[4][5] The Black playwrights whose work the company produced included Countee Cullen (One Way To Heaven), Theodore Browne (Go Down Moses and Natural Man), Owen Dodson (Garden of Time), Alvin Hill (Walk Hard) and Curtis Cooksey (Starlight).

[5] In addition to their theatre productions, the ANT also produced a weekly radio program in 1945, with a repertoire that spanned Shakespeare, Dickens and opera.

Many of her students later had careers in the performing arts, including television comediennes Helen Martin (Good Times and 227), Emmy-winning Isabel Sanford (All in the Family and The Jeffersons), and Clarice Taylor (Sanford and Son and The Cosby Show);[1][6] stage and screen couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee,[7] movie actor Sidney Poitier, and singer-actor Harry Belafonte.

[10] Within the next few years, however, the ANT folded, a victim of repeated financial shortfalls and in-fighting over its mission in the wake of its Anna Lucasta success, for which its lead actress Alice Childress gained a Tony nomination for playing the title character.

Hill and O'Neal quickly garnered support for the American Negro Theatre, which they dubbed the ANT to reinforce the idea of a hard-working interdependent community, by assembling several of their theatre friends, including: Howard Augusta, James Jackson, Virgil Richardson, Claire Leyba, Jefferson D. Davis, Vivian Hall, Austin Briggs-Hall, Stanley Green, Fanny McConnell, and Kenneth Manigault.

[citation needed] In 1944, the ANT submitted a proposal to the General Education Board of Rockefeller Center, explaining that their objectives were to develop (1) an Art, (2) a Vital Theatre and (3) Pride and Honor, and requesting funding for the salaries of the company's officers.

[6] According to a notice in the Brooklyn Eagle on March 30, 1944, the sets for that initial production were designed by the American realist painter Michael Lenson, but that has not been verified.

[citation needed] Five weeks later, the play opened on Broadway where it launched the career of Ruby Dee and scored star Alice Childress the first Tony nomination for a Black actress.

It serves as a spur to citizen ambition provides a partly self-supporting source of work and income, and a healthy kind of occupational therapy on a national scale for thousands.

We know it too frequently as an investment for gambling show men, or as a playground for dilettantes and escapists who are unable to withstand the hard realities of life.