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Robert
Lee "Rob" Penny
(August
6, 1941-March 16, 2003)
Prized
Playwright, Poet, Professor, and Pan-Africanist activist
By
Brentin Mock
City
Paper, Pittsburgh
Rob Penny, the Hill District’s prized
playwright, poet, professor and activist, died last weekend from
a heart attack at the age of 62. No one among his family,
friends and colleagues say they saw it coming.
“We were just joking and having fun
this past Friday,” says Marcia Spidell, longtime friend of
Penny’s and administrative assistant in the University of
Pittsburgh’s Africana Studies Department, where Penny served
as a professor since the program’s inception in 1969. “He
was excited about a new printer that [the department] had just
purchased for him.” The hundreds of poems, plays and short
stories Penny wrote in his lifetime probably put his old printer
out of service.
Penny was born in Opelika, Ala., and
moved to Pittsburgh’s Hill District in 1949. His father had
already moved there years before, during the Great Migration
that brought droves of blacks up north from the brutally
oppressive South. At the time, the Hill District was a sparkling
place -- some-parts Motown, some-parts Harlem Renaissance -- for
western Pennsylvania, attracting jazz artists and other
entertainers from all over the nation. This environment prepared
Penny to help form the Black Horizon Theatre in 1968 and the
Kuntu Writer’s Workshop in 1976. With the help of good friend
Vernell Lillie’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre, these enterprises
gave birth to playwrights such as Marta Effinger, Javon Johnson
and nationally acclaimed writer August Wilson, who was once
Penny’s protégé. During the late 70s Black Arts
Movement, Penny wrote and performed alongside Amiri Baraka, Haki
Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez.
Though his plays have been performed
nationally, garnering heavy followings in New York City and
Chicago, Penny never captured the mainstream attention of peers
such as Wilson and Baraka -- by choice. According to his wife of
43 years, Betty, Penny once turned down the offer of a group of
local white theater owners who promised Broadway and millions of
dollars if he made a few changes to his script Good Black
Don’t Crack. Betty says Rob responded, “I don’t want to go
to Broadway, I want it to go to my people.” The play since has
become one of his most traveled and popular.
His immovable and unbreakable
dedication to the black community and an Afrocentric worldview
further underscored his reputation across the city. In 1969, he
fought to create the Africana Studies department at the
University of Pittsburgh. His class, “Black Consciousness,”
has long been considered essential for any black student at
Pitt. Penny fiercely advocated pan-African schools of thought.
Many of his close friends throughout the department and the
community called him Oba, which is a Yoruba term for “king.”
“The University [of Pittsburgh]
probably doesn’t recognize what a gem they had in Rob Penny,
who was one of the guiding lights of our department,” says
Lillie, who will be working to create a Rob Penny reader. Kuntu
Theatre will also proceed with Penny’s last play, Difficult
Days Ahead in a Blaze, this summer.
Close friends and family say Penny, who
had suffered a heart attack years ago, was big on healthy diets
and exercise and in good health in his final days. His wife,
with him in his last moments, says she believes he was
nonetheless prepared for this attack. He was listening to jazz
in his room when he began to call for her. “By the time I got
upstairs he was already going, telling me he didn’t think he
was gonna make this one,” she says. Penny called her Timamu,
Swahili for “she who completes me and makes my life whole.”
Penny is also survived by his three
sons: Johnny, Robert Lee Jr. and Kadumu. A whole league of
up-and-coming writers -- his “new printers” -- will continue
his legacy.
Visitation: March 20, 7-9 p.m., White
Memorial Chapel, Point Breeze. Wake: March 21, St. Benedict the
Moor Church, Hill District, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Funeral: March 22,
St. Benedict the Moor Church, 11 a.m.
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update 13 April 2009 |
