Val Gray Ward, founder of Kuumba Theatre Workshop, pioneering Black theater company in Chicago, dead at 91

Val Gray Ward helped change the theater landscape in Chicago for Black people.

In 1968, she founded the nonprofit Kuumba Theatre Workshop and, in doing so, helped pioneer a new outlet for Black creativity that became known internationally for its work.

“I got tired of seeing Black trauma being twisted into entertainment by artistic incompetents,” she said in a 1975 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “All the old stereotypes were being commercialized, and Black images went further down the American drain. I want to use theater to explore every mood, attitude, variation and lifestyle of the Black experience and portray positive images while I’m at it. Usually, the result is provocative drama.”

Mrs. Ward died March 7, according to family members, who did not disclose a cause of death. She was 91.

The creation of Kuumba came amid the Black Arts Movement in Chicago.

“This was coming out of the 1950s, when Emmett Till was killed, lynching was going on, Black people couldn’t go certain places, and what Val and a group of others in the arts community did was create a space for art that was by, for and about Black people,” said Pemon Rami, a filmmaker who directed with Kuumba early in his career. “Prior to Val, we basically were doing standard plays, like Tennessee Williams productions, except with Black casts.”

Mrs. Ward served as artistic director and produced and directed such plays as “The Amen Corner” by James Baldwin, who was a friend, and “Welcome To Black River” by Samm Art Williams.

Kuumba staged productions of the Useni Eugene Perkins play “The Image Makers” in Lagos, Nigeria, as part of an international arts festival.

It also performed in Japan and Canada and received 21 Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for its work on the 1988 PBS television production of “Precious Memories: Strolling 47th Street,” a retrospective on Chicago’s pioneers of jazz and blues in the 1940s.

Kuumba performances were also held at taverns, prisons, churches and schools. And the group offered tutoring programs and workshops for writers, actors and dancers.

The theater company was born out of her South Side home and over the years operated out of several spaces, including the South Side Community Arts Center, a space at 2222 S. Michigan Ave. and Malcolm X College before shutting down in 1993.

Mrs. Ward took the stage before each Kuumba performance and read the Langston Hughes poem “Note on Commercial Theater” — a commentary on the richness of Black art and the watered-down appropriation of it.

“All the Black artists really wanted to work with Kuumba because you knew there was an audience who came to see Val’s stuff — while everyone else was fighting to get an audience,” said Chuck Smith, who directed shows at Kuumba and is resident director for the Goodman Theatre. “She was one of the first to open the doors for all of us Black theater folk, and it was really well run. She’d announce an entire season of shows featuring new works. And, back in the day, there weren’t a lot of Black published plays. So we had to create from scratch with the writers who were around in the city.”

Queenola Val Ward was born Aug. 21, 1932, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, an independent Black community founded by former slaves in 1887. She was one of nine children of Henry Ward, a minister, and Iola Ward, a homemaker.

As a girl, she enjoyed performing theatrical readings from the works of Black writers.

After graduating from high school in 1950, she moved to Chicago in 1951, got married and became a homemaker and mother of five children.

While home with her young children, she resumed her theatrical interpretations.

“I stayed home and read books and found the characters within myself,” with her kids as her audience, she said. “They liked it and kept me going.

“During the early ‘60s, when the Civil Rights Movement was getting going, people heard about me and called me up to read for their groups, and later I was asked to perform at colleges,” she said.

She became friends with famed artist Margaret Taylor-Burroughs and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Her one-woman show, in which she interpreted the works of Black writers, was a powerhouse, according to friends and published accounts.

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Brooks called Mrs. Ward, who was 5 feet, 3 inches tall, “a little Black stampede.”

In the 1960s, she also worked with the Chicago Committee on Urban Opportunity and directed the group’s theater-in-the-streets program. Her actors included high school dropouts and ex-gang members. They traveled in a caravan of two trucks, a trailer and a bus and performed open-air shows.

“My biggest thing is listening, not putting down what they have done before but helping them create new values,” she told the Sun-Times in 1968 about her work with young people.

The group performed a play on the life of Harriet Tubman that was written by her second husband, Francis Ward, a journalist who worked for the Sun-Times at the time.

“Val was fearless,” said Jackie Taylor, former head of the Black Arts & Cultural Alliance of Chicago and founder of the Black Ensemble Theater. “She taught us, through her ministry of theater, how to love ourselves and how to be second-class to nobody.”

Taylor was a grade school student when she first saw Mrs. Ward perform.

“I’ll never forget, in an auditorium of 300 young kids from Cabrini-Green — and we did not do well at assemblies — but you could hear a pin drop as she began her performance as Sojourner Truth because that is the power that she had in reaching and teaching young people,” Taylor said. “She said: ‘You will listen to me, little Black children, and understand how great you are.’ And we shut up.”

Kuumba shut down in 1993 after 25 years. In large part, that was because Mrs. Ward moved to New York to be with her husband, who was teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Ward is survived by sons Babatu Gray, Akintola Ward and Kenneth Gray, her daughter Rhonda Ward Sonoiki, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Latanya Richardson, died in 2018.

Services are being planned.