a great deal of financial success. W.E.B. Du Bois' refusal to give Spence a share of the award money won by her play at the National Little Theatre Tournament eventually led to the end of the Krigwa Players. The $5000.00 payment she received for her screenplay of The Whipping was the only compensation she ever received as a writer. Spence, who never married, retreated from public life after The Whipping and focused on her work as a high school teacher, while she continued to write and act for Columbia University's Laboratory Players. Influence on Joe Papp Spence was a progressive thinker who challenged her students to discuss social norms. Teaching in a predominantly white classroom, she encouraged her students to think about race and gender in the literature they studied, something that was unheard of prior to the 1960s. Theatrical producer Joe Papp called Eulalie Spence "the most influential force in his life." He continued to speak about her in reverential terms even fifty years after he was a student in her classroom, at Eastern District High School, where she was the only black teacher. Papp credited Spence with "scrubbing his tongue" of its Brooklyn accent and eliminating his "gutter speech" by teaching him grammar and proper enunciation. She brought actors to class and gave her students poetry and plays to read. Papp said that Spence "was interested in me. She made me feel good about myself. She took me under her wing. And she was interested in an area that I seemed to find interesting: language." Papp never forgot the impact of Spence on his life and career, but was unaware of her life as playwright, only learning about her theatrical work years later at a Harlem museum exhibit. Re-assessment of her work Contemporary scholars have tended to dismiss Spence's plays because of their inclusion of Black dialect and because of her inability to sustain a career in theatre. Spence has actually made a notable contribution to theatrical history, especially in relation to the art theatre movement and the history of African American theatre. She was responsible for a major shift in attitudes on dialects in race drama by the mid 1920s. Many modern critics hold Spence in high esteem, such as Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, who said that Spence could be credited with "initiating feminism in plays by black women", and James Hatch and Ted Shine, who noted that Spence