James Spruill lectures at the University of Connecticut

Professor Spruill talks about his experiences in the off Broadway, experimental (avant garde) theatre in the 1960s. Duplicate of RR274. Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library Born in Baltimore, Mr. Spruill attended segregated schools before attending Goddard College, a progressive school in Plainfield, Vt., on a scholarship.

Interrupting his studies for prolonged periods of acting, he divided his time between Vermont and New York City, where in addition to acting with Freeman, Mr. Spruill was an understudy to Louis Gossett Jr. and appeared with others who became well-known in television and movies.

Mr. Spruill initially left New York to join the Theater Company of Boston. In 1968, the year he founded the New African Company, which he founded with Gustave Johnson, he began serving as a host of WGBH radio’s Say Brother,’ which became Basic Black.’

He enrolled that year in a master of fine arts program in directing at Boston University. Mr. Spruill was the first to be awarded the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship for a graduate student and received his degree in 1975. The next year, he was hired to teach on the faculty of BU’s College of Fine Arts, where he remained until retiring in 2006.

James Spruill died on December 31, 2011.

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