Langston Hughes, Letter to John Rumsey

Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto was written in 1931 and debuted at the Vanderbilt Theater in New York in 1935. It was the first play on the topic of interracial relationships written by a Black author addressed to a white audience, and was the longest-running Broadway play by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. The play’s white producer, Martin Jones, dramatically altered the script (including the addition of a rape scene) and used “every possible device and subterfuge” to deny Hughes his royalties. After enlisting the help of NAACP attorney Arthur Spingarn and the Dramatists Guild, Hughes documents here the first time in the year since the play’s debut that he has been fully paid the royalties due to him as author.