Beah Richards

Beah Richards, born Beulah Elizabeth Richardson on July 12, 1920, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, was an American actress, poet, playwright, and activist who worked across stage, screen, and television throughout a career spanning decades. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a seamstress. Richards studied dance under Ismay Andrews and earned a degree from Dillard University in New Orleans in 1948, relocating to New York City two years after graduating.

Her professional stage career began in 1955 with an off-Broadway production of Take a Giant Step, in which she portrayed an 84-year-old grandmother. Her Broadway work ran from 1959 to 1967 and included appearances in The Miracle Worker, Purlie Victorious, A Raisin in the Sun, The Little Foxes, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and The Amen Corner. Her performance in the 1965 production of The Amen Corner, written by James Baldwin, earned her both a Tony Award nomination and the Theatre World Award that same year.

Beyond acting, Richards was a writer whose output included poetry, plays, and performance pieces. In 1950 she wrote A Black Woman Speaks, a verse performance piece comprising fourteen poems that examined the role white women played in the oppression of women of color. Its first performance was given that year for Women for Peace, a white women's organization in Chicago. The reception of the work led Richards to co-found the civil rights organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which drew in activists including Shirley Du Bois, Louise Thompson Patterson, Mary Church Terrell, Claudia Jones, and Audley Moore, and used A Black Woman Speaks as a foundation for its efforts. Her first play, One Is a Crowd, was written in 1951 and centered on a Black singer seeking revenge against a white man who had destroyed her family; it was not produced until decades after it was written. Richards was also a sponsor of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis. From the 1930s through the late 1950s, she was a member and organizer with the Communist Party USA in Los Angeles, having befriended artist Paul Robeson.

Her film work brought her significant recognition. She appeared in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967, playing Mrs. Mary Prentice, the mother of Sidney Poitier's character, a role that earned her nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe Award. Additional film credits include In the Heat of the Night, Hurry Sundown, The Great White Hope, and Beloved. On television, Richards accumulated an extensive list of guest appearances on series including Sanford and Son, The Big Valley, Beauty and the Beast, The Bill Cosby Show, 227, Benson, Designing Women, The Facts of Life, Murder She Wrote, and ER, where she played the mother of Dr. Peter Benton. She appeared in Roots: The Next Generations as Cynthia Murray Palmer, the grandmother of Alex Haley. She won two Primetime Emmy Awards for guest roles, the first in 1988 for Frank's Place and the second in 2000 for The Practice.

In the final year of her life, actress LisaGay Hamilton documented Richards in a film drawn from more than seventy hours of conversation between the two women. That documentary, Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, won the Grand Jury Prize at the AFI Film Festival. Richards died from emphysema on September 14, 2000, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, less than a month after receiving her second Emmy Award.