Writers, edited by Thadious Davis and Trudier
Harris, 201–207. Detroit: Gale, 1985.
King, Jr., Woodie. “Directing Winesellers.” Black World
25 (April 1976): 20–26.
“Playwright Ron Milner Dies.” News Briefs. Michigan
Chronicle 67, no. 43 (July 14–20, 2004): A1.
Smitherman, Geneva. “ ‘We Are the Music’: Ron Mil-
ner, People’s Playwright.” Black World 25, no. 6
(April 1976): 4–19.
Loreta G. Woodard
Mitchell, Loften (1919–2001)
A playwright, actor, theater historian, novelist,
and teacher, Loften Mitchell was an eminent early
leader of the black theater movement in America.
Born in Columbus, North Carolina, on April 15,
1919, to parents who migrated to Harlem, Mitchell
attended Cooper Junior High and graduated with
honors from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1937.
A year before graduation, he launched his theatri-
cal career in New York City as an actor, perform-
ing with the Salem Community Dramatizers, the
Pioneer Drama Group, and the Rose McClendon
Players.
After high school, Mitchell studied playwriting
for a year at City College of the City University of
New York before accepting a scholarship to Tal-
ladega College in Alabama, where he received a
B.A. in sociology and a minor in creative writing
in 1943. While there, he wrote the musical Prelude
to the Blues (1940) with the late Wallace Prickett,
which, in 1941, won the Delta Sorority’s Jabber-
wock Prize for the best play written by a student.
Additionally, Mitchell studied at Union Theologi-
cal Seminary and General Theological Seminary
before serving in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945.
Three years later he returned to Harlem and mar-
ried Helen Marsh, with whom he had two sons,
Thomas and Melvin. He studied playwriting with
John Gassner and earned an M.A. degree from Co-
lumbia University in 1951.
Although he began his acting career in New
York City during the 1930s, Mitchell also worked
as a social worker and social publicity director for
the Jewish Federation of Welfare Services. From
1946 to 1952, he was an actor, stage manager, and
press agent at People’s Theatre and Harlem Show-
case. From 1950 to 1962 he worked as a writer
for the New York City WNYC-Radio weekly pro-
gram “The Later Years” and for the New York City
WWRL-Radio daily program “Friendly Adviser.”
As a professor of theatre arts, Mitchell taught at
Long Island University, New York University, and
State University of New York at Binghamton, where
he taught drama and reactivated the Playwright’s
Program. He retired in 1985.
Inspired to become a playwright from his vis-
its to the old Lafayette, Lincoln, and Alhambra
vaudeville houses in Harlem, Mitchell has con-
tributed generously to the black American stage,
revealing his remarkable shifts among dramatic
concerns, music, and history. His earlier plays in-
clude Shattered Dreams (1938), Blood in the Night
(1946), The Bancroft Dynasty (1948), The Cellar
(1952), A Land beyond the River (1957), Ballad
for Bimshire (1963), Ballad of the Winter Soldiers
(1964), Star of the Morning (1965), Tell Pharaoh
(1967), The Phonograph (1969), and The Final
Solution to the Black Problem in the United States;
or, The Fall of the American Empire (1970). His
later plays include one of his best-known theatri-
cal works, Bubbling Brown Sugar (1975), And the
Walls Came Tumbling Down (1976), Cartoons for a
Lunch Hour (1978), A Gypsy Girl (1982), and Miss
Ethel Waters (1983).
Most critics agree that A Land beyond the River
(1957), which focuses on the efforts of blacks to
integrate American southern public schools, is
Mitchell’s most important dramatic work. The
main character, the Reverend Dr. DeLaine of
South Carolina, commits himself to championing
the cause of rural black students to achieve equal
education, including bus transportation to school.
Although the blacks initially lose their case, they
appeal to the Supreme Court and win, echoing
the issues and outcome of the history-making Su-
preme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion of Topeka, Kansas.
Mitchell’s screenplays include Young Man of
Williamsburg (1954), Integration-Report One362 Mitchell, Loften