take part
in the competition, their performance was so moving that they received
the winner’s plaque—the first time a Black group had done so in the
twenty-five years of its history.
Adams wasn’t the only one to pursue the arts. Myra Hemmings, who
received her master’s in speech from Northwestern University, and
taught in San Antonio, was also very active in amateur theater. She was
a major figure in the San Antonio Negro Little Theater, where she dir-
ected many of its productions. Her husband, John “Pop” Hemmings
was a dramatist and its director. Ethel Watson, in addition to her
teaching career, noted that she was well remembered for her dramatic
performances in Ocala, Florida, where she once presented She Stoops to
Conquer , and in her home Parkersburg, West Virginia’s, Smoot Theater.
In the latter she presented two “all-colored revues—giving an excep-
tionally clever performance and displaying gorgeous costumes which
I designed and made of satins, tricotine spangles, and tarleton,” she
wrote in a bio sketch. “I have been the only colored who has ever given
a performance at Smoot Theater for Warner Brothers in Parkersburg,
West Virginia,” she noted.
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There were also wordsmiths in the group. To no one’s surprise
Madree White, who believed deeply in Kelly Miller’s conviction of the
power of the pen to fight injustice, became a journalist; she also wrote
poetry, and gathered a number of poems in a volume titled Reveries in
a Poetic Vein . Wertie Weaver published a novel, Valley of
66 / In Search of Sisterhood

the Poor , about racism, poverty, and exploitation—“diseases” that science
attempts to overcome.