Negro Ensemble Company

The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) is a groundbreaking New York City-based theater company and training institution established in 1967 by playwright Douglas Turner Ward, producer/actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald S. Krone with funding from the Ford Foundation. The company's focus on original works with complex themes grounded in black life with an international viewpoint created a canon of theatrical works of which set the stage and created the audience for writers who came later, such as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and many others.

The Negro Ensemble Company was created in 1964 when actor Robert Hooks created a tuition-free acting workshop for urban youth which he named the Group Theatre Workshop (GTW) in tribute to Harold Clurman's The Group Theatre. The group became a refuge for young minority actors. He and his associate Barbara Ann Teer then decided to utilize the young actors in a one-night friends-and-parents showcase. The plays chosen were Gwendolyn Brooks' We Real Cool and Douglas Turner Ward's Happy Ending.

Jerry Tallmer, reviewer for the New York Post, happened to attend this free, one-night student event and glowingly reviewed it. This inspired Hooks to option both Happy Ending and Ward's Day of Absence with the goal of producing them as a double bill under the banner of Robert Hooks Productions. After raising $35,000 (equivalent to $267,000 in 2016) from music moguls Clarence Avant and Al Bell, Hooks booked the St. Mark's Playhouse (where many black performers had performed in the long-running show, The Blacks) and hired Gerald Krone as Company Manager.

Ward was also invited by The New York Times to write an opinion piece for its Sunday edition on the state of black theatre. American Theatre: For Whites Only? (8/14/66), a scathing indictment of America's theatre establishment, also posited the need for a unique Black theatre institution.