It is the Summer of 1930. Harlem, New York. The creative euphoria of the Renaissance has given way to the harsher realities of The Great Depression. Young Reverend Adam Clayton Powell is feeding the hungry and preaching an activist gospel at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Black Nationalist visionary Marcus Garvey has been discredited and deported. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is opening a new family planning clinic on 126th Street and the doctors at Harlem Hospital are scrambling to care for a population whose most deadly disease is poverty. But, far from Harlem, African-American expatriate extraordinaire, Josephine Baker, sips champagne in her dressing room at The Folies Bergère and laughs like a free woman.

—from the Setting in the script for BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY

click on the links below to LEARN MORE…

The Harlem Renaissance

Blues’ Who What Where & When

Women’s Health and the Harlem Birth Control Clinic in Blues

Queer Harlem and Blues

Harlem: Black Dreams of the Promised Land by Faye M. Price
Article about ‘The Great Migration’, excerpted from the Guthrie Theater’s Blues Study Guide

Prohibition and the Great Depression

Sources and Further Reading

Blues for an Alabama Sky written by Pearl Cleage comes to the Wells Theatre April 17 - May 5, 2024. Sponsored by Capital Group and supported by the generous partnership of The YWCA of South-Hampton Roads.