Mother Liked ItAlvira Hazzard(1928)
A one-act play by ALVIRAHAZZARDthat was pub-
lished first in the SATURDAYEVENINGQUILL,a
BOSTONliterary journal. Hazzard considered issues
of deception and social conflict in the story about
Jonas Smithly, a young man whose summer job is
to appear in public as Ali Khan, an Indian Prince.
The job enables him to pay his UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGOtuition.
Alta Fields, a character identified as one
“[w]hose practical jokes misfire,” and Tess, a woman
who “takes life as she finds it,” ridicule their friend
Meena Thomas, a romantic who is completely en-
amored of the prince. Alta and Tess mastermind
their own deception and hire Jay Windsor, another
friend, to impersonate the false prince. Ultimately,
the two men conspire to introduce Smithly to
Meena, the “girl of the golden smile,” whom he so
admires. He reveals his true identity in a letter and
notes that he will even change his real given name,
even though “mother liked it.” The play, set in a
local theater and a trendy café, offers a concise ex-
amination of racial and social performance.
Mother Liked It,which does not appear to have
been performed widely, was most likely staged by
amateur theater groups that tended to perform
other Hazzard plays.
M Street High School
One of the most prestigious high schools for
African Americans in the country. Located in
WASHINGTON, D.C., its roster of faculty and stu-
dents was a daunting record of intellectual excel-
lence. In 1916 the school, which was established
originally as the Washington High School, was re-
named DUNBARHIGHSCHOOL.
Located at 128 M Street, the school’s most
celebrated principal was ANNAJULIACOOPER, the
first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D.
Cooper taught Latin and math there from 1887
until 1901, when she began a five-year tenure as
principal. She was only the second woman to
achieve the position of principal in the District of
Columbia public schools. Cooper resumed teach-
ing in 1910 and retired in 1929.
The accomplished faculty included MARY
CHURCHTERRELL, the first president of the National
Association of Negro Women; JESSIEFAUSET, who
taught Latin and French before becoming literary ed-
itor at THECRISIS;and EVABEATRICEDYKES, who,
with fellow teacher Georgiana Simpson, became one
of the first three African-American women to earn a
Ph.D. from an American institution.
M Street students included James Butcher, a
renowned artisan and creator of dollhouses; Sadie
Mossell Tanner Alexander, daughter of African
Methodist Episcopal Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tan-
ner and the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in eco-
nomics; Frank Coleman, head of the physics
department at Howard University and cofounder
of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity; Charles Hamilton
Houston, the first African-American editor of the
Harvard Law Reviewand counsel for the NA-
TIONALASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT
OFCOLOREDPEOPLE.MulattoLangston Hughes(1935)
A tragic melodrama by LANGSTONHUGHESthat
opened on BROADWAYat the Vanderbilt Theatre
in October 1935. It was the longest-running
African-American play on Broadway until Lorraine
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sunmade its debut in
March 1959.
Written by Hughes, the stage production of
the three-act play was produced and directed by
Martin Jones. The cast on opening night starred
Rose McClendon and Morris McKenny who, be-
tween them, had appeared in Broadway produc-
tions of Porgy(1927, 1929), the Annie Nathan
Meyer play Black Souls (1932), and the PAUL
GREENplay INABRAHAM’SBOSOM(1926). Mc-
Clendon, whom reviewers described as “an artist
with a sensitive personality and a bell-like voice,”
delivered a performance that was hailed as one of
the play’s strengths.
The plot revolves around the tangled lives of a
Colonel Norwood, a white widowed Georgia slave
master, Cora, his enslaved housekeeper and the
mother of three Norwood children, and Bert, his
youngest and most irrepressible son, who ulti-
mately kills his father and himself before a lynch
mob descends upon his body. Hughes’s focus on
miscegenation and tragedy in the South comple-
mented works on the southern racial tension and
violence by writers such as MARIONVERACUTH-
BERT, Paul Green, and MYRTLELIVINGSTON.354 Mother Liked It