National Black Theatre Festival (International Black Theatre Festival)

Larry Leon Hamlin had a problem. Researching a magazine article in the late 1980s, he found Black theatre companies scattered across America with no way to find each other. His answer was a festival — and he called Maya Angelou.

Together, they raised $500,000 and launched what became the International Black Theatre Festival in 1989 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angelou served as the festival's first chairperson. That inaugural gathering drew 10,000 people to 30 performances by 17 of the country's professional Black theatre companies. Local tradition holds that Angelou brought celebrity company with her — that the first festival carried the weight of the whole culture showing up at once.

Hamlin had already built the NC Black Repertory Company here before he built this. Winston-Salem — tobacco money, Moravian roots, six colleges inside city limits — turned out to be the right ground. Hamlin's stated goal was straightforward: unite Black theatre companies to ensure the genre's survival into the next millennium. The festival also, as he put it, helped dispel the misconception that Black theatres weren't professional enough to warrant grant money.

The festival runs biennially, six days at a stretch, spread across the Stevens Center and other downtown venues. Today it draws nearly 60,000 people and stages more than 100 theatrical performances alongside readings, colloquia, workshops, a poetry slam, and a vendors' market. More than 50 celebrities typically attend. In 2001, a $300,000 deficit threatened to end it — Hamlin didn't cancel, raised the money, kept going. He died in 2007; the festival did not.

In 2024, the festival was renamed the International Black Theatre Festival. The work Hamlin started is still the work — a reunion of people who refuse to let the form disappear.