Val Gray Ward, an accomplished actress, director and producer who founded Kuumba, a pioneering African-American theater company in Chicago, has died at 91.
An accomplished actress, director and producer, Val Gray Ward founded Kuumba, a pioneering African American theater company in Chicago.
In the 1960s, she was drawn to the civil rights movement and saw how theater could empower Black writers and actors. The result was Kuumba, a theater company that Ward founded in 1968 out of her home on the South Side. She took the name from a Swahili term meaning “to clean up; to create.” “She embodied and understood the sacred and intrinsic importance of the arts in the lives and liberation of Black people and, by extension, the world. For Val you can and must educate and entertain at the same time. That’s exactly what she did,” Fitzpatrick said.
The troupe also took its productions to large universities around the Midwest. In 1987, it found a new home at Malcolm X College.
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