45 pages • 1 hour read
A Soldier's Play
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Background
Authorial Context: Charles H. Fuller Jr. (1939-2022)
Charles Fuller was born on March 5, 1939, and grew up in Philadelphia. As a high school student, he loved to read, and he and a friend, Larry Neal, competed to be the first to read all the books in their school library. However, the two boys soon noticed that their school’s library had no books written by Black authors, so both Fuller and Neal decided to become writers and write the Black-authored books themselves.
Fuller attended Villanova University for two years before leaving to join the army in 1958. For four years, Fuller was stationed in Japan and South Korea. The influence of his military experience is apparent in A Soldier’s Play. In 1962, Fuller returned to Philadelphia and Villanova as a civilian to finish his education. In the 1960s, Fuller shifted his attention from writing poems, essays, and short stories to writing plays. Fuller began his career as a playwright during the rise of the Black Arts movement, which was led by playwright Amiri Baraka, developing in conjunction with the Black Power movement and emphasizing Black-centered art and culture. His first critically recognized play, The Village: A Party (1968), debuted at Princeton University’s McCarter Theatre before transferring off-Broadway in 1969 as The Perfect Party.
Fuller eventually left Philadelphia to move to New York and become a full-time playwright. He wrote several plays throughout the 1970s for the Henry Street Settlement theater as well as for the Negro Ensemble Company. In his work, he endeavored to depict Black people as complex and authentic characters as opposed to the stereotypes that dominated media representation. Fuller frequently exposed uneasy truths about racism in the United States, and also wrote plays that were based on history, reinserting Black Americans into the historical narrative. For instance, Fuller’s 1975 play The Brownsville Raid dramatized a real-life incident from 1906 in Brownsville, Texas, when the murder of a white bartender and the non-fatal shooting of a white police officer were falsely blamed on the all-Black regiment stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Fuller won his first major award, the 1980 Obie Award for Playwriting, for Zooman and the Sign, a play about a Black teenager who murders a 12-year-old Black girl, and her father’s campaign for justice.
Fuller’s most well-known work remains A Soldier’s Play, for which he became the second Black playwright in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1982). He also won the New York Drama Critics Award. The play was controversial, tackling not only institutional racism but internalized racism as well.
The film version of A Soldier’s Play, A Soldier’s Story (1984), which had a screenplay adapted by Fuller, won an Edgar Award and was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Writer’s Guild Award. Almost 40 years after its off-Broadway premiere, A Soldier’s Play opened on Broadway in 2020, winning Fuller and the production a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play. Fuller died two years later on October 3, 2022, at age 83.
Historical Context: Black Soldiers and World War II
From the Revolutionary War onward, Black Americans fought with the US armed forces in every single conflict, but only as part of segregated units. In 1940, a military draft law was implemented during peacetime—the US had not yet entered the fighting in World War II— for the first time in US history. Despite lobbying by Civil Rights activists to let Black men both participate in the draft and serve in integrated regiments, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration only agreed to include Black men in the draft with no move toward desegregation.
For the 1.2 million Black men who served during World War II, the paradox of the experience was being good enough to fight and die as Americans while being denied their full rights as citizens. As A Soldier’s Play depicts, Black soldiers were keen to join the fight during World War II, but the government-sanctioned segregation and discrimination laid out by Jim Crow laws were applied in all branches of the US military. Jim Crow laws were statutes at the local and state level that were put in place after the Civil War. The laws maintained legal prejudice against Black Americans after enslavement was abolished by the 13th Amendment, denying voting rights, equal employment opportunities, equal education, and the right to use the same public facilities. Black Americans who were caught defying these laws were arrested and incarcerated, where they performed the kind of unpaid labor that they had been forced to perform during enslavement.
For Black soldiers who enlisted out of a desire to fight Nazis overseas, the actual experience of basic training was disheartening. The military espoused the belief that Black soldiers weren’t capable of taking on leadership roles or even jobs in combat, so they were stuck in labor positions. They performed maintenance work, service jobs as cooks or mechanics, and jobs that required heavy lifting. They weren’t allowed to carry weapons, operate tanks, or fly planes. Black soldiers described their working conditions as similar to that of enslavement, and they were treated as less than human. White soldiers hurled demeaning abuse and racial slurs at the Black men in their charge. All bases required Black men to use their own medical facilities and blood banks, as well as different recreational facilities. There were a limited number of Black enlistees who reached the rank of officer, but they could only command segregated companies of other Black men.
Although Jim Crow laws were enacted primarily throughout the southern United States, many of the nation’s military bases were located in the South. This meant that a lot of the segregated Black companies underwent training there. They faced racism and harassment not only on the base but by white locals who objected to their presence. Black activists fought for the military to allow Black soldiers to go into combat, and in 1944, the United States finally agreed. After the war, the invaluable contribution of Black soldiers in winning the war and the withholding of their entitled benefits for many of them afterward was a major issue that galvanized the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.
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