The American Negro Theatre (ANT) was co-founded on June 5, 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal. Determined to build a "people's theatre", they were inspired by the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Unit in Harlem and by W. E. B. Du Bois' "four fundamental principles" of Black drama: that it should be by, about, for, and near African Americans. The ANT produced 12 original Black plays and seven adaptations of non-Black work for tens of thousands of primarily Black audiences in its first nine years. The Black playwrights whose work the company produced included Countee Cullen (One Way To Heaven), Theodore Browne (Go Down Moses and Natural Man), Owen Dodson (Garden of Time), Alvin Hill (Walk Hard) and Curtis Cooksey (Starlight). In addition to their theatre productions, the ANT also produced a weekly radio program in 1945, with a repertoire that spanned Shakespeare, Dickens and opera. It also ran the Studio Theatre school of drama under the leadership of Osceola Archer, one of the first Black actresses on Broadway. Many of her students later had careers in the performing arts, including television comediennes Helen Martin (Good Times and 227), Emmy-winning Isabel Sanford (All in the Family and The Jeffersons), and Clarice Taylor (Sanford and Son and The Cosby Show); stage and screen couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, movie actor Sidney Poitier, and singer-actor Harry Belafonte. In a 1996 interview with Cornel West, Belafonte described how the American Negro Theatre opened his eyes to how "magical" theatre was. Belafonte said that he saw his first show in the ANT when he was given two tickets as a gratuity when working as a janitor's assistant for Clarice Taylor, who was in the play that night. Aside from teaching, Archer also directed plays for the ANT, most notably a 1948 command performance for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt of an integrated production of Katherine Garrison Chapin's play Sojourner Truth, featuring Belafonte and actress Jill Miller. Within the next few years, however, the ANT folded, a victim of repeated financial shortfalls and in-fighting over its mission in the wake of its Anna Lucasta success, for which its lead actress Alice Childress gained a Tony nomination for playing the title character. Theatre arts scholar Jonathan Shandell counts ANT's expansion of the "repertoire to include canonical black playwrights, use of a predominantly black cast and crew in all productions, and ... community outreach efforts,