Richard Wright and Paul Green c. 1940
UNC Campus at work on the Native Son stage play.
Call for Proposals:
The Paul Green Foundation, named for the famed North Carolina author, humanitarian and civil rights activist, seeks grant proposals from 501(c)(3) Charitable Organizations for projects that reflect the life's work and values of Paul Green. These values centered on the arts, human rights and racial equality.
Projects may be programs, dramatic productions (which could include the promotion and preservation of Green's own work) or other literary or artistic projects that disseminate, promote or preserve Green's unique literary and human rights legacy.
Because Green's plays and stories typically supported his social conscience, a proposal in which an art form illuminates an issue of human rights would be particularly appropriate.
Green's Accomplishments and Values
Paul Green (1894-1981), born and
raised on a North Carolina Harnett County cotton farm, learned the value of
hard work and the love of music and literature in his family home. With these skills and passions he went to
the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1916 to study philosophy
and drama and began what would become a long life of service to others less
fortunate than he, and a life devoted to literature and music.
In 1927, Green received the Pulitzer
Prize in Drama for his Broadway play, In
Abraham's Bosom that depicted the tragic life of a struggling Black man
who wanted his people to have access to education. In 1941, he wrote the Broadway play for
Richard Wright's powerful novel Native
Son, dramatizing the oppressive effect of racism on the Black population
in 1930s America.
Paul Green lived his long life with
compassion and action for the people whose lives were rife with
inequality. He used his powerful pen
to affect social change with the writing of a one-act play, “Hymn to the
Rising Sun“ that challenged the right of the State to continue the inhuman
and cruel chain gangs. He was firmly
opposed to the death penalty and stood as a “Lone Vigil” on nights of
executions.
Green may be perhaps best known for creating a new artform - Symphonic Outdoor Drama with the writing of
The Lost Colony in 1937. This epic play – still in production –
brilliantly dramatizes the courage, the depth of integrity, and the devotion
to freedom that are the hallmarks of the American character. Green went on to
write sixteen more such dramas for large outdoor venues from Texas to
Virginia, dramatizing significant events in the life of the nation, performed
in amphitheatres on or near the sites where the events actually occurred.
A former professor of Philosophy and
Drama at UNC-Chapel Hill, Green was the author of Broadway plays, Hollywood
feature films, novels, poems, short stories and scholarly essays. His writing, more often than not, combined
his literary genius with the stories of people who had experienced great
hardship and loss in their lives.