Rose McClendon

Rose McClendon (August 27, 1884 – July 12, 1936) was an African-American actress and director who performed on Broadway from 1926 to 1935. Born Rosalie Virginia Scott in Greenville, South Carolina, she relocated to New York City as a child and began performing in church plays during her youth. She pursued professional training after winning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Art, launching her acting career in her thirties. At age twenty she had married Dr. Henry Pruden McClendon, a chiropractor.

McClendon's first notable stage role came in 1926 in Deep River, described as a native opera with jazz. The following year she appeared in In Abraham's Bosom, a play by Paul Green that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. She returned to Paul Green's work in 1931 with The House of Connelly, the inaugural production of the Group Theatre, directed by Lee Strasberg. In 1932 she drew critical attention for her portrayal of Phyllis in Annie Nathan Meyer's Black Souls at Broadway's Provincetown Playhouse. Her additional Broadway credits include Never No More, Brain Sweat, Roll Sweet Chariot, and Panic. Langston Hughes, a contemporary of McClendon's, created a character specifically for her in his 1935 play Mulatto, though she was forced to leave the cast in December of that year after falling critically ill with pleurisy.

Beyond performing, McClendon directed productions at the Harlem Experimental Theatre. In 1935 she co-founded the Negro People's Theatre in Harlem with Dick Campbell. The organization's first production, an adaptation of Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty, drew more than 4,000 attendees, and the group was formally organized in June of that year. The Negro People's Theatre directly inspired the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, established in 1935 under McClendon's supervision. She guided the creation of African American theatre units in cities including Seattle, Hartford, Philadelphia, Newark, Los Angeles, Boston, Raleigh, Birmingham, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. She also advised national director Hallie Flanagan and selected John Houseman to co-direct the New York unit, having previously worked with Houseman on an unrealized stage adaptation of Euripides' Medea, for which Countee Cullen had written the adaptation, Virgil Thomson had composed the music, and Chick Austin had designed the production.

A planned showcase for McClendon's talents, the Medea project had sets and costumes prepared by the end of 1934 but was abandoned after she fell ill. Her illness continued to affect her career; she had been intended to portray Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles's 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth, but Edna Thomas took the role in her place. McClendon's pleurisy developed into pneumonia, and she died at her home on July 12, 1936.

Following her death, Dick Campbell established the Rose McClendon Players in her honor. In 1946, Carl Van Vechten created the Rose McClendon Memorial Collection of Photographs of Celebrated Negroes at Howard University, now held in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. In 1950, the estate of her husband donated her scrapbooks, spanning 1916 to 1934 and containing articles, reviews, programs, letters, telegrams, and photographs, to the New York Public Library. In 2021, the biopic Voodoo Macbeth, produced by the USC School of Cinematic Arts and depicting the creation of the 1936 New York Negro Unit production of Macbeth, premiered at the Pan-African Film Festival, with Inger Tudor portraying McClendon.