This doesn’t help the author’s comparison, because it shows that a large proportion of the black theater groups’ plays before the Negro Units had African American authors. We prefer an answer that would suggest these groups before the Negro Units rarely had African American authors.

The “truly national black theater” doesn’t relate to the government-funded nature of the Negro Units. So learning about funding doesn’t help strengthen the author’s comparison. African American theater groups could have been far-reaching across the United States and focused on primarily African-American subjects/audiences even without government funding.

This supports the author’s comparison by showing that prior theater for African Americans was less national — it wasn’t as far-reaching as the Negro Units. “Exclusively in large eastern cities” is less national than “cities spread throughout the United States.”

This doesn’t strengthen, because we have no evidence the “truly national black theater” relates to the size of audiences for productions. Although the author does mention that the FTP had a huge audience, this doesn’t imply that the individual productions of the Negro Units had large audiences. So we have no evidence that audience numbers as a metric are relevant to the way the author believes the Negro Units were closer to a “truly national black theater.” In any case, we don’t know that the Negro Units received 100 or more people on average to any given production.

This just implies we have difficulty finding a certain kind of source that relates to early African American theater groups. But it doesn’t imply that the early African American theater groups had less national reach or had less African-American focused subjects/audiences than the Negro Units.