Shuffle Along marked the first full-fledged Broadway musical with an all-black cast, playwright, composer and lyricist. The show was a hit, running for about 484 nights on Broadway, a record at the time, according to The New York Times. Shuffle recently came back into the mainstream when George C. Wolfe wrote and directed an adaptation that also detailed the backstage saga of the original’s creation. The production featured Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Joshua Henry, Billy Porter, Adrienne Warren, Brandon Victor Dixon and more.

George and Ira Gershwin penned this opera, featuring an all-black cast of classically trained singers. Even though it has been criticized for stereotyping African-Americans with depictions of drug abuse, poverty and prostitution, it has been revived on Broadway seven times, most recently in the 2012 Audra McDonald- and Norm Lewis-led production.

In what might be seen as a radical casting move even today, in 1967, the entire Broadway cast of Hello, Dolly! turned over to welcome an all-black cast, led by actress and singer Pearl Bailey as Dolly Levi. The reviews for Bailey and the new cast were glowing, and the production ran for another two years. Bailey received a 1968 Special Tony Award for her performance.

For his leading turn in The Great White Hope, James Earl Jones was awarded Best Actor in a Play at the Tony Awards, the first African-American winner in any play category. The acting legend is also one of the few artists to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award, giving him the status of EGOT.

Geoffrey Holder was the first African-American director to win Best Director of a Musical, as well as the first to win Best Costume Design in a Musical. He won both trophies for The Wiz!, another seminal musical that featured an R&B/soul score and an all-black cast.

The playwright launched his Broadway career and legendary cycle of plays, beginning with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which is about a group of blues musicians in the 1920s. He would go on to make an enormous impact in American theater with his works chronicling the 20th-century African-American experience such as Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which have both received Broadway revivals. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and his Jitney won Best Revival of a Play at the Tony Awards in 2017.

When Audra McDonald won the 2014 Best Leading Actress in a Play Tony for Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, she set two records, becoming the first performer ever to win six Tony awards, and also the first to win in all four acting categories.

The revolutionary musical Hamilton swept the 2016 Tonys, including wins for three of its leads: Renée Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom Jr. and Daveed Diggs. Cynthia Erivo, the standout talent from that season’s revival of The Color Purple, joined the all-black acting winners circle with a trophy for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.

There is still a long way to go toward racial equality, but strides have been made by black actors who have recently originated, replaced or gone on as an understudy as characters that have usually been perceived as white. Some wins for representation in the past few years include Norm Lewis as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Nicolette Robinson as Jenna in Waitress, Joshua Henry as Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Aisha Jackson as Anna in Frozen, Michael Luwoye as Alexander Hamilton in Hamilton, Brittney Johnson as Glinda in Wicked and Christiani Pitts as Ann Darrow in King Kong.