Woodie King Jr. obit

Woodie King Jr. Dies: ‘The Renaissance Man of Black Theater’ Who Advocated For Onstage Representation Was 88

 

He was not on the list.

Woodie King Jr., the theater actor, director and producer, who advocated for Black onstage representation, has died. He was 88.

The New Federal Theatre (NFT), his company dedicated to amplifying the voices of Black and other underrepresented artists, announced that King died January 29 of complications from emergency heart surgery on Thursday at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.

Born on July 27, 1937, in Bladon Springs, Alabama, King was raised in Detroit, where he worked for Ford Motor Company as an arc welder before moving to New York City for college, earning an MFA in theater from Brooklyn College.

Starting in 1965, King served as the cultural director of Mobilization for Youth for five years, before founding NFT in 1970 to give a voice primarily to Black playwrights, actors, directors, designers and others in American theaters.

Having produced more than 450 plays, the theater’s mission is “to integrate artists of color and women into the mainstream of American theater by training artists for the profession and by presenting plays by writers of color and women to integrated, multicultural audiences—plays which evoke the truth through beautiful and artistic re-creations of ourselves.”

Veterans of NFT, which will continue to be known as Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre, include Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Debbie Allen, Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Chadwick Boseman, Robert Downey, Jr., Jackée Harry, Phylicia Rashad and more.

King was the subject of director Juney Smith’s documentary The King of Stage: the Woodie King, Jr. Story, as wella as TCG’s Legacy Leaders of Color video project. Dubbed the ‘Renaissance Man of Black Theater’, King was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2012 and received the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre in 2020.

King is survived by wife Elizabeth Van Dyke, and his three children Geoffrey King, Michael King and Michelle King Huger, whom he shared with ex-wife Willie Mae Washington, as well as five grandchildren.