Sheppard Randolph Edmonds (30 April 1900–28 March 1983), educator and playwright, was born in Lawrenceville, and was the son of George Washington Edmonds, a tenant farmer, and Frances Fisherman Edmonds. He attended Saint Paul Normal and Industrial School (later Saint Paul's College), where he graduated as valedictorian in 1921. During three years of summer work as a waiter in New York City from 1918 to 1920, Edmonds attended professional theater productions that made a profound impression on him. He attended Oberlin College, in Ohio, where he helped establish the Dunbar Forum, a group that discussed and wrote creative literature. In 1926, the group staged Rocky Road, a three-act play that Edmonds both wrote and directed. After graduating from Oberlin that year, he received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1932 and pursued graduate study at Yale University, the University of Dublin, and the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, in London. On 2 December 1931, he married Irene Olivia Colbert, who became accomplished in her right as a theater professor, developing children's theater programs and directing plays at two universities where her husband taught. The couple had one son and one daughter. After his wife's death in July 1968, Edmonds married widow Ara Manson Turner in Brunswick County, Virginia, on 6 September 1969.
During a decades-long academic career, S. Randolph Edmonds, as he was generally known, taught at Morgan College (later Morgan State University) in Baltimore from 1926 to 1935, at Dillard University in New Orleans (1935–1947), and at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee (1947–1970). He studied outside the United States through a 1933 Rockefeller grant and a 1937 Rosenwald Fellowship where he traveled to England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. During World War II, Edmonds enlisted on 9 April 1943 and served as a captain in the United States Army Special Services. He entertained troops in the United Service Organization as well as assisted in the sale of about $1.3 million of war bonds through his Fort Huachuca Arizona Soldier Show Troupe, for which he was honored by the United States Treasury Department. He was discharged on 17 August 1944.
The author of almost fifty plays, Edmonds believed African Americans—especially those in the South—constituted a "beginning audience" and dramas that addressed issues of Black life should be performed in the expanding field of little community theaters that became more prevalent in the United States after 1920. He worked to ban depictions of the demeaning stereotype Uncle Tom and insisted that dramatic productions portraying the lives of African Americans do so honestly without resorting to caricature. He called for the integration of casts and theater technical unions; advocated the fostering of university theater programs; and championed high standards for moral and artistic behavior of those engaged in theater productions.
Seventeen of Edmonds's plays were published in three separate volumes: Shades and Shadows (1930), Six Plays for a Negro Theatre (1934), and The Land of Cotton and Other Plays (1942). Almost all his plays were tailored for ease of staging with a single set, often the living/dining area of a small cabin or house. Many featured a limited cast of a dozen or fewer actors. These plays detailing realistic dilemmas of Black life often included characters who were struggling with racism, poverty, and injustice, and the characters were typically broadly drawn bullies, self-sacrificing mothers, young people in love, and murderously rampaging and threatening white men. He set his plays predominantly in the American South with dialogue that was written either completely or mostly in dialect, and superstitions as well as adherence to traditional Christian religious values coexisted. Most were single-act plays, featuring quick exposition of the central conflict as well as an uplifting moral at the end.
Variants on these plays were Nat Turner, Everyman's Land, and Yellow Death, which address a historical figure or time. A few of Edmonds's plays, such as Hewers of Wood, The Tribal Chief, The Devil's Price (with more than a dozen characters), and The High Court of Historia (featuring almost twenty characters) were set in fantasy lands but continued his pattern of imparting moralistic themes. Some of his plays (notably the six published in Shades and Shadows), he maintained, were more stories than drama and were meant to be read rather than performed. Edmonds was modest about the literary quality of his plays, none of which was critically lauded. At one time dismissed as conservative and even old-fashioned, more-recent critical assessments of his work locate his efforts within a larger movement to create and even reclaim Black theater, offering in his plays characters and situations neither demeaning nor reductive.
Along with his playwrighting, Edmonds focused his energy on teaching drama and on educational theater sponsored by schools, colleges, and universities. Called the Dean of Black Academic Theater, he was cited as a pioneer in expanding theatrical awareness for African American audiences and fostering theater education for students, including the establishment of the Negro Intercollegiate Drama Association (NIDA). Founded in 1930 when Edmonds was teaching at Morgan College, NIDA was the first Black theater organization founded by African Americans, initially comprising a consortium of HBCU institutions. With Edmonds serving as president for five years, NIDA provided a way for its members to network, provide workshops, and hold competitive intercollegiate drama tournaments and noncompetitive festivals.
In 1935, Edmonds joined the faculty of the newly established Dillard University, where he organized its theater department. He founded the Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts (SADSA) the following year and served as president until 1942. Comprised of more than two dozen HBCUs throughout the South, it provided a professional organization for students and faculty members. With expanding membership nationally, in 1951 the organization changed its name to the National Association of Dramatics and Speech Arts (NADSA). His advocacy for Black theater extended beyond the country in 1958, when he and a group of students toured ten African countries, sponsored by the United States Department of State. During the tour, Edmonds directed forty-seven productions of four plays, while he and his wife Irene Edmonds gave almost thirty lectures on American education and children's theater.
Widely lauded during his life, Edmonds was awarded honorary doctorates from Bethune-Cookman College in 1947 and by Oberlin College in 1977. He was recognized for his accomplishments by the National Urban League, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, the American Theatre Association, and Saint Paul's College. Sheppard Randolph Edmonds died of a stroke on 28 March 1983 at a hospital in South Hill, Mecklenburg County. He was buried in the Saint James C.M.E. Church Cemetery in Lawrenceville. In 1988 the Black Theatre Network (an outgrowth of NADSA) initiated an annual S. Randolph Edmonds Young Scholarly Competition to recognize scholarly work addressing aspects of Black theater.
Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates in Death Certificate, Brunswick Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Richmond, Va.; first marriage in Baltimore Afro-American, 5 Dec. 1931; second marriage in Marriage Certificate (1969), Brunswick Co., BVS; Randolph Edmonds, The Land of Cotton and Other Plays (1942), v (quotation); Marilyn Janice Gayle, "Randolph Edmonds: Pioneer in the Negro Educational Theatre" (M.A. thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1960); biographies in G. James Fleming and Christian E. Burckel, eds., Who's Who in Colored America, 7th ed., (1950), 173–174 (portrait), and Hal May and Susan M. Trosky eds., Contemporary Authors 125 (1989): 110–112; Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves (1988), esp. 19–61; Edward Mapp, Directory of Blacks in the Performing Arts, 2d ed., (1990), 147–148; David Krasner, "The Theatre of Sheppard Randolph Edmonds," New England Theatre Journal 16 (2005): 21– 41; obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 29 Mar. 1983; South Hill Enterprise, 30 Mar. 1983.
Photograph in Richmond Planet, 27 Dec. 1930.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leila Christenbury.
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Leila Christenbury, "Sheppard Randolph Edmonds (1900–1983)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Edmonds_Sheppard_Randolph, accessed [today's date]).
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