Hemsley Winfield

Osborne Hemsley Winfield was born on the twentieth of August 1907 at Yonkers, New York, the son of Jeroline Hemsley Winfield — a Black playwright and director who had founded the Harlem Drama Group at Manhattan in 1922 — and Osborne Winfield Sr., a Black-American clergyman of the Yonkers Black-Methodist congregation. The family moved to Harlem in 1918 and Winfield was raised in the Harlem theatrical-and-Methodist household of his mother.

He was placed at the Harlem Public School 89 and at the Manual Training High School at Brooklyn. He took informal study at the Harlem theatrical-and-modern-dance scene of the closing years of the 1920s and was the principal performer of his mother’s Harlem Drama Group at the Lincoln Theatre on 135th Street, Harlem, from 1925 onward.

He was placed in 1929 at twenty-two at the new Greenwich Village modernist-dance studios of the principal post-Denishawn choreographer Edna Guy (placed in this archive) — among the first Black students at the Edna Guy modernist-dance training.

He founded in 1931 at his mother’s Harlem Drama Group studio at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 134th Street the New Negro Art Theatre Dance Group — the first all-Black-American concert-dance company in the history of the period. The Group conducted from 1931 to 1934 the principal Black-American concert-dance experimental programme of the early Harlem Renaissance — predominantly the modernist-and-Africanist choreographic synthesis of the post-Denishawn period.

The Group conducted its first principal concert programme at the Saunders Trades School at Yonkers on the twenty-ninth of April 1931 — the first Black-American all-modernist concert-dance programme of any major American venue.

The Group conducted across 1931 to 1933 a sustained programme of Manhattan concerts at the Cherry Lane Theatre at the West Village, at the Theatre of the Dance at the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre, and at the principal Harlem stages of the period.

He was hired in early 1933 by Otto Kahn of the Metropolitan Opera Association as the principal choreographer-and-leading-performer of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Louis Gruenberg’s opera The Emperor Jones — based on the Eugene O’Neill 1920 play.

Winfield danced the role of the Witch Doctor at the Metropolitan Opera production of The Emperor Jones at the Metropolitan Opera House at the corner of Broadway and Thirty-Ninth Street on the eighteenth of January 1933 — the first appearance of an African American in a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera. He performed the role at the four scheduled Metropolitan performances of the production: 18 January, 23 January, 27 January, and 11 February 1933.

The Metropolitan Opera Emperor Jones production was a critical and popular success and a substantial factor in the post-1955 desegregation of the Metropolitan Opera — twenty-two years after Winfield’s performance.

He died at Manhattan on the fifteenth of January 1934 of complications of pneumonia, at twenty-six — fourteen months after the Emperor Jones Metropolitan Opera debut.

He is honored here as the first Black-American at the Metropolitan Opera.