Richard B. Harrison

Richard Berry Harrison was born on September 28, 1864, in London, Canada West, the eldest of five children. His parents had escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad and settled in Canada. His mother, whose own interest in theatre shaped her son's path, named him Richard after attending a performance of Shakespeare's Richard III. Harrison grew up working odd jobs, including selling newspapers, and sought out opportunities to spend time near a local theatre, saving money whenever he could to attend performances. His early aptitude for recitation was recognized at school and in church.

After relocating to Detroit, Harrison pursued formal training at the Detroit Training School of Dramatic Art and studied privately with Edward Weitzel, a British drama coach who also served as drama editor for the Detroit Free Press. Between 1892 and 1896, he traveled across the United States working as a dramatic reader, building a repertoire that drew on Shakespeare as well as the poetry of his friend Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose promotional tours for the collection Oak and Ivy Harrison supported. He was also booked by the New York Federation of Churches, a lyceum network encompassing 1,600 churches. In 1895, he married Gertrude Janet Washington, the first Black person to graduate from the Chicago Conservatory of Music. The couple had two children, Lawrence Gilbert and Marian Ysobel.

Alongside his performing career, Harrison taught elocution and dramatics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, Branch Normal College — now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff — and Flipper-Key College in Oklahoma.

Harrison's Broadway career spanned 1930 to 1935, and its defining achievement was his portrayal of "de Lawd" in Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures, which opened on Broadway on February 26, 1930. He delivered that performance more than 1,650 times. The production ran for 16 months before embarking on a national tour that reached more than 203 cities and towns, including Harrison's hometown of London, Ontario, where it played at the Grand Theatre. Connelly received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play in 1931.

The recognition Harrison received for his work was extensive. The NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1931. On his 70th birthday in 1934, Howard University conferred an honorary Master of Arts degree upon him, while North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College and Lincoln University each awarded him honorary doctorates in Dramatic Literature. That same year, Boston University made him the first actor to receive the Sigma Society Key. He also received congratulatory telegrams from 14 university presidents and seven governors, was praised by religious leaders for his performance, and was presented with an inscribed Bible from the Clergy Club of New York City.

Ten days after appearing on the cover of TIME magazine on March 4, 1935, Harrison died of heart failure in New York City on March 14, 1935. He was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois. His legacy has been honored through numerous institutions: a public library in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded by Mollie Huston Lee, was named after him in 1935 and today includes the Richard B. Harrison Community Auditorium; Richard B. Harrison High School in Blytheville, Arkansas, bears his name; and the Richard B. Harrison Auditorium, completed in 2006 at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, as does that university's theatre company. In 2003, an interpretive historical plaque was erected in a London, Ontario, park named in his honor near the site of his childhood home. In 2015, the Harrison Park Square Senior Residence in Newark, New Jersey, was dedicated to him.