Setting and the Play

Between 1900 and 1950, millions of African Americans fled the South and its "Jim Crow" (separate but unequal) laws for the industrial cities of the North and West. As Wilson's text (on pages xvii and xviii relates), many of the migrants struggled to achieve their dreams. As we'll see in the play, inequalities and injustice continued. Barriers and unjust race-based laws continued to plague African Americans. Racism would FOMENT (promoting the growth) of tension leading to the Civil Rights movement in the years to come (1954-1968).

Poet Langston Hughes' poem "One Way Ticket" captures some of the emotions of the time. NOTE: this poem is the first one. Answer these questions for yourself as you listen.

1. What is the significance of the poem’s speaker “pick[ing] up his life and taking it with him”?
2. How does the speaker stress the opportunities of the north and west versus the threats in the south?
3. How does the theme of the poem convey emotions African Americans at the time might have had about the Jim Crow laws?

There are additional poems after “One Way Ticket” if you are interested in hearing more.

One Way Ticket audio

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Some Notes about the Playwright--August Wilson

August Wilson (http://www.heinzawards.net/upload/wilson_color2.jpg)

How did a kid from the streets of Pittsburgh develop into a Pulitzer Prize winning author? Press play to watch the video below.

In his own words: August Wilson speaks of his youth

The excerpt below is from a biography found on the Gale Database.

"August Wilson grew up as the fourth of six children in a black slum of Pittsburgh, his home a two-room apartment without hot water or a telephone. Relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs, his mother, Daisy Wilson, managed to keep her children clothed and fed. August's father, Frederick August Kittel, a baker by trade, was a white German immigrant who never lived with the family and rarely made an appearance at the apartment. August Wilson officially erased his connection to his real father when he adopted his mother's name in the 1970s. David Bedford became Wilson's stepfather when the boy was a teenager, but the relationship between father and son was rocky. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, Bedford would become a source for the play Fences, whose protagonist was a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation."

http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/wilson_a.htm