Bay State News

Black History Month: James Spruill Founded Important Black Theater Company

When James Spruill began to teach Dramatic Arts at Emerson in 1971, he had already founded an influential Black theatre company in Boston, and acted in plays with future Academy Award winners.

Spruill co-founded the New African Company (NAC) in 1968 with Gustave Johnson. NAC was named after the African Grove Theatre of New York City, which was founded in 1821, and was the first professional Black theatre company in the country. NAC continues to produce plays today.

“There must be a black theater for the black community, our own voices in our own playwrights, and the more black rage the better,’’ Spruill told Boston Globe theatre critic Kevin Kelly in October 1968, according to Spruill’s 2011 obituary in the Globe.

NAC was unique as it brought plays highlighting the Black experience to white audiences, and presented professional acting to Black audiences who might not ever attend Theater District performances.  

“We are building a theater that attracts people who are not regular theater-goers,’’ he told the Globe in 1970, according to his obituary. “We are fighting dehumanization by TV, movies, and commercial theater.’’

Outspoken about topics such as race and civil rights, Spruill began hosting WGBH radio’s Say Brother in 1968, which later became Basic Black.

Spruill grew up in Baltimore attending segregated schools, and then went to Goddard College in Vermont on a scholarship. He enrolled at Boston University in 1968 in a master of fine arts program in directing, and became the first to be awarded the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship for a graduate student.

He attended BU while teaching at Emerson, and received his BU degree in 1975. The next year, he was hired to teach on the faculty of BU’s College of Fine Arts, where he remained until retiring in 2006.

Original source can be found here