MR. KOJO NNAMDIPhilip Rose, the legendary Broadway producer, died late last month at 89 years old. He occupies a special place in American theatre history. His production work cleared the way for "A Raisin in the Sun," which broke down massive racial and gender barriers. It was the first play written by a black woman to open on Broadway. It was also the first Broadway play with a black director.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIBut Rose's personal history was shaped tremendously by the time he spent living in a segregated Washington D.C. He joined this program a little more than ten years ago, back in 2001 to talk about those experiences and about his life's work.

MR. PHILIP ROSEWhen I was about 17 years old, my family had moved to Washington D.C. and I joined them very shortly afterwards having been left alone in New York and rather lonesome. And I came to Washington, which was a very different town from what it is today, and not in a better sense, I must say, at that time.

NNAMDIThis was a segregated city.

ROSEIt was a very, very segregated town. It wasn't in the normal senses we might think of the deep south with perhaps the threat of violence all the time against black people, but nevertheless it was completely segregated. I like to mention that the famous drugstores at the time were People's Drugstores, which were a chain, a very large chain. But it was called People's Drugstore, but blacks were not allowed to come in there and have a Coke.

ROSEThrough a chain of circumstances, I was given an opportunity -- I see it now as an opportunity, to spend much time in the black community.

NNAMDIHow come?

ROSEI had to get a job. And this was Depression days, and there was nothing I was very well fitted for. But there was a department store called Marvin's department store on Seventh Street Northwest, which was very like many of the other stores which catered to the poor people in Washington, which inevitably meant mostly black people, because black people were not allowed then to have normal kinds of jobs in Washington.

ROSEThey were not working for the government. They were not allowed to work in the government except as perhaps janitors or something like that. They didn't get to take the tests, and so they worked -- the women worked as domestics largely, and the men whatever they could get as some kind of work. The store hired bill collectors, because the people who bought the merchandise would generally pay a very insignificant amount of money down, and then pay so much a week, 50 cents a week, a dollar week, for a suit, for a radio, whatever it is they were buying. They never had enough money to buy on cash -- for cash.

NNAMDIAnd you were the collector?

ROSEYour audience cannot see that I'm not six feet tall and wasn't even then.

NNAMDIFive feet five at your best.

ROSEYou got it. I was warned that I was taking on a very dangerous job, because I would come into the black communities during the day and the evening with money in my pocket that I had collected during the course of the day. And I spent about a year to a year and a half doing that. Never had a bad incident, and as a matter of fact, got to know many of the people and make friends with many of the people.

ROSEAnd they welcomed me. I to this day don't know why quite, and we -- I really found out about so many things in life and this country from these people.

NNAMDIMany of our listeners are likely familiar with Lorraine Hansberry, the author of "A Raisin in the Sun" and "Young, Gifted, and Black." You are credited with helping to make her famous.

ROSEIt was another unplanned thing in my life. I had gotten a job as a singer, and was pursuing that, and I got a job at a summer camp. And when I arrived there, and had my first dinner, which was served to all the people who had just arrived, there was a waitress and she waited on me, and she was a young, very attractive, black woman. And I notice her for all the above reasons.

ROSEThen got to know her, and it turned out she was an aspiring writer. She had come from Chicago.

NNAMDIHow good a waitress was she?

ROSENot very good. She also wasn't a very good ping-pong player. We used to play ping-pong together, and she hated to lose. But when the summer was over, the entire summer, we had gotten to be quite close, and when we both got back to New York, she had a little apartment in the village, and I had my apartment, and we used to go to the theater together and talk about theater just as friends. She happened to be a student of theater which I was not.

ROSEI knew very little about it. So she taught me a great deal. One day, and this is after we had seen a play about black people, and she had said, if I were going to write something like that, I could do a better play than that. And, uh, I casually said, well, then, why don't you try that? Well, as I said, a few months later than, she had me come down to listen to what was about half of the play "A Raisin in the Sun." That's as far as she had gone.

ROSEAnd I left her house that night at about 2:00 in the morning I think, and I couldn't sleep. Kept thinking about...

NNAMDIBy then she was married, right?

ROSEShe was married, yes. She was married then, and her husband was at the reading too, and -- along with another mutual friend. And when I came home, I could not fall asleep. I kept thinking about these characters. And they fascinated me, and I wanted to know more about them. So I called her at about 6:30 in the morning and, of course, woke her.

NNAMDILeft her house 2:00 o'clock and called her at 6:30 in the morning.

ROSEExactly. And the first thing she did was get angry at me for calling her at 6:00 o'clock in the morning. But I said, I want to produce your play, and she said...

NNAMDIShe said, Phil, you're not a producer, you're a sometime singer.

ROSERight. Beside which, you're crazy. She also volunteered that, because she didn't know what I was talking about and neither did I.

NNAMDIWith absolutely no experience, what made you think you could produce a Broadway play?

ROSEThe truth is that I didn't even think about it. I fell in love with Lorraine had written, the little bit I had heard, I was very much aware that there was no chance it would ever get on, so the play wouldn't be any worse off if I tried to produce and didn't get it on, or if somebody else tried to produce it and didn't get it on.

NNAMDISo it was gonna be improbable either way.

ROSEEither way. So I just decided to try to do it.

NNAMDIYou had investors who were willing to make a contribution because they thought this play was going to make a political statement.

ROSERight.

NNAMDIAnd they were willing to invest on that basis, but you said, oh, no. No. This is going to be a money-making enterprise. And they said okay, I'm putting my money back on my pocket.

ROSEExactly right. No. No one believed me when I said that I think people will really come to see this play. And, of course, neither did the theater owners, which is why we couldn't get the theater. And we went into rehearsal in December without a theater in New York, which, of course, was unheard of. But the last -- when we got to Philadelphia for just a two-week engagement, John Schubert had begun to hear rumors about the play being something that people wanted to see.

ROSESo he came down to Philadelphia for the Wednesday matinee, and he didn't see the play, but he watched the audience come in and out, and he realized that they were really enjoying this.

NNAMDIOpening night on Broadway, at the end of it, when they didn't know who would be going to see the play because whites would be uncomfortable, and blacks were felt not to have enough money to go to the Broadway theater, tell us what happened on opening night at the end of the play.

ROSEFascinating, because we had one preview the night before, which didn't go well at all. The audience didn't seem to know quite what to think about this play. The curtain came down at the end and we were all scared. Came the next night for opening, at the end of that evening, when the cast began to come out for their bows, and the final bow of course was Sidney Poitier's, and the audience applauded, and the curtain came down after the specified number of bows, and everybody was still in their seats and applauding.

ROSESo the stage manager brought the curtain up again, and then brought it down, and they kept applauding. And then they started screaming author, author. They wanted to see this young black woman who had written the play. There had been no provision for this. They were standing there on stage, didn't know whether to continue bowing or what to do.

ROSEAnd was Ruby D. who made some remark to Sidney. She punched him in the side and said you go get her. And so Sidney jumped off the stage into the audience, ran up the aisle, and almost carried her onto the stage. Never seen anything like it.

NNAMDIAt that time, Lorraine Hansberry was all of 28 years old.

ROSEShe was 28 years old.

NNAMDISadly, Lorraine Hansberry died just a few years later in 1965 at the age of 34. Philip Rose died late last month. He changed American theater and contributed to a better understanding among the races by producing Lorraine Hansberry's debut play, "A Raisin in the Sun." The first Broadway show with an all-black cast. You can listen to the full interview with Philip Rose whose engaging memoir was called, "You Can't Do That on Broadway" at our website, kojoshow.org.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.