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(...Coming soon...) Black Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts By Lisa Pertillar Brevard Black Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts recaptures the original “ umbrella” title and full meaning of Lisa Pertillar Brevard’s biographies of Madame E. Azalia Hackley (1867-1922), African-American classical singer-activist; and Edwin Henry Hackley (1859-1940), African-American poet, playwright, attorney-activist, respectively. In 1989, Brevard originally envisioned the Hackleys’ life stories taking the form of a dramatic stage play, complete with outstanding music in the form of African-American spirituals, ragtime and early jazz. Today her original vision is being made manifest. Black Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts tells of the global missionary work of Madame E. Azalia Hackley, whose untiring efforts in international touring, newspaper and book publishing (The Colored Girl Beautiful, 1916) and musical arrangements and compositions fostered the careers of Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes and established the African-American spiritual as standard repertoire in Historically Black Colleges and Universites (HBCUs). It also tells of Azalia's husband, Edwin Henry Hackley, the first African-American attorney of the State of Colorado, whose political views on race manifested in poetry (written at times in relation to his close friend, poet laureate Paul Laurence Dunbar); scathing editorials on race, published in the Denver Statesman, which he edited; his controversial play set in Morocco, The Ambassador (1913); and his co-authorship of Hackley and Harrison’s Guide...for Colored Travelers (1930), a guide to suitable lodging and meals for elite African-Americans traveling througout the United States during the “Jim Crow” (“Coloreds Only”) era -- a virtual blueprint tracing the “stops” on the Underground Railroad, from the United States into Canada. Black Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts also briefly explores romantic ties between Edwin Hackley and then-aspiring actress Ida B. Wells -- also known as “Iola” -- the newspaper activist and Anti-Lynching Crusader. |
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