| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marvin McAllister. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown's African and American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. x, 239. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.

On New Year's Day, 1824, "gentlemen of color" in Manhattan and their escorts attended a charity ball to aid Greek rebels struggling for national independence against Turkish oppressors. The newspaper ad announcing the event hoped that the cause would be "felt with peculiar force on that day, which cannot fail most powerfully to recall to the descendents of Africans, the blessings of freedom, and prompt them to unite with their white brethren in resisting the arms of despotism whenever it may be reared" (p. 180), for that day also marked the legal end of American involvement in the international slave trade. Poignantly, the ball was to be held on Mercer Street, at a theater where a troupe of African Americans under the management of theater owner William Brown had performed. Marvin McAllister's moving book tells the story of Brown, his company of Afro-New Yorker actors (which included James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge, both of whom later gained renown outside the United States), and their efforts to establish multiracial theater in New York City. Brown staged theater that followed from his own life experience: black, American, and free. His radical concept of selfhood, nationalism, and theater was that one aspect of identity did not have to exist at the expense of the other.

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