As the holiday season approaches, many are familiar with the Black Nativity movie or play. This unique adaptation of the Nativity story, often performed by an entirely Black cast, carries deep cultural and historical significance.
Langston Hughes and the Black Nativity
Black Nativity, a musical about the Christian origin story of the birth of Christ, was mounted on an Off-Broadway stage with an all-Black cast on December 11, 1961. It was originally titled Wasn’t It a Might Day? written by the well-known African-American poet, Langston Hughes. Hughes developed Black Nativity in 1961 after the founders of Cleveland's famous Karamu House, Rowena and Russell Jelliffe, commissioned him for the project. As a young man, Hughes had premiered many of plays there and remained lifelong friends with the Jelliffes.
Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, is perhaps best-known for his earlier work during the era known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s). He traveled extensively throughout his life, working as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy, and later as a seaman, all the while writing poetry. Hughes died in 1967 and is one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century.
Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. He authored two autobiographies and published sixteen volumes of poetry, three short story collections, two novels, eleven plays, and nine children’s books. Black Nativity is an adaptation of the Nativity story by Langston Hughes, performed by an entirely black cast.
Hughes was the author of the book, with the lyrics and music being derived from traditional Christmas carols, sung in gospel style, with a few songs created specifically for the show. The show was first performed Off-Broadway on December 11, 1961, and was one of the first plays written by an African American to be staged there.
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The Structure of the Show
The show begins with the theater completely darkened. Barefoot singers clad only in white robes and carrying (electric) candles walk in, singing the classic hymn "Go Tell It on the Mountain". The birth of Jesus is one of the most dramatic aspects of the show, as the stage--previously lit with orange and blue lights--is bathed in a deep red hue.
Mary's contractions are echoed through the use of African drums and percussion. The Three Wise Men are often played by prominent members of the black community in the neighboring area, and have no singing parts. The show closes with the chorus singing a reprise of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" as they walk out in darkness.
Interestingly, Black Nativity was the first all-Black play to be featured on Off-Broadway, and the first to mix Gospel with African drums and other motifs of diasporic Black culture. Since then, it continues to be mounted throughout the US and in other parts of the world as part of annual Christmas holiday offerings, sometimes true to its original story but often reimagined to more contemporary times.
In 2013, for example, Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons brought it to the big screen with actors Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson and Angela Bassett. This musical put Hughes’ story into a modern tale of economic struggle with a young single mother and her teenaged son getting evicted.
In a 2013 National Public Radio interview Rachel Martin stated that roughly a quarter million people had seen the Black Nativity play.
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История популярной рождественской традиции / The History of a Popular Christmas Tradition
The Significance of Black Representation in the Nativity Story
Other than wanting to tell the story of Christ’s birth within a Black perspective, we have found little on why Hughes wrote Black Nativity; it is important that he did. While many people accept that one of the three kings who visited the Bethlehem manger where Christ was born was Black, few know why.
It is important to note that Africans in the north eastern horn of Africa became Christians long before Christianity reached Western Europe. In fact, the Ethiopian (Axum) and Egyptian Kingdoms of the time, which included parts of what today is Sudan, adopted Christianity in significant ways in the third and fourth centuries AD.
Many Black people who grew up in the West do not know this history because Christianity was brought to the Americas by Europeans after 1492 AD, and most Africans that were captured and enslaved were from West Africa where indigenous African religions and Islam were the predominant spiritual practices.
Notably, the African Methodist (AME) Church, founded in the late 1700s in Philadelphia began using Ethiopia as a touchstone part of their origin stories and began centering blackness. By the late 1960s, Black American theologians, led by the Reverend Dr. James Cone, began theorizing on what is now called Black Liberation Theology (BLT).
BLT draws on Christianity’s African roots, but also on the principles of Liberation Theologians working with the poor in Latin America. Today, many Black ministers, although not all, practice Black Liberation Theology.
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The Broader Context of Nativity Scenes
’Tis the season for the Christmas crèche, a depiction of the birth of Jesus displayed in churches, in homes and-sometimes controversially-on public property. In most of these scenes, the divine child lies on a bed of straw, watched over by Mary, Joseph and a few reclining animals.
A tableau of sculptures or living beings, the Nativity scene (as well as the closely related Adoration of the Magi) traces its origins back some 1,500 years. The tradition has changed over time, taking on new meanings as Christianity itself has evolved.
Saint Francis of Assisi is often erroneously credited with creating the first crèche (a French word derived from the Latin cripia, or crib). Francis’ manger may have been the first recorded live Nativity scene.
The New Testament provides few details of Christ’s birth. Of the four Gospels, only the Book of Luke presents the infant lying swaddled in the manger with Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and heavenly angels. The Nativity narrative known today only emerged in the seventh century, with the circulation of what was believed to be an unknown Gospel by Matthew.
Before the Pseudo-Matthew Gospel provided a richer narrative, religious art centered on Jesus’s birth drew on the few details provided by the biblical Gospels. One of the oldest known renderings of the Adoration of the Magi, or the Epiphany, as the wise men’s visit is also known, is a late third- or early fourth-century wall painting in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome.
By the fifth century, elaborate portrayals of the Magi’s tribute had overtaken these relatively modest scenes. A mosaic completed around 435 at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, for instance, shows the infant Christ seated on a bejeweled throne, flanked by his mother; a mysterious woman; and a group of angels.
The Adoration of the Magi remained a popular subject for centuries, inspiring such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Diego Velázquez. But while the story of the wise men’s visit is entwined with that of Jesus’s birth, the two eventually began to be marked on separate days, with the Adoration traditionally falling on January 6 and the Nativity on December 25.
As the Nativity scene gained traction, reflections of the infant Jesus’s humanity replaced the displays of divine majesty associated with the Magi. In Italy, Nativity scenes are called presepi, after praesepire, a Latin verb meaning to fence or enclose.
Santa Maria Maggiore, the Roman basilica that houses an ancient mosaic of the Epiphany, boasts several ties to early Nativity scenes. According to Berliner, papal records indicate the church housed a reconstruction of the Nativity, perhaps containing sculptures of Mary and Jesus, as early as the fifth century.
Evolution and Adaptation
During the Renaissance, the southern Italian city of Naples won acclaim for its extravagant Nativity scenes-a claim to fame that it retains today. Cajetan’s presepio and others like it inspired a whole new genre of Nativity scenes fueled by the exuberance of the Baroque movement.
The Christmas crèche tradition was “enthusiastically adapted not only by other orders of the Catholic Church but also by the laity, and even by Protestant countries,” wrote art historian Hanns Swarzenski in a 1967 essay.
As Puritans and other religious exiles settled in the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, attitudes toward the crèche softened. The Moravians, a Protestant denomination from what is now the Czech Republic, founded the city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on Christmas Eve in 1741.
Back in North America, Nativity scenes gained popularity in tandem with Christmas, which was first celebrated as a national holiday in the mid-19th century. Some, like the Moravians, crafted their sets by hand, while others purchased figurines crafted out of cardboard, plaster, lead, wood, porcelain and more.
Contemporary Controversies
In the 21st century, the Christmas crèche has become a subject of controversy, in large part due to the perennial debate over whether this religious symbol belongs on public property. Broadly speaking, the court allows such tableaux as part of displays representing a wide range of holiday traditions (for instance, a crèche accompanied by a menorah and a statue of Santa Claus).
Meanwhile, in Naples, locals continue the tradition of intricate presepi, offering up contemporary figures in addition to mainstays like Mary and Christ. Though the Nativity scene has evolved in recent decades, one key aspect of the tradition remains.
“The miniature world of the Nativity scene provides an opportunity for its viewers to imagine themselves within the holy narrative,” writes art historian Olaya Sanfuentes for MAVCOR Journal. “Creators of Nativity scenes represent themselves as contemporary participants within the historic event.
