Miscegenation and Mixed-Race Children in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Plays

Out of the 28 plays written by Georgia Douglas Johnson, the famous Harlem Renaissance author, only 12 have survived. Two of them deal with sexual relationships between white men and black women and with the position of the children born of these marriages. In the play Blue-Eyed Black Boy, this theme is combined with the theme of lynching, while in the play Blue Blood it is linked to the lives of “ordinary” African Americans and, as some critics have noted, is presented in the form of a tragicomedy. This paper examines how the playwright developed these two themes, the extent to which the plays reflect the real lives of African Americans at the time they were written, and the extent to which they leave room for interpretation – by the reader or by a potential director. It also takes a brief look at the play Paupaulekejo, which deals with the relationship between a mixed-race African man and a white British woman.