Look at August Wilsons fences. We will begin with a very brief discussion about who and what August Wilson was, his goal as a playwright. I am going to repeat some stuff you have heard before from our in class presentation, but there is going to be some stuff i will talk about with a little more depth than we talked about last class. On thursday, you guys will look at tbone and weasel. I hope you read that and are prepared to do that. I will give you a brief pop quiz. It should be easy as we will be done discussing it but we will be taking it so you can get a grade for it. And you will also have the pop quiz for tbone and weasel. Lets start with August Wilson. August wilson was born Frederick August kittle on april 27, 1945. His mothers name was daisy wilson. She was a cleaning lady. His fathers name was Frederick August kittle. He was a german baker. I want you guys to pay attention. Race matters in a very specific way. Race is always one of the things we are discussing as we look at these plays. So, his father, Frederick August kittle, was a german baker, he is white european. His mother is a black woman named daisy. She is a cleaning lady. We are talking about a mixed relationship. His mixed identity is a part of what he is working on when he is writing. How he is negotiating africanamerican existence is a part of who and what he is as he is working as an artist and as a writer. It is part of the mission he is undertaking. He is the fourth of the six children. And they live in the hill district of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. A lot of what wilson is going to talk about deals with the great migration. I have mentioned that in this class before. The great migration is what happened after reconstruction in the south. When the social status of black people moved from slavery to freed to the reconstruction era to sharecropping. Namecropping was this new for i dont think it is quite accurate for me to say slavery, but that is essentially what it becomes. We have talked in this room about what sharecropping is, right . Good, thank you. It is just a system where the black people used to be the slaves on the plantation are now in a position where they are renting what used to be the slave cabins. They are renting the clothes. They are renting the tools to go work for the same farms on which they were enslaved. And they enter this system in which they are never actually able to pay for the rental fees for the things they are using. Thats one of the motivating factors that caused a number of blacks to move northward at the turn of the century and pursue a better life in the north. I want you guys to think for just a couple minutes about what that does or what that means for black families in the south. Was it whole families moving north, or was it more often than not the man who would go north or the eldest son who would go from the Southern States to the northern states, and their purpose was to make money that they could send home . Thats always the goal. You will find a number of people in pittsburgh, new york, chicago who have come north looking to make a fortune so they can either make enough money so that their families can come to the north and live with them in the north, or so they can send money home so their people could have a way of living. So, understand that one of the things wilson is talking about, one of the things that informs what wilson is talking about, is the great migration. In pittsburgh, because these rural areas are now dealing with an influx of black people, there are racial tensions that get built at the turnofthecentury and afterwards. The racial tensions include white neighborhoods in which black presences hadnt been before. In which now you have a growing poor black populations that need things to live. They need jobs, they need food, they need shelter, because it is cold. It is colder in pittsburgh than it was in South Carolina or georgia. Whock people how have have now migrated north, they are like, how do we live . How do we feed ourselves . How do we clothe ourselves . These become the primary concerns. Understand that all of those things are what are informing fences, when we finally get to it. At the age of 15 he dropped out of high school and joined the army in 1962 for three years. I want to take just a second to talk about what that means. Why today do we have black people i cannot give you the real percentages. I would be making stuff up and lying to you. But i believe there is a higher percentage of black people in our current military than other races. What are some of the motivating factors for joining the military . What does it give you . He is unmarried at this point. Goahead. Dont a lot of Army Recruiters go to poor black neighborhoods with people of color to go recruit like and brown kids . And push the education opportunity like hitting aid and using getting aid and using that . They wouldnt do it with rich white kids. Prof. Proctor the point was she believes recruiting agencies go to poor black neighborhoods and recruit black people in greater numbers than they do in rich white neighborhoods. That is a fact of today. May have been a fact in the 1960s. But its a job. It is a good job. It provides money. It provides an income. It provides a steady income. Right . You are risking your life, yes, but that is part of this. Think about the institutions that take black men away from their families. Outside of prison and what will become the insane incarceration rate based around things that happened in the 1980s, but we have to go back and look at the systems that moved black men away from their families. The army was one of them. Or the Armed Services were one of them. But it was not in a cruel way. I think they were offered this opportunity. They said, hey, here is an opportunity for you to get three meals a day, a place to sleep, training, education. You can send a check home to your family. That is one of the opportunities for employment and advancement. That happened when wilson was at this point, he would have been about 18 years old. But hes in the army for three years. After he leaves the army in the late 1960s, he comes back to the pittsburgh area and joins a group of artists, and they form the center avenue points. Black he will cofound the horizon theater, a black nationalist Theater Company in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. He stays in pittsburgh until i think 1974 or 1975. Then he begins to move westward. He spends a couple years in chicago, then he moves in 1978 to minnesota. And he joins hes going to concentrate on playwriting in minnesota. He joins the penumbra theater and the artistic director is lou bellamy. The penumbra theater is a blackowned, black oriented, and black centered Theater Company in minnesota. Why is the name of the town in minnesota flying out of my head . My brain is trying to say fargo, minnesota. But it is not fargo. Minneapolis, that would be the name of the giant town that i cannot think of. The penumbra theater in minneapolis, minnesota. She is working with lou and he is working with lou bellamy. Understand that August Wilson gets to a point in his life where what he is writing about is the lives of black people. And i want you guys to think for a couple of minutes about why that is happening. Why is it significant and in what way is it significant that he is writing about the lives of black people . We have talked in this class before about the shift between white artists writing black voices. What does it mean . What does it mean when a white playwright writes a black character into a play . What does their voice sound like . Is it authentic . What is the characters purpose . Black characters were appearing in white movies. I will jump just a bit to talk about the Popular Culture that is influencing the way August Wilson is thinking about plays and writing and the presentation of black people. But i am only going to jump for just a couple seconds. I want to talk for a second about the Popular Culture of the 1980s. So in the 1980s, what are the things informing im talking about the 1980s because August Wilson will ultimately talk about we will talk about the fences. But what about the things that informed the way wilson was thinking about the world . In the beginning of 1986, what are the popular images that are influencing what wilson is seeing . The movies include e. T, return of the jedi, raiders of the lost ark, Beverly Hills cop, pretty in pink, some kind of wonderful. Most of these movies came out before you all were born. Are you at all familiar with these series of movies . Have you heard of them before . If you think about things like the breakfast club, pretty in pink, i think his name is john hughes. John hughes is making a whole genre. We talk about what ideology means. Ideologies are the unspoken and sometimes less clear structures that influence the way people think about america. The way women should behave, the way men should behave. What it means to be straight, what it means to be gay, what it means to be a lot of things. No one says it outright. But it is unspoken, underlying structures that inform the way we think about race and identity and class and gender. Does that make sense . Good. If you have movies like pretty in pink and some kind of wonderful, there is the movie with john cusack holding up the boombox. I cant remember what it is. But you have all of these as the biggest movies coming out in the 1980s. And the primary concern in these movies is technically the beginnings of romcom. I am not a cinema professor, i cannot tell you the truth about that. But white women, white men falling in love, those are what a lot of those stories are about. Overcoming rejection, obstacles,vercoming blah, blah blah. The 1980s movies in are dealing with white folks falling in love. Think for a couple seconds about how we, people of color, appear in those films. Give it a little bit of consideration. Notre more often than marginal or tangential. We are someone else in that story. When we finally make it to August Wilson the things that are motivating August Wilson are his desire to move black people from the margins to the center. And say, what is true about us . What matters to us . What is happening in our lives . Because when we are just are on the margins, what we have to say is maybe not part of the main story. It becomes this caricature where we are saying the funny lines. Like i said, prior to this, weve got George Jefferson who began as a marginal character. It is not called the archie bunker show, but it was archie bunker. Then we have good times. Black people showing up in comedy. Black peoples lives in Popular Culture for a long time was something you laughed at. Not laughed with, but laughed at. We were the joke, we were the comedy. Think about eddie murphy. I dont know if any of you looked at or read his early comedy, but think about what that is rooted on. It is different. Like comedians, black people for blacklack comedy people is a different experience than black people appearing in largely white structures as something to be laughed at. I want you guys to consider how that works. On television, you have roseanne, married with children, vcrs become a thing. Mtv at one point in time, Music Television began with music. Video killed the radio star in 1986. I was a high school student. You are all looking at me with vacant expressions like, for real . The very first song that ever played on mtv was video killed the radio star. I cant tell you who did that song but i know that was the song. Michael jacksons thriller. Think about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. This is how black people are represented in art. It becomes a thought that people are doing on purpose. People are really considering black artists, black playwrights, black songwriters, black performers im not saying that they are embracing black identity, but they are becoming critical and critically analyzing black identity in a way that is a response to the blacks ploy to to the blacksploitation films of the 1970s. In response to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We have to look at things in relationship to each other. We can go back further and look at the 1950s. We again look at emmett tills mother who realize the value of performance by keeping his casket open. That was an act of performance. She was like, this wont happen behind closed doors anymore. Think about private voice versus public voice. What does it mean when we are forced to keep something in private, as opposed to when we make it public . Think about the developments in technology that have happened between the 1950s and 1980s. Think about the advancements we make in telephone, in recording technologies. Think about the advancements we have made in film and television itself. For example, and the way that should make sense to you guys now, there are videos. Every time something happens out there, if somebody meets you in the Grocery Store parking lot and they start acting funny, whats the first thing that happens . What is the first thing that happens if you are in a public space and you think things will go bad . That is not a rhetorical question. You can leave, yes. Somebody pulls out a phone and starts recording. We have all of these instances right now of things that used to happen without any evidence. But now, there is evidence. There is evidence not only from local street cameras, but every individual. Everybody in this room has their own phone so they have a way of documenting their existence and that these crazy things happen to us. Because that is what africanamerican existence becomes for a while. We say to the public, you are treating us in this way. And often times what comes back is people will go, it cannot be that bad. You are exaggerating. Well now, we get to the point where the phone comes out and we are not exaggerating, this is what is happening. What happens subsequently is this weird justification. I have to understand the context. That was taken out of context. Maybe it wasnt taken out of context. When we get back to August Wilson in the 1980s, the things that are informing his artistic vision and his life as a writer include all of those popculture references that i talked to you. He is seeing a large what is informing his television and movie habits, he is like, that is white peoples world. Who is writing about us . When they write about us, what are they saying . Thats whats driving him as a playwright. Good. Reallytalk about briefly, i will go through the contextual is asian of then the contextualization of the 1980s. A lot of this is stuff that i was alive for. There is a different relationship to this. As i was putting it up here, you guys will look at a lot of the stuff im about to say as stuff that only ever existed in a history book. But i was in high school from essentially here on. Everything i am talking about are things i have a memory of having happen. Having happened while i was in high school. I was a little younger than where you guys are now. In 1980, Mount Saint Helens explodes. I cannot begin to tell you what the images of the ash pouring all over those people look like. It was on my television for days. Images of people covered in ash. We all saw it. It is what informed us. On october 10, 1980, president jimmy carter signed legislation establishing the boston africanamerican National Historic site. It is the Oldest Black Church in america. That happened in the 1980s. It was on the news. January 20, 1981, the inauguration of ronald reagan. The 40th president of the united states. This matters. Im not an economics professor. But reaganomics is something you can look up and look at how it affected the world. One of the things that is the most important part that we will talk about later deals with a tax cut in which we went from a that gets dropped to 37 or 35 . From the wealthiest people in the country. Over the course of five years, 750se as a country billion. Years, we as a country 750 billion in tax revenue, based on this bill that was signed by ronald reagan. March 30, 1981, someone tried to kill ronald reagan. Everybody knew about it. I am only talking about the things that showed up on the news for days. April 12, 1981, the first launch from the Space Shuttle in cape canaveral. January 29, reagans tax cuts cost america 750 billion over the next five years. September 12, 1981, Sandra Day Oconnor becomes the first female justice of the supreme court. These are big stories we couldnt not see. I am absolutely positive on some level these stories impacted or were in the awareness of August Wilson. I dont say that it even necessarily impacted fences, but these are some of the things he is thinking about. When you guys are thinking about what the themes are in fences, and as we move from the deeply personal to the public, i want you to think about the way the public is becoming aware. Because of the publics growing awareness of the world, nation, the national identity. March 2, 1982, the Senate Passes a bill eliminating busing. Eliminating the practice of busing to achieve racial integration. Busing stops in 1982. Was racism fixed in 1982 . No, i dont think it was. Busing was born i think busing was initially built as a way to integrate blacks and whites. It had to do with equality. Do you all remember what do you know of that from history . We talked about this a couple classes ago. The one black young woman who had to go to school in mississippi and the 5000 National Guard people who went to mississippi just so she could go to school. 1954, 1955. 1954, 1955. All of these things are related to each other. Black people being allowed to go to largely white institutions. Being allowed to. And we in this room have to think specifically about what this means for us. Tulane, looking at the racial demographics of tulane, we have to consider w