Olivia Ward Bush-Banks
Educator, Youth Theatre, Director, Activist, Playwright, Education Director
1869-1944
Years:
Affiliations:
WPA, Chicago Public Schools, Bush-Banks School of Expression, Settlement House
Chicago, New York, Illinois, Boston
Locations:
Connections:
Langston Hughs, WEB Du Bois
Author, poet, theatre artist and educator Olivia Ward Bush-Banks celebrated her African-American and Native American Montaukett heritage in her writing. Following a divorce in 1895, she supported herself, her two young daughters and her elderly aunt, who had raised Ward. She published her first book of poetry, Original Poems, in 1899 and her second, Driftwood, in 1914. From 1900 to 1914, she was employed as an assistant theater director at the Robert Gould Shaw Settlement House in Boston. She also served as the Montaukett tribal historian in South Fork, New York, and wrote her first play, Indian Trails: or Trail of the Montauk circa 1920, but it survives only in fragments.
With her second husband, she established and ran the Bush-Banks School of Expression in Chicago, a gathering place, working and performing space for African-American artists. Bush-Banks also taught drama in the Chicago Public School system and was part of the Works Progress Administration’s Theatre Project during the Great Depression. For the WPA, she taught drama from 1936 to 1939 at Abyssinian Baptist Church’s Community Center, an important hub for secular and religious music and art during and after the Harlem Renaissance.
She wrote regularly for Colored American magazine and had an arts column in the Westchester Record-Courier, for which she was also arts editor, and was a proponent of the New Negro Movement. In addition to preserving some of the Algonquian Montauk language and folklore, Bush-Banks’s work preserved regional and ethnic dialects that would otherwise have no written record. Bio from https://www.infinite-women.com/women/olivia-ward-bush-banks/.
Check out this podcast episode on Olivia Ward Bush-Banks: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-missed-in-histor-21124503/episode/olivia-ward-bush-banks-88797169/
