Reid’s publications during the Harlem Renais-
sance included a number of works on African
Americans, labor, education, and family life. He
published studies such as Negro Membership in
American Labor Unions(1930), The Problem of Child
Dependency Among Negroes(1936), Adult Education
Among Negroes (1936), and The Urban Negro
Worker in the United States, 1925–1936(1938).
Bibliography
Moore, Jesse Thomas, Jr. A Search for Equality: The Na-
tional Urban League, 1910–1961.University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981.
Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A
History of the National Urban League.Boston: Little,
Brown, 1971.
Weiss, Nancy. The National Urban League, 1910–1940.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Reinhardt, Max(1873–1943)
An Austrian writer and director who founded the
Salzburg Theatre Festival and directed and produced
more than 500 plays during his lifetime. Billed as a
“prophet in the theater” who had a “pronounced
‘sixth sense’ with respect to drama,” he spoke to
ALAINLOCKEabout the future of African-American
theater. Locke was committed to facilitating a viable
and sustainable African-American theater tradition.
While at HOWARDUNIVERSITY, he had collaborated
with the inspired drama professor T. Montgomery
Gregory and inaugurated the HOWARDUNIVERSITY
PLAYERS, the university’s first theater troupe and a
nationally respected amateur company.
Locke’s interview with Reinhardt appeared in
the May 1924 issue of OPPORTUNITY.The piece, en-
titled “Max Reinhardt Reads the Negro’s Dramatic
Horoscope,” included what Locke believed readers
would regard as “penetrating and quite prophetic ob-
servations.” In response to Locke’s questions about
the damage that exploitation wreaked upon African-
American actors and theatrical projects, Reinhardt
insisted that African Americans “must not even try
to link up to the dramas of the past, to the European
drama. That is why there is no American drama as
yet,” he pronounced before making the bold assertion
that “if there is to be [an American drama], it will be
yours.” Reinhardt’s assertion echoed the sentiments
of leading Harlem Renaissance figures such as Locke,
Gregory, W. E. B. DUBOIS, and the visionary play-
wrights of the period such as GEORGIADOUGLAS
JOHNSON, ANGELINAWELDGRIMKÉ, and WILLIS
RICHARDSON. The KRIGWALITTLETHEATREmove-
ment and the founding of small theater companies
such as LANGSTONHUGHES’s Little Suitcase Theatre
provided playwrights with opportunities to explore
African-American folk material and to generate
scripts that grappled with other absorbing aspects of
American society and human experience.Bibliography
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black
Women Playwrights in America.New York: Green-
wood Press, 1988.
Hay, Samuel. African American Theatre: A Historical and
Critical Analysis.Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Hill, Errol. A History of African American Theatre.Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Manuel, Carme. “Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and
Zora Neale Hurston’s Dream Deferred of an
African American Theatre of the Black Word,”
African American Review (2001).
Reinhardt, Gottfried. The Genius: A Memoir of Max
Reinhardt.New York: Knopf, 1979.
Styan, J. L. Max Reinhardt.Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1982.Reiss, Winold(1886–1953)
A Bavarian painter who immigrated to the United
States with the intention that he would paint
Native Americans. Reiss’s love of portraiture
prompted him to engage many potential subjects in
NEWYORKCITY, and he soon became an artist
well known for his sketches of ethnic peoples.
The son of Fritz Reiss, a landscape painter, he
went on to study with the German artist Franz von
Stuck. He groomed himself as a portrait painter in
Sweden, Holland, and Germany where he painted
different groups of folk peoples. He emigrated to the
United States in 1913 and supported himself by
working as an interior designer and commercial
artist. He was celebrated for his art designs in hotels,
restaurants, shops, and other public venues. He later
immersed himself in Native American art, forging a
professional relationship with the Blackfeet Indians
in Montana. Reiss established his own school at446 Reinhardt, Max