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“C” is for Childress, Alice (1920-1994 )

“C” is for Childress, Alice (1920-1994 ). Actress, theater director, playwright, novelist. Childress was born in Charleston but was taken to New York City quite early and raised by her grandmother. However, she maintained a connection to the lowcountry through a network of Charlestonians living in Harlem. She first worked professionally as an actress in 1940, when she joined the American Negro theater. She rose to director, a position she held for nearly 12 years. Childress acted in plays on and off Broadway and later in films. Perhaps her most famous play, A Wedding Band, a tale focusing on an interracial love affair in Charleston, circa 1918, premiered in 1966. In 1977 Alice Childress published A Short Walk, a novel of a woman growing up in Charleston, going into show business, and ending up in New York.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.