Discrimination you face was from the other black students, the darker skinned students who take thekids home after school , telling them cracker and things like that and making them fly up the streets. There was a gate there and i would stop the kids. One day their mother, they basically told and listen, were going to put an end to this. Dont close the gate, let them come lying on up. She stood in that corner there, back in the corner hidden with this big pail of water that she used debate them. I dont know how she did this. The Children Play and she doused them with this big bucket of water and said leave my kids alone. But that was part of the dynamic. It was an integrated neighborhood. It was not one really of racial tension. Target school is such a pittsburgh figure, and iconic pittsburgh figure. All but one of his major plays were set in pittsburgh. It really had pittsburgh themes whether it was jitney state station, urban redevelopment, whether its the coming in of drugs or whether its urban renewal later in the 1990s and the nfl district. So he and his plays really captured an important part of black pittsburgh history. Wilson had a real sense of place. He walked the streets of the hill district. He never drove a car. Didnt have a license, didnt like driving, didnt like flying. He was a person who walked. He could walk for miles and as he walked he observed. He watched the guys on the corner. He watched people in the barbershop. He got in the barbershops, in the pool hall and talk with people, he learned from them and he could really capture the atmosphere of those spaces. He liked to work there, thats where he gave his writing and while he was writing he was also listening at the same time and absorbing the atmosphere and the style and feel of those places. So he had an idea of the sort of life that he wanted to portray and it was the life on the streets and off the streets. It was shut off in some sort of obscure location. It was everyday life, everyday people and every day settings and he wanted people to be aware that art exists there. Life exists there. Important things are said there. Things we can learn from in those places that people just drive right by, dont pay any attention to. Things that are sent by ordinary or kind of weird people that others look down on or look away from. A lot of his people are outsiders like he is. One of the remarkable things in the neighborhood, it was multiracial, multiethnic. Blacks, jews, italians, syrians and people got along. People really cared for one another. It was a community. People asked about each others children, looked out for their children. It was a neighborhood you didnt have to lock your doors. There were no bars. No throttles, really very little retail at all on the street. Very solid working class lower middleclass sort of life here. And so wilson had a very comfortable childhood in that regard. In that it was a Pleasant Place and he talks about this of how well the neighbors got along. So he did not really experience discrimination or racism or prejudice until he left the hill district when they moved to hazelwood when he was a teenager. And as he grew up here, it was really a very comfortable, nurturing sort of environment. He was also a very creative person. The house they lived in was very run down. Incorporated feeling on the walls and things like that and the kids slept in the bed together. This was two rooms for five people so they share the bed, august always sat next to the wall. He picked the paint chips off the wall and then makes stories of them about the figures that emerged from that. From the figures that you can see from the paint being missing. So he was always thinking creatively, even as a little kid. But this is the wilson house, it was situated in the back of where the tigers and the future is lived. Wilson, they just had the bottom two rooms when they first moved here. This was actually the basement. They had those two rooms up there in what looked like the second floor but was really the first floor. And thats where they had five people in those two rooms. Then in the 50s, thefamily who lived above them , a family called hadley who figures in his play seven guitars, they had the apartment above and when they moved out around 1952, the wilson got that apartment so it expanded there. They were living space. But this was the home that he really related to that meant so much to him. His father did not live with him. Father did not live here. Father had another family in the south hills. Father had another family. Father would come here after work, he was a baker. But he baked downtown overnight like bakers do, they work at night. So in the morning he would come to the wilson home. By the time he got here eight, 9 00 in the morning the kids already left for school. By the time the kids were back from school he had already left here he wasnt around much. They didnt really bonded or that reason. One reason he had trouble identifying and bonding with his father was that his father was an alcoholic. He was a very talented baker. But he had a real drinking problem, a serious alcoholic and so i think possibly for that reason august very seldom drive himself. He smoked like a smokestack but he didnt the bottle really at all. Just socially a little bit. But its really, thats kind of the mystery of just what the relationship to the two was. His real father, lets say his substitute father was his neighbor who lived across the street from him, Charlie Burley who was a prizefighter. Sort of a figure that you could see a kid getting more about so august idolized charlie and charlie almost adopted august as his son. And charlies wife julia was augusts mothers best friend so there were a lot of ties between the two and august modeled himself after charlie. In addition to being an outsider which august was, he had what he called warrior spirit. And of course charlie is a boxer, its a fighter, somebody who stands up not someone whos necessarily aggressive and hostile because charlie wasnt back. Charlie could take a punch, you see. You take a punch, you dont let it get you down. You get back up. Charlie is the one in census about a garbage hauler whos angry that he didnt get to play majorleague baseball. Charlie was a fires prizefighter who shouldve been World Champion but never got the fight that he needed. It was too early for a black man. Joe lewis was enough. Charlie never got the break he should have. I go out here every morning, bust my butt. Put up with those crackers every day because i like you . Youre the biggest fool i ever saw. Its my job. Its my responsibility. You understand that . A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house, get your behind in my club, fill your belly with my food. Because i like you . Because youre my flesh and blood. August always had this idea thats what a warrior does, thats what his mother did. So charlie was a very important part of august development and was just, the neighbors across the street a few doors down from where he grew up and thats part of his, what we will call the warrior spirit. He didnt write any plays in pittsburgh. All his plays, he wrote some plays in pittsburgh but they didnt go anywhere. The plays that made him famous he wrote after he left the city and lived in st. Paul minnesota. Which is ironic because he channels the voices and experiences of pittsburgh. He himself, it really took moving out of the city to a place very different from black pittsburgh to really hear those voices. It was when youre surrounded by them, your close. Its like your heartbeat, youre not aware of it because its so close. So he left pittsburgh when he was 32, 33. Moved to st. Paul. Got homesick. And started thinking back to these voices and people that he had known. And he then was able to just channel those in ways he hadnt done in pittsburgh and in pittsburgh, the sort of plays and poetry heroes were very abstract, abstruse, complex. And the modernistic trend. Very difficult to understand, opaque and all that and they didnt capture the language of the people. But heknew that language. He just felt he needed to elevate it. To bring more honor and dignity to these people. But as neighborhoods go, its a big neighborhood. Especially the old, the original which included all that lower stuff thats now gone from urban renewal. It was very large neighborhood. It was the citys oldest neighborhood. And you can see its right next to downtown so the first neighborhood that developed. So it was old and it was large. Always had, blacks always live there and that makes a difference in terms of race relations. Never having to say oh, somebodys coming in to our state. And blacks were there from the very beginning so what you had was the thickening of peoples. Blacks were always here, immigrants were always here and it sort of thickened but you never had a real push in and as you can see in this area there were, the jews lived south of center avenue, that was the heavily jewish park. The goldmans were here and other jewish families, lots of overlap and blacks lived over, the italians lived down that way, italians and greeks and the syrians but there were jews who lived in there and blacks who lived in there as well. There was a lot of overlapping. And it was a remarkable neighborhood in terms of, a lot of the things that people think reading the history of cities like chicago or washington, they had these early race riots before the king assassination. Well, pittsburgh didnt have those. When you look at the history of american cities, i think as you look in most places they didnt have that. So we have the sense of people will never be able to get along, they will always be fighting tooth and nail. This place shows no, not necessarily. Things can be different but we focus on the dog that barks. Its quiet and nothing happens, newspapers dont look at it or whatever but if there is a right or outbreak, that gets the attention and if you only look at those, then you generalize those. Thats another thing the pittsburgh story will tell, this is a neighborhood where people didnt get along together. By getting out and seeing life and paying attention to it, august realized life is complex. And thats what makes his plays so interesting because theyre not just simplistic agitprop sort of things where you know the answer, you know the good guys, you know the bad guys. That one is on the side and the other is on that side. People have conflicting feelings and he was able to capture that because he not only did he observe but he thought about what he had observed and he was very honest about it. When you get down to the Human Element within black america, there is variety. Theyre not all just one thing or the other. There are different opinions and he captures that and show that in his place. There are all sorts of arguments in augusts place where people are going back and forth on some topic because he realized that we are not simple people, simple lines. We are complex. And thats really part of why hes such a compelling playwright. Our encore presentation of some of the stops along the cspan cities tour continues as we take you to concorde massachusetts