Mary Powell Burrill (August 1881 – March 13, 1946) was an early 20th-century African-American female playwright of the Harlem Renaissance, who inspired Willis Richardson and other students to write plays.
They That Sit in Darkness was published in Margaret Sanger's progressive Birth Control Review, a monthly publication advocating reproductive rights for women.
[9][6] Burrill hosted literary gatherings in her home, which was known as “the Half-Way House.” It served as a meeting space for creative expression and intellectual discussions among many prominent writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
She dies of physical and mental exhaustion, forcing her 17-year-old daughter to take care of the family rather than go to college as she planned, a result that continues the cycle of poverty for her and her siblings.
[9][11][12] Through Malinda's story, the play explores how legal restrictions that limited women's access to reproductive rights affected their welfare and that of their families.
This play is set in rural South Carolina and features John, an African-American soldier who discovers after returning home from World War I that his father has been lynched.
[12] Aftermath (1919) was considered political because Burrill's portrayed John as a black male who selflessly and fearlessly confronted racial oppression.
How my brain whirls how my pulse leaps with joy and madness when I think of these two words, 'my wife'"[18] In 1912, while teaching, Burrill met Lucy Diggs Slowe, an English teacher from Baltimore.
She and Burrill decided to buy a house at 1256 Kearney Street in nearby Brookland, then a predominantly white middle-class neighborhood in Northeast Washington.