BroadwayWorld.com: Vincent Victoria Presents New Play MR. BOOKER T. AT THE DOOR

Booker T. Washington & Theodore Roosevelt

Broadway World Houston

Aug. 13, 2018

Before former President Barack Obama lived in the White House, before Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr became the first African American to sleep in the White House as a guest in 1972, Educator and Civil Rights leader Booker T. Washington became the first black person ever to dine inside the Executive Mansion as a guest.

The new play "Mr. Booker T. at the Door" written and directed by playwright Vincent Victoria, examines the moments leading up to Booker T. Washington's simple dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt and his family in 1901. Before that time, blacks had worked and lived inside the White House as servants and before then as slaves, but never had a black person been invited by a President to sit down and eat with the First Family.

Upon finding out about the dinner, the Southern States became enraged that Roosevelt could make such an invitation to a "N Word"" and that Washington would have the audacity to accept. The dinner remained in the headlines for weeks across the country and opinions were divided across the nation about the dinner's appropriateness depending on your race and whether or not you were from the North or from the South.

"This is not the first play written about the famous meal between Roosevelt and Washington " Says Victoria " In fact there was an Opera about the dinner written by Ragtime Composer Scott Joplin in 1903. This will be the first play about the dinner staged in Houston though"