African Americans’ theatrical performance has mirrored their quest for dignity and inclusion since slavery. Ordinarily stagehands for white performers, slaves and free blacks often performed plays in black churches or fraternal halls. In 1821 New York City freedpeople opened the African Grove Theatre, which presented classical dramas and even apprenticed Ira F. Aldridge, who became an acclaimed Shakespearean actor in England. By contrast, post–Civil War black performers such as the Georgia Minstrels played the vaudeville circuit, depicting a foolish “Stage Negro.” Between 1893 and 1917 blacks also danced and occasionally acted in Harlem and Broadway productions.

During the Jim Crow era they enhanced their stage presence. They built viable and famous theatre companies, including Harlem's Anita Bush Players and Lafayette Players. Other troupes made the Pekin Theater in Chicago and the Karamu Theater in Cleveland, Ohio centers of African American dramatic arts. The Theater Owners Booking Association of New York booked black players at eighty theaters nationally by the 1920s. Meantime, the Harlem Renaissance created spaces for Apollo and Lafayette troupers in the Broadway musicals Shuffle Along (1922) and Blackbirds (1926). Blacks appeared off-Broadway in the likes of The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), by black playwright Willis Richardson, and sponsored the Ethiopian Art Players. Paul Robeson starred in leading roles as The Emperor Jones (1923) and Othello (1930).

Such repertory contributions continued. As the Great Depression worsened, the Federal Theatre Project helped sustain black performers. The project's Negro Unit supported 22 affiliates, among them the Lafayette Theater. Its assistance was vital for Harlem Suitcase Theatre, founded by poet and writer Langston Hughes, whose play Mulatto (1935) enjoyed a long Broadway run. In 1940 other Harlem artists formed the American Negro Theater; its play Anna Lucasta (1944) had a record 957 Broadway performances. Comparably popular, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), by Lorraine Hansberry, explored conflicts in a working-class black family.

Raisin foreshadowed the 1960s Black Arts Movement. Its chief promoters included the Negro Ensemble Company of New York and Free Southern Theater of Jackson, Mississippi. Black consciousness writers and poets, notably Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, were the movement's major figures. They sang and spoke to issues in civil rights, Black Power, and radical politics.