Wikipedia Deep Dive

African Grove

9 min read

In 1821, something remarkable happened on Thomas Street in lower Manhattan. A Black man from the West Indies opened a theater—the first successful Black theater in America—and staged Shakespeare for audiences who had never seen themselves reflected on stage. Within a few years, white New Yorkers would pay extra to watch, jealous competitors would pay thugs to start riots, and police would shut the whole thing down. But for a brief, brilliant moment, the African Grove Theatre proved that Black Americans could master and reinvent the Western dramatic tradition on their own terms.

A Ship Steward's Vision

William Alexander Brown had traveled. As a ship's steward sailing between New York, England, and the Caribbean, he'd seen theater in London and across the British colonies—a privilege almost no working-class American, white or Black, could claim. Most New Yorkers in the 1820s had never left their neighborhoods, let alone crossed an ocean. Brown had watched Shakespeare performed in the West End. He knew what professional theater looked like.

When he left his job on a Liverpool ship and bought a house at 38 Thomas Street in Manhattan, he started small. His backyard became an entertainment garden—food, drink, poetry, short dramatic pieces. Think of it as an early nineteenth-century dinner theater, but with a revolutionary subtext. Every Black person in that backyard was asserting their humanity in a city where slavery still existed.

This wasn't hyperbole. New York wouldn't fully abolish slavery until 1827, six years after Brown opened his theater. The gradual emancipation law passed in 1799 freed enslaved people slowly, requiring children born to enslaved mothers to serve "apprenticeships" until age twenty-one. So when the African Grove opened, the audience included both free Black New Yorkers and people who were technically still enslaved. Middle-class professionals sat alongside laborers. They all came to watch Shakespeare.

James Hewlett and the Birth of Black Shakespeare

The transformation from backyard entertainment to legitimate theater came through James Hewlett. He was both a regular customer and a performer—the kind of person who sits in the audience but clearly belongs on stage. Hewlett convinced Brown to expand, to hire more Black actors, to stage full productions.

It worked. The African Company, as the troupe was called, began performing Shakespeare's greatest hits: Richard III and Othello were the favorites. Hewlett became the first Black man documented to play Othello's title role. Think about that for a moment. Shakespeare wrote Othello around 1603, creating one of literature's most complex portraits of a Black man. For over two centuries, white actors had played the role, often in blackface. It took the African Grove Theatre to finally put a Black actor in a part written about a Black character.

The productions weren't polished by modern standards. Small casts meant actors doubled and tripled roles. A reviewer named George Odell, writing about an 1821 performance of Richard III, described how one performer played both King Henry and the Duchess, while another handled both Lady Anne and Catesby—quite a trick when those characters need to appear together. The robes for Richard III were sewn from discarded curtains from the City Hotel's ballroom. Lady Anne, incongruously, broke into song during Act III.

But the audiences didn't care about the makeshift costumes or the creative casting solutions. They cared that it was theirs.

The Segregation That Cut Both Ways

Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. As the African Grove grew more popular, white New Yorkers wanted to attend. Brown accommodated them—but in a segregated section. The theater's stated reason inverted the usual racial logic of the time:

"Whites do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color."

This wasn't just clever rhetoric. Brown was making a serious point about respectability and behavior. Working-class white theater audiences in 1820s New York were notoriously rowdy. They threw things. They shouted. They fought. This was considered normal, acceptable behavior at white theaters catering to the laboring classes. But when Black audiences exhibited similar enthusiasm, city officials deemed it "unacceptably boisterous."

The double standard was infuriating and obvious. The same conduct tolerated among whites became grounds for shutting down a Black business.

Success Breeds Enemies

The African Grove grew so popular that Brown had to build an additional level of seating just to accommodate the white audiences clamoring to attend. This success attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention.

When Brown moved his theater from Thomas Street to a new location near Bleecker and Mercer Streets, he faced a dilemma. The new neighborhood was at the edge of developed Manhattan—too far from the core audience of free Black New Yorkers downtown. So he built a theater building strategically located near the Park Theatre, the most prestigious playhouse in the city.

This was either brilliant marketing or a fatal mistake.

When the Park Theatre announced a production of Richard III starring Junius Brutus Booth—a famous English tragedian and father of the man who would later assassinate Abraham Lincoln—the African Company rented a hall next door and staged their own Richard III the same night. Direct competition. A Black theater company going head-to-head with the city's elite white establishment.

Stephen Price, owner of the Park Theatre, wasn't having it. He paid agitators to start a disturbance, giving police an excuse to shut down the African Grove. This was standard practice in early American theatrical competition—owners routinely hired gangs to disrupt rivals—but it was deployed with particular viciousness against Brown's company.

The Drama of King Shotaway

The African Grove didn't just perform European classics. In 1823, they staged William Alexander Brown's own play, The Drama of King Shotaway—believed to be the first full-length play by a Black American ever performed in the United States.

The play told the story of Joseph Chatoyer, a Garifuna leader who fought against British colonial forces in the Second Carib War on the island of Saint Vincent in the 1790s. The Garifuna people were descendants of West African enslaved people who had escaped or been shipwrecked and intermarried with indigenous Caribbean populations. They had built their own society, their own culture, their own resistance.

Chatoyer died fighting the British in 1795, but his story of anticolonial resistance resonated powerfully with Black New Yorkers in 1823. Here was a hero who looked like them, who had fought against the same European powers that had enslaved their ancestors. Brown was giving his audience not just entertainment but mythology—stories about Black resistance, Black courage, Black sovereignty.

The play's script is lost to history. We know it existed; we know it was performed; we know what it was about. But the words themselves have vanished, like so much of early Black American culture destroyed or simply never preserved by a society that didn't value it.

The End and the Legacy

The historical record grows murky after 1823. One source claims the theater "mysteriously burned to the ground in 1826." Other historians note simply that "there are no records of the African Grove Theater after 1823." Whether it ended in flames, bankruptcy, or exhaustion from constant harassment, the African Grove's run was over.

But its impact rippled outward in ways its founders couldn't have imagined.

One young person who attended performances at the African Grove was Ira Aldridge, who would become one of the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century. Unable to find work as a Black actor in America, Aldridge emigrated to Europe, where he achieved fame performing across Britain, Ireland, and the European continent. He was the first Black actor to play Othello in a major European theater. He received honors from the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria.

Aldridge's success proved what the African Grove had asserted: that Black performers could master classical drama at the highest levels. But he had to leave America to prove it. The country that had produced him couldn't accept him.

What the African Grove Tells Us

The story of the African Grove Theatre is often told as a footnote—the "first" Black theater, a pioneering effort, a historical curiosity. But it's more than that. It's a case study in how success by marginalized people threatens established power.

The theater wasn't shut down because Black performers couldn't act. It wasn't shut down because Black audiences misbehaved any worse than white ones. It was shut down because it was succeeding. Because white audiences were paying to attend. Because a Black business was competing effectively with white establishments. Because the whole arrangement suggested a kind of equality that early nineteenth-century New York wasn't prepared to accept.

William Alexander Brown saw something in London and Liverpool that he knew his community could create. He built it. He drew audiences. He nurtured talent. He staged plays about Black resistance. And for that, he was destroyed.

The next time someone says Black Americans lack cultural institutions or artistic traditions, remember the African Grove. Remember that those institutions existed. Remember that they were systematically dismantled. Remember that the absence of something is often evidence not of incapacity but of destruction.

The West Village Connection

Today, the neighborhoods where the African Grove operated—lower Manhattan, Greenwich Village—are associated with white wealth and bohemian culture. Few people walking down Bleecker Street realize they're passing through what was once a center of free Black life in America.

The African Grove was part of a broader Black community in lower Manhattan, one that predated the Great Migration, predated the Harlem Renaissance, predated almost everything most Americans associate with Black New York. This was the original Black New York—fragile, threatened, remarkable in its ambitions, crushed by its success.

William Alexander Brown wanted to bring Shakespeare to his people. For a few years, he did. And then, as so often happens, the people with power decided that was too much.