As mentioned on Wednesday, the New York City Council approved the naming of West 47th Street between Broadway and 8th Ave as “Lloyd Richards Way.” Below is part of the addendum we submitted to the New York City Council minutes of that day, when the resolution was approved by a vote of 46-0 with one abstention. At a later date, I will detail more about how this finally came to pass after Julius Hollingsworth, Chet Whye, Jr., and I worked for almost three years to make this happen.

“It is thrilling that the New York City Council has the opportunity to vote today on co-naming West 47^th Street between Broadway and 8^th Avenue, as “Lloyd Richards Way.” This is a long overdue honor for the legendary Broadway theater director and educator, Lloyd Richards. Broadway is the beating heart of New York City, and the beating heart of Broadway is Lloyd Richards. His accomplishments and influence have been wide and deep and affected every aspect of American theater.  Actress Ruby Dee has said that “Lloyd Richards was the Father of the Modern American theater”; James Earl Jones said, “Lloyd Richards was the rabbit everyone was trying to catch”; Charles S. Dutton said, “Lloyd Richards had two sons, but many children”: actors, directors, playwrights, lighting designers, scenic designers and more. Thousands of theater workers and artists have directly benefited artistically and economically from Lloyd Richards’ efforts.

It is befitting that the street to be co-named after the legendary Broadway theater director, teacher, producer, and artistic director is West 47^th Street: for that is the street where Lloyd Richards’ groundbreaking production of A Raisin in the Sun in 1959 was first performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, smashing the color barrier on Broadway for African-American directors of drama. West 47^th Street is also the location of the Theater Development Fund TKTS booth—and Lloyd was, among many other crucial positions in the American theater, at one time the Chair of the Board of Trustees at TDF. We thank New York City Council member Erik Bottcher for sponsoring this street co-naming and navigating it through the City Council.

On June 29^th of this year, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine issued a proclamation proclaiming the day as “Lloyd Richards Day” in recognition of Lloyd’s many contributions to the artistic and cultural life of New York City. June 29^th marked both the day of Mr. Richards’ birth and that of his passing, 87 years later, in 2006. Now the New York City Council has the opportunity to vote on making that recognition of Lloyd Richards a more permanent one. With this street co-naming, you are making sure that one of New York City’s most important cultural heroes is not forgotten. Lloyd Richards was not a man to tout his own lifetime of achievement. His way was always quiet influence. It is up to us to preserve his legacy.

Let’s take a walk through some of Lloyd Richards’ many accomplishments in more detail to understand why preserving his legacy is so important to this city and American theater.

Back in their struggling days, when Lloyd Richards and his friend, Sidney Poitier had to pool their change to split a hot dog to eat, they may not have realized that it was just a matter of time before Richards would be directing Poitier in the ground-breaking Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Lloyd had come to NYC shortly after a stint in the armed services during WW2, serving with a unit that would become The Tuskegee Airmen. Soon he was starring on Broadway as an actor, but became even more well known as a consummate acting teacher. Yes, the unknown Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee were among some of his early acting students. And in 1959, he directed the legendary production of A Raisin in the Sun at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, a groundbreaking production where almost every member of that cast became stars—and in the process, Lloyd Richards became the first African-American director to direct a drama on Broadway.

That would be enough for any one man but there’s so much more to Lloyd Richards’s legacy. As artistic director for decades of the O’Neill Theater’s National Playwrights Conference, Mr. Richards brought dozens of playwrights to the attention of Broadway producers, including John Guare, Lanford Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, Richard Wesley, and Lee Blessing among many others, all as a direct result of Lloyd Richards’ efforts.

But perhaps the most famous playwright that Lloyd Richards mentored was August Wilson, whose work has now been brought both to Broadway and the movie screen. In 1987, the great James Earl Jones—whom Mr. Richards had earlier directed in the one man show Paul Robeson–starred in August Wilson’s play Fences, and Lloyd Richards won the Tony award for Best Director of a Play for his direction of that play. Lloyd subsequently directed five more of Wilson’s works on Broadway.

As impressive as Lloyd’s directing work was—and that included the direction of one of the episodes of the enormously popular Roots mini-series—his direction may not have been his greatest accomplishment. In addition, Mr. Richards was known as a consummate educator of actors, a teacher who was unforgettable to his students who spoke of Lloyd’s quiet way of giving them a sense of artistic purpose and independence. As Dean of the Yale Drama School, as Professor of Theater at Hunter College and New York University, as teacher at the acting school of the Negro Ensemble Company, The Actor’s Center, and his own studio, Lloyd Richards trained hundreds and hundreds of actors including Angela Bassett, Courtney Vance, Kate Burton, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cicely Tyson. Mr. Richards often said about his actor training that his job was to “prepare birds to fly,” while he stood watching on the ground.

And then concomitant with the direction and the teaching, Mr. Richards was also an able and influential theater administrator. He was a founding member and president of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society; he served, as mentioned before, as chair of the board of directors at TDF; he served on the board of the American Theater wing; he was Artistic Director of National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center; and Artistic Director of the Yale Repertory Company.

Lloyd Richards had garnered many awards for his work, all the way up to the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the Clinton White House. But recognition by the City of New York of the man who has given so much to the cultural and economic life of New York City with a permanent public marker in the theater district, where such a sign of recognition truly belongs, is particularly gratifying.”