Class. On thursday, you guys are going to look at tbone and weasel. I really hope you all read that and prepare to do that. Im going to give you your very quick pop quiz. The pop quiz for fences should be easy, as we will be done discussing it, but were going to take it so that you guys 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 kittel on april 27th of 1945. His mothers name was daisy wilson. She was a cleaning lady. His fathers name was Frederick August kittel. He was a german baker. I want you guys to pay attention. Race matters in a very specific way. Race asuis always one of the ths were discussing as we look at these plays. His father, Frederick August kittle, was a german baker, so hes white, or hes european. And then his mother is a black woman named daisy, right . And shes a cleaning lady. I want you to understand, were already talking about a mixed relationship. So, his mixed identity is a part of what hes working on when hes writing, like 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. Its part of the mission that hes undertaking. He is the fourth of six children. And they live in the hill district of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. A lot of what wilsons going to talk about deals with the great migration. Ive 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. So, sharecropping was this new kind of or new name for, i dont think its quite accurate for me to say slavery, but essentially thats what it becomes. Weve talked in this room about what sharecropping is, right . Good. Thank you. And its just a system where the black people who 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 theyre never able to actually pay for the rental fees for the things that theyre now using to till the land. So, thats why the great 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. Youll find a number of people in pittsburgh, in new york, and in chicago, who have come north looking to make a fortune so that they can either make enough money so that their families can come up to the north and live with them in the north or so they can send money home so that the people that are their people down there could have a way of living. So, understand that one of the things that 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 start to get built at the turn of the century and afterwards. The racial tensions include white neighborhoods in which black presences hadnt been before, in which now you have a growing poor black population who need things to live. They need jobs. They need food. They need shelter, because its cold. Its colder in pittsburgh than it was in South Carolina or in georgia. And the black people who have now migrated north are they were 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. So, at the age of 15, in 1960, he drops out of high school and he joins the army in 1962 for three years. And i want to take just a second and talk about what that means. Why today do we have black people you. But i believe theres 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. Go ahead. Dont a lot of like army recruits go to poor black neighborhoods or poor neighborhoods of people of color to go to recruit like black and brown kids and kind of push the education opportunity like getting paid and using that as like a force to kind of bring more because they wouldnt get it from rich white kids. Right. I just want you to understand that what her question had to do with was, she believes that 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. Its a good job. It provides money. It provides an income. It provides a steady income. Right. And youre risking your life, yes, but thats part of this thats part of this. Think about the institutions that take black men away from their families. Outside of prison and what will become the incarceration the insane incarceration rates based around things that happened in the 80s, 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 wasnt in a cruel way. I think they were offered this opportunity. They said, hey, heres an opportunity for you to get three meals a day, a place to sleep, training, education, and we will and, you know, you can send a check home to your family. So that is one of the opportunities for employment and advancement that happened during 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 he joins a group of artists and they form the center avenue poets, which will later become later he will cofound the black horizon theatre. Which is a black National Theatre company in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. In 19 so he stays in pittsburgh until, i think, 1974, 1975. And then he begins to move westward, spends a couple years in chicago. And then he moves in 1978 to minnesota. And he joins and hes going to concentrate on play writing in minnesota and he joins the penunbra theatre. Its a owned back oriented and black centered Theatre Company in minnesota. Why is is that the name of the town in minnesota flying out of my head right now. My brain is trying to say fargo, minnesota, but its not. Minneapolis, that would be the giant town in minnesota i cant think of right now. So the theatre is in minneapo s minneapolis, minnesota. And hes working with lou bellamy. Understand that August Wilson gets to a point in his life where what hes writing about is the lives of black people. And i want you guys to think for just a couple of minutes about why thats happening. Why is it significant, and in what way is it significant that he is writing about the lives of black people . Weve talked in this class before about the shift between white artists writing black voices. What does it mean when a white playwright writes a black character in the play . What does their voice sound like, is it authentic . What is the characters purpose. Black characters appearing in white movies become a thing. Im going to jump just a little bit to talk about the Popular Culture that influences the way August Wilson is thinking about plays and writing and the presentation of black people. But im only going to jump for a couple of seconds. Im going to talk about the Popular Culture of the 1980s. In the 1980s, what are the things informing im talking about the 1980s because August Wilson will ultimately talk about were going to talk about fences but lets talk about the things that were informing the way that wilson was thinking about the world. So in the mid to in the beginning to like 1980 to like 1986, 1987, what are the popular images that are influencing what wilson has seen . You have the movies include et, return of the jedi, breakfast club, pretty in pink, and some kind of wonderful. I know these came out before you 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, hes making a genere. We talked about ideology before, what influences the way people think in america, the way women should behave, men should behalf, what it means to be straight, gay, what it means to be a lot of things. No one says it outright but its ju unspoken underlying structures that form the way we think about race and identity and class and structure. If you have movies like pretty in pink and some kind of wonderful, and i think theres a movie with john cusack holding up a boom box high fidelity . I dont think so. But you have these movies coming out in the 80s and the primary concern for a lot of these moves i think this is the beginning of rom com. Im not a cinema professor, i cant tell you the truth of that. But white women, white men falling in love. Thats what those stories are about, overcoming rejection, obstacles, blah, blah, blah. So most of our movies in the 80s are dealing with white folks falling in love. Think for a couple seconds about how we, people of color, africanamerican people appear in those films. Give it just a little bit of consideration. We are more often or not marginal or tan jen shl. We are someone else in the story. So when we make it to August Wilson we have the things that are motivating August Wilson are his desire to move black people from the margins to the center, and say whats true about us. What matters to us. Whats happening in our lives. Because when were just otmn th margins, what we have to say is maybe not its not part of the main story. So it becomes this caricature, where were saying the funny lines. Prior to this we have george jefferson, who began as a marginal character in its not called the archie bunker show, but its archie bunker. Then we have good times black people showing up in comedy. Black peoples lives was for something in culture that you laughed at. Not laughed with, but at. Think about eddie murphy. I dont know if you have looked at read his early comedy. Think about what thats rooted on. Its different. Black comedians, black people creating black comedy for black people is a different experience than black people appearing in largely white structures as something to be laughed at. So i want you to consider how that works. On television, weve got roseanne, married with children. Vcrs become a thing in the 1980s. Mtv, Music Television bebegan with music. Video killed the radio star, i think i was a high school student. We know, the very first song that played on mtv was video killed the radio star. I cant tell you who did the song but i know that was the song. And Michael Jacksons thriller. Think about Michael Jackson in the 1980s. This is how black people are represented in art becomes a thought that people are doing on purpose. People are really considering, what happened black artists, black playwrights, block song writers, black performers are im not saying that they are embracing black identity, but theyre becoming critical and critically analyzing black identity in a way that is a response to the black films of the 1970s, in response to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We always have to look at things in relationship to each other. We have the 1960s and what happened during the Civil Rights Movement. We can go back and look at the 1950s, again look at emmett tills mother who realized the value of performance by keeping emmett tills 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 were forced to keep something in private as opposed to what happens when we make it public. Think about the developments in technology that have happened between the 1950s and the 1980s. Think about the advancements we make in telephone, think about the advancements we get in recording technologies. Think about the advancements weve 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 for you, whats the first thing that happens . What is the first thing that happens if you are in a public space and something and you think things are going to go bad . Thats not a rhetorical question. You can leave. You can leave, yes. Take out our phones. 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 theres evidence, right. Theres 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, right. Because thats what an africanamerican existence becomes for a while. We say to the public, you are treating us in this way and oftentimes what comes back is people go, it cant be that bad. You are exaggerating. Well, now we get to the point where a phone comes out, were not exaggerating. This is whats happening. So what happens subsequently is this weird justification. I have to understand the context for that. Right. That was taken out of context. Maybe it wasnt taken out of context. So when we get back to August Wilson, in the 1980s, the things that are informing his artistic vision and his life as a writer, including all of those pop culture reference that i talked to you. So hes seeing a large whats informing his television and his movie habits, hes like thats white peoples world. Whos writing about us . And when they write about us, what are they saying . Thats whats driving him as a playwright. Good. So lets talk about really briefly im going to go through the contexturalization of the 1980s. A lot of this is stuff i was alive for and we have a different relationship to this. I realized as i was putting this up this morning you guys are going to look at this stuff im about to say as stuff that only existed in a history book. But i was in high school from, essentially, here on. Right. So everything that im talking about are things that i have a memory of having happened while i was in high school. So i was a little bit younger than where you guys are right now. In 1980, mount st. Helens explod explodes. I cant tell you the images of the ash pouring all over those people looked like. It was on my television for days. Images of people covered in ash. We all saw it, its what informed us. On october 10, 1980, president jimmy carter signed legislation establishing the boston africanamerican National Historic site. Its the Oldest Black Church in america, that was in the 1980s, it was on the news. January 20, 1981, its thereaga the 40th president of the united states. This matters in im not an economics professor, but reag reaganomics is something you can look up and look how it affected the world. One of the most important parts that well talk about later deals with the tax cut in which we went from i think 70 tax rate on theres a way to say it, i dont know what it is. But its a 70 tax rate thats dropped to 37 or 35 from the wealthiest people in the country over the course of five years we lose, as a country, 750 million no, billion. Sorry, over five years we as a country lose 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. Im talking about the things that showed up on the news for days. April 12, 1981, is the launch of the the first launch from the Space Shuttle in cape canaveral. January 29th, reagans tax cuts cost america 750 billion over the next five years. September 12, 1981, sondra day oconnor becomes the first female justice of the supreme court. These are big stories we couldnt not see. Im positive on some level these stories im pacted or were in the awareness of August Wilson. I wouldnt say it impacted fences but these are things hes thinking about. As you guys think 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 way the way the publics growing awareness of the world, of the nation, of the national identity. March 2, 1982, the Senate Passes a bill eliminating the practice of busing to achieve racial integration. So busing stops in 1982. Was racism fixed . In 1982. No. I dont think it was. Busing was born as a way to i think busing was initially built as a way to integrate blacks and whites. It had to do with equality. Do yall remember what do you know of that from history . Why we bussed we talked about this a couple of classes ago. The one black young woman who had to go to school in mississippi and the 5,000 National Guard people who went to mississippi just so she could go to school. So that would have been so 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. We here at tulane looking at the racial demographics of tulane have to always consider what that means to us. We are a part of this history. September 20, 1984, the cosby show premiers. And weve talked about that in this room. The cosby show is one of the first times we have a representation of a black male doctor married to a black female lawyer and they have five kids who