Please be patient, we are in the process of creating this section of the Site.

Thelma Thornton was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 23, 1909.

Upon graduating from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School at age sixteen, a friend who also was “interested in dramatics” suggested the two apply to Emerson College. At the time there was one other black student, Grace Postles, in Thelma’s class.
As there was no theatre departmentment Thelma received a B.L.I., a Bachelor of Literary Interpretation.
Asked if Emerson was a very liberal school. Thornton said,

“Well, it was not; we had a lot of Southerners there, and at that time in Boston in the 20s they didn’t want you to live in the dormitories. Of course, I lived in Cambridge. I commuted just across the Charles River.” She recalls no encounters with discrimination. "I was just loving living at that time. If there was discrimination I didn’t know it.”

Thelma remembers the Allied Arts Center, founded by Maud Cuney Hare, as the first black theatre group in Boston.

“It was Mrs. Hare’s baby. It was her dream to fulfill, of letting the people at that time know that there was some talent within our group and not only just dancers and theatre people, singers, but people who could create beauty in literature and in the dance and in drama.” (The Center was technically interracial, but )“of course the majority were our people.”

Thelma herself ran one of the workshops, a children’s group that met on Saturdays. She organized a small group that she called the University City Players, one of whom was a man named Bill Howard, which functioned for three years.

Thelma was away from Boston for four years.
When Thelma finished Emerson she could not find work but was hired to teach English and dramatic arts at the Palmer Memorial Institute, directing three plays a year.
Returning to the city when her mother died, she headed a dramatics group at the Robert Gould Shaw House, teaching voice and gesture, and at the summer camp.
She met her future husband, the Reverend Wynn, when he arrived from Florida to spend two years at the Boston University School of Theology and a third year at Andover Newton Seminary. A Baptist, Reverend Wynn “got the missionary fever to go to Africa,” an event that changed the course of Thelma’s life.

Her most important role in Allied Arts theatre was the female lead in “Antar of Araby,” a major production staged at the Fine Arts Theatre.