Eugene O’Neill’s play “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” and the harassment of its author over the staging

Eugene O'Neill has a play, "All God's Chillun Got Wings", about the friendship of a Black boy and a white girl who share their dreams with one another. Ella says she wants to be black, like Jim, while Jim secretly eats chalk, dreaming of becoming white. With the years their bond weakens, and at some point they find themselves on opposite sides of an impassable wall of racial enmity. Ella and Jim no longer hold hands; it seems to her that they have too little in common to go on talking. Jim becomes a qualified lawyer, and Ella a deserted drunkard and, into the bargain, a racist. When she is left entirely alone, rejected by all and forgotten, Jim appears and marries his childhood sweetheart, hoping that Ella will thaw and understand everything. But Ella can barely tolerate his coloured relations and lives, with a heavy heart, beside this man of the wrong skin colour, who has turned out to be the only creature on earth who loves her. In the end she loses her reason altogether. The play closes with the characters playing as they did in childhood. Ella asks Jim to be her boy for a while, and he agrees to play with her even at the very gates of the kingdom of heaven.

When O'Neill decided to stage this play, he was subjected to the most ferocious persecution from every side. Some were outraged that a Black man was to be played by a Black actor rather than a white one in make-up; others that children would see an interracial friendship, to say nothing of the author being accused of promoting interracial marriages, which were forbidden in 30 states. Some were offended that a Black man would kiss a white woman on stage, some that an actress had agreed to act opposite a Black man, and still others raged that a Black man who had made good should marry a white woman far beneath him in status.