Richard B. Harrison

Richard B. Harrison was one of the leading African-American dramatic stage actors of the Twentieth Century; from 1930 until his death, he played the role of "De Lawd" in Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize winning play "The Green Pastures" on stage for 1,657 performances. The eldest of six children of a couple who escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad, Harrison went to work as a newsboy near the local theater, where he would sneak in to see plays and other presentations. After moving to Detroit, he worked at menial jobs--handyman, janitor, waiter, busboy, bellhop--while studying acting. Eventually, he developed a program of dramatic readings from Shakespeare and other American and English poets and traveled through the United States and Canada. He also taught theater arts at North Carolina A & T College in Greensboro, N.C. Harrison portrayed "De Lawd God Jehovah" as a country preacher, with a frock coat, stiff collar, and floppy hat, and it brought him fame, at the age of sixty-five--the NAACP, which had opposed him taking role as they thought it would be demeaning, awarded him their highest honor, the Spingarn Award, in 1931, in recognition of his work. Time Magazine had him on the cover of their March 4, 1935 issue; he died ten days later, after suffering a heart attack before a matinée at the 44th Street Theater in New York City. Although "Green Pastures" was subsequently made into a movie, with Rex Ingram as "De Lawd", it appears that this Oscar Micheaux movie is the only surviving film presentation of Harrison that has survived.