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  • National Black Theater Festival, 1997*
  • August Wilson (bio)

My only real qualification for standing here is the same as any one of you . . . a robust concern for the state of Black Theater and by virtue of that a concern for the health of Black America, our material comfort, our culture and the strong and vibrant spirits that mark our grace and our welfare.

Black Theater. These words have a feeling to them. When you see them, you feel good. Black Theater. These words have a meaning. These words have a power. And not everyone is glad to see them. There are some in our society who feel threatened by them. Powerful segments of our society who feel threatened by the meaning these words have. Black Theater is Black America’s imagination on display. Black America’s intelligence on display. Black America’s humanity on display. The field of manners and rituals of intercourse that Baldwin speaks of . . . on display. It is on this field that we have matured; it is on this field that we have come into our own. As survivors of a most difficult and profound history and experience that has altered and continues to alter the muscle of our hearts with its share of grief and love and loss and triumph. We are attendants to that history. We serve it because it is ours.

The old folks sang, “We have come this far by faith.” And we are the inheritors of that faith. It is that faith that has enabled our survival. That is our greatest gift. That faith is born of hope and ennobled by the struggle to affirm the value of our lives, to exalt our presence in what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad called “the wilderness of North America.”

I was recently at a meeting to talk about Black Theater, and someone remarked that we had to figure out where we fit into the larger struggle. Everyone nodded in agreement, including myself. But as I thought about it, I realized that there is no larger struggle. This is it. There are different fields of endeavor, different approaches, but there is no larger struggle than the affirmation and exaltation of our lives. Than the struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.

I first became involved in theater in 1968 with the idea of using theater as a tool to politicize the community and “raise the consciousness of the people,” as we said then. Together with my good friend, Rob Penny, we founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh. We took as our model the brilliant and provocative theater of Amiri Baraka and the Spirit House Players and Movers. It was a theater that sought to inform and provoke as well as entertain. It was a theater rooted in age-old storytelling, that sought to teach and inspire by providing examples of conduct sanctioned by the community [End Page 483] as we sought ways to alter our relationship to the society, a relationship that had begun as master and slave and had made little progress in the three hundred and some odd years since. We had inherited a mantle of struggle and felt honored by our call to duty, to man the stations, and not only alter our relationship to the society by acquiring the power to effect some control over our lives and our development as we moved toward this now approaching millennium. But first we had to alter the expectation we had of each other, and to bridge and expand what we knew to be possible.

We were joined by a Black America who felt the need in those heady days of the 1960s to seize the moment and launch its long march to power and self-determination. Along with this newly emerging theater, there was an explosion of poetry and art that made the Harlem Renaissance look like a tea party. It was Black America discovering its muscles and stretching them. We mouthed the words Black Power and stomped and danced to Archie Shepp, Ornett Coleman, Albert Ayler, and the Supreme brilliance of John Coltrane. Everywhere you looked our style, our stance, and our posture announced the presence of a new people reconnecting themselves, rekindling...

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