Woodie King Jr., an influential force in Black theater as founder of the New Federal Theatre (NFT), who helped Black playwrights amplify their voices with a stage to tell their stories of cultural expression and social change, died at a hospital in New York on January 29. He was 88.
King’s cause of death was myocardial infarction, as confirmed by his long-time associate Voza Rivers.
King celebrated his 80th birthday at New York City’s midtown Castillo Theatre, which became his new home for the NFT. He retired from his role as producing director at NFT in 2021, but remained on the board.
Juney Smith of the Rainbow Media Group and Reed R. McCants of Black History Mini Docs captured King’s journey from Detroit to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and beyond in their documentary “King of Stage (The Woodie King Jr. Story).”
The trailblazing producer, director, author, and actor founded the NFT in 1970, and for more than six decades, it became his incubator, where he championed new works by Black playwrights, artists of color, and women, premiering more than 200 productions at Henry Street Settlement, including the 1976 world premiere of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”; “Death of a Prophet” starring Morgan Freeman; “Checkmates” by Ron Milner; and “The Taking of Ms. Janie.” He also produced such Broadway shows as “For Colored Girls …”; “What the Wine Sellers Buy”; and “Checkmates,” which he also directed.
King’s landmark shows launched stars like Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Glynn Turman, Phylicia Rashad, and Samuel L. Jackson, and gave voice to urgent stories, earning him the National Black Theatre Festival Living Legend Award, an Obie, AUDELCO lifetime honors, Obie Award for Sustained Achievement, the Actors’ Equity Association’s Paul Robeson Award and its Rosetta LeNoire Award, and a Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater in 2020.
King was the architect of the National Black Touring Company in the late 1960s. The goal was to coordinate national Black theater tours across America. “That was shortly lived; the unions in those theaters were taking all the money and we weren’t allowed to bring in our own trained people,” King told this writer in an AmNews 2017 interview. “We then started touring the college and university circuit that proved successful until 2010.”
His co-founding of the National Black Theater Festival in 1979 with Larry Leon Hamlin has blossomed into an annual Black theater cultural event in Winston-Salem, N.C., featuring more than 40 productions with more than 55,000 people participating.
Woodie King Jr. was born on July 27, 1937, in Baldwin Springs, Alabama. At the early age of five, he and his parents moved to Detroit, Michigan. Like many young men, after graduating from high school, in 1956, King took a job at the Ford Motor company on the assembly line, where he toiled for three years before taking a position as a draftsman with the city of Detroit.
Black plays didn’t exist in Detroit during King’s era, so he made his own. “That was when I became a producer, still not understanding the full concept, but it was on the job training,” said King to the AmNews. “Back then, it only cost us about $100 to rent a bar and get the actors.”
According to Cliff Frazier, Emmy Award winner and longtime Detroit friend, “In Detroit there was no Black theatre. He created his own Black Theatre. We all contributed financially, and participated in acting, and out of it emerged a great playwright, Ron Milner. Woodie and I sometime later starred in the national tour of ‘Study in Color’ written by the Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd.”
King, armed with his guerilla producer/director’s degree from the streets, left Detroit for New York in 1964, at the pinnacle of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. He became friends with Amiri Baraka, who had created the Black Arts Repertoire Theater School (BARTS) in 1964 that played a pivotal role in Black arts.
“Amiri set a new standard,” said King. “We became friends and I eventually optioned some of his plays, like the Black Quartet. He had a good group of brothers from Newark that we both worked with when we were doing plays. It was a whole radical movement.”
That same year, he was hired as the cultural arts director at Mobilization for Youth, an anti-poverty program in Manhattan. He held the position for five years before establishing the New Federal Theatre. In those days, a college degree wasn’t necessary to run a theater, produce, or direct, but King eventually earned his M.F.A. at Brooklyn College in 1999. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Lehman College.
King’s New Federal Theatre inspired Voza Rivers while he was under the tutelage of Roger Furman at Harlem’s Roger Furman Repertory Theatre in 1964. Two of America’s major Black theater companies came together in 1983 when Rivers and King first collaborated on Laurence Holder’s drama “When the Chickens Come Home to Roost.” Their relationship and partnership endured until King’s transition. “Our partnership was not defined by contracts, but by deep respect and shared purpose,” said Rivers. “We’ve cheered each other’s triumphs, shared in the struggle for resources, and celebrated the stars we’ve helped discover together.”
According to King, “Black theatre is about helping and bringing people along to carry on the tradition.”
King is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Van Dyke, and his three children, Geoffrey King, Michael King, and Michelle King-Huger, whom he shared with ex-wife Willie Mae Washington, as well as five grandchildren.