Adrienne Macki challenges critics who assert that the plays of Eulalie Spence, Alice Childress, and Lorraine Hansberry were either apolitical or not sufficiently political. In her chapter, Macki reintroduces the playwrights, who were active between 1930 and 1960, and chronicles the vital roles that they played in opening the doors for Black women to have their work staged regionally as well as on Broadway. Furthermore, she makes a convincing case that their plays feature “self-actualized black characters fighting against oppression and consumption while struggling to maintain racial and gender subjectivity.”

Sandra G. Shannon celebrates Lynn Nottage, Adrienne Kennedy, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Shirley Graham Du Bois for their ability “to expand their worldview beyond the United States’ borders and to inspire, through their dramas, an emotional affinity with the sufferings of people from cultures other than their own.” She bridges these theatrical innovators both by highlighting their interest in Africa and by demonstrating how they were able to employ the theatre to comment upon world politics and with the intent of effecting social change.

Norman’s chapter excavates a missing element in studies of the civil rights autobiography tradition: narratives by children who did not tell their own story, but who nevertheless were central to the movement and in many cases helped shape it. These include Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Littlerock Nine and author of Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High. Norman argues that, adorned with diverse artifacts of Black print culture, Beals’s autobiography invites the reader into a journey of becoming a face of everyday Black heroism amid pervasive and fierce white commitments to segregation. Just as important as Beals’s life narrative are those of everyday living during a period of massive social change, including Rosemary Bray’s Unafraid of the Dark: A Memoir, which details a childhood shaped by poverty, Catholicism, the welfare state, and a freedom movement providing new language, models, and hopes for a nation’s citizens. Norman’s chapter ultimately traces African American autobiography by children of the movement from Amira Baraka’s daughter Lisa to Paul Coates’s son Ta-Nehisi.