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Ntozake Shange, Author, and Educator born

Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange was born on this date in 1948. She was a Black playwright, author, and educator.

She was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, NJ, to Paul T. Williams, a surgeon, and Eloise Williams, a psychiatric social worker and educator. She is the oldest of four children from an upper-middle-class family. In 1956, when she was five years old, her family moved to a racially segregated St. Louis, where she enjoyed music, dance, art, literature, and opera.  At a German-American school, she suffered blatant racism as a part of the dawn of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She was an avid reader of Jean Genet, Herman Melville, and Langston Hughes.

She also interacted with musicians and singers like Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Josephine Baker, all her parents' friends.  W.E.B. DuBois was also a family visitor.

In 1961, she returned to New Jersey, completed high school, and became increasingly aware of the inequities of American society regarding Black females; five years later, she enrolled at Bernard College. Soon after, she attempted suicide (more than once) after a recent separation from her law school husband and a deep sense of bitterness and alienation.

Upon gathering together, she earned a bachelor's degree with honors in American studies from Barnard College in 1970 and a master's degree from the University of Southern California in 1973. In 1971, she decided to take an African (Zulu) name: Ntozake, which means "she who comes with her things," and Shange, which means "who walks like a lion." This change reinforced her inner strength and redirected her life. Shange taught humanities, women's studies, and Afro-American studies from 1972 to 1975 at Sonoma State College, Mills College, and the University of California Extension.

During the same period, she danced and recited poetry with the Third World Collective, Raymond Sawyer's Afro-American Dance Company, West Coast Dance Works, and her own company, then called "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide." In 1975, she moved to New York. That move was facilitated by the production of her choreopoem, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf." During the long run of this production, Shange was an artist in residence for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a creative writing instructor at City College of New York.

She has had several volumes published: "Sassafras: A Novella" (1977); "Nappy Edges," a book of poems (1978); and "three pieces" (1981), a book that contains three theatre pieces. A number of her short stories appeared in such publications as Yardbird Lives, the Little Magazine, Spell #7, The Black Scholar, Ms. Magazine, Midnight Birds, and The American Rag; her poems were published in Black Maria, Black Heights, The Black Scholar, Yakity Yak, and others.

From 1976 to 1980, she gave frequent readings and lectures at Yale University, the University of North Dakota, Howard University, New York University, Detroit Art Institute, Southern University, and others. She married her second husband, David Murray, a musician.

Shange has written children's books, "I Live in Music" (1994) and "Lilliane: Resurrection of the Daughter" (1994). She has also collaborated with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on a play at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

Shange died in her sleep on October 27, 2018, aged 70, in an assisted-living facility in Bowie, Maryland.  She had been ill, having suffered a series of strokes in 2004, but she "had been on the mend lately, creating new work, giving readings and being feted for her work." Her sister Ifa Bayeza (with whom she co-wrote the 2010 novel Some Sing, Some Cry) said: "It's a huge loss for the world. I don't think there's a day on the planet when there's not a young woman who discovers herself through the words of my sister."

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