Legacy of the Watts Writers Workshop Continues
Archive interviewee Marla Gibbs (co-star of The Jeffersons and star of 227) will be one of the honorees at the Watts Writers Workshop Gala Banquet on February 9th. Other honorees include actor Ted Lange (co-star of The Love Boat), actor Roger E. Mosley (co-star of Magnum, P.I.), and Professor Johnnie Scott, the Emmy award winning writer of the acclaimed NBC documentary, The Angry Voices of Watts. Selections of a recent interview with Budd Schulberg will also be screened.
In September of 1965, television and film writer Budd Schulberg started the Watts Writers’ Workshop in response to the devastation of the infamous riots, which had taken place in the primarily African-American South Los Angeles neighborhood a month earlier. “In a small way, I wanted to help,” says the Academy Award-winner. “The only thing I knew was writing, so I decided to start a writers’ workshop.”
The Watts Writers’ Workshop applied for and received a $25,000 grant from the fledgling National Endowment for the Arts -- which enabled the group to establish Douglass House. The Workshop’s new home served as a meeting space for its writing programs as well as housing for some of the Workshop’s members, many of whom were homeless.
“The NEA provided tremendous assistance, no question about it,” says Schulberg. “It was like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and it helped us gain additional private support and also obtain help from the film industry.”
The Workshop quickly attracted national and international media attention; in 1966 it was the subject of an hour-long NBC TV documentary. Writing from the Workshop was also collected in the 1967 anthology From the Ashes: Voices of Watts.
“The Watts Writers’ Workshop allowed us to voice what urban, black America was thinking, feeling, and seeing and to get that out to he rest of the country,” observes honoree Johnnie Scott. “Before that, we had no voice; no one was listening.”
Though the Watts Writers’ Workshop lasted less than a decade, its legacy endures. In 1971, Schulberg and screenwriter Fred Hudson, founded the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in Harlem, New York. The center’s programs include writing classes in several genres as well as an after school program in creative writing and computer literacy for elementary and middle school students. The Center also produces the annual Black Roots Festival of Poetry, Prose, Drama, and Music, which has showcased leading African American writers and artists such as Lucille Clifton, Gordon Parks, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed.
For information or tickets call 619-531-0902 or visit www.climbsd.org