Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community

“The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.” —Stokely Carmichael 

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1916 that Black drama could both “teach our people the meaning of their history and reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing,” he was anticipating the pedagogical terrain I walk at William & Mary, where I teach a seminar on “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle.”¹ Most students who take the seminar are non-Black, a demographic reality that reflects the institution rather than the course design. This composition does not diminish the value of student engagement; however, it shapes the work, demanding a pedagogy attentive to the difference between access to a tradition and belonging to it. In such instances, Wilson’s plays can create a necessary space for recognition, empathy, and the disruption of flattened understandings of Black life.  

Yet this possibility is not without its tensions. First, to “reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing” is a noble goal with a measurable cost. As podcaster Deanté Kyle suggests, attempting to prove one’s humanity to those committed to practicing inhumanity is often an act of depletion rather than transformation.² Stokely Carmichael made a similar intervention in his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America,” referenced later in the essay. While acknowledging the intellectual genius of Du Bois, Carmichael argued that it is not the responsibility of Black Americans to persuade white audiences of their worth.³ My experience as a Black woman teaching in a ​​​​predominantly white context (PWI) confirms the tension. At times, this labor illuminates; at others, it simply drains, leaving the structure unchanged.  

Then, there are the rare but instructive occasions, as in my most recent offering of “Nommo Force: Black Acting Theory and Performance” class, where I include at least one of the cycle plays, white students—despite lectures and advisory guardrails against cultural appropriation—mistakenly presumed that their creative and intellectual proximity gives them permission to inhabit Black inner life. This embodied trespassing, rather than witnessing, reveals both the reach and the boundary of Wilson’s vision in some settings. Theatre may beckon the heart toward empathy, recalling Bill Moyer’s discussion of his weeping at Fences,⁴ but it cannot erase the miles of history, memory, and blood that determine who may speak from within a story and who should posture themselves to listen. As Wilson declared to the 1996 Theatre Communications Group (TCG) audience, “We cannot allow others to have authority over our cultural and spiritual products.”⁵  

Teaching in this context pulls my pedagogy in two directions at once, and each direction generates its own set of questions. In teaching Wilson in a collegiate setting, I began to question what it meant to steward his work in rooms where the responses Black Americans were making to individual and collective histories risked becoming a performance rather than a cultural inheritance.⁶ Recalling a white female theatre major who had taken classes with other Black professors and was “so excited” to learn more about Black aesthetics from me, I was curious. Would she view this information as a gift or a credential? How, if at all, would this information position her to advance in a field that Black labor had helped build, but struggled to reap the benefits of? Would her cultural homework ultimately benefit Black people? If so, how? 

Yet, as Wilson once said, “…to celebrate and accept responsibility for one’s place in the world is all that can be asked of anyone,”⁷ dwelling on the presence of white learners was incomplete without reckoning with the absence of Black students and the institutional forces behind it. ⁸ My questioning shifted not only from what white students would do with this knowledge, but also why there were not more Black students here to receive and celebrate it. In that absence is disinterest, but also the effects of curricular marginalization, recruitment gaps, skepticism about the usefulness of Africana Studies and theatre, and the long-standing devaluation of Black theatre as a site of intellectual and cultural inheritance.  

In my moment of pedagogical reckoning, Stokely Carmichael’s words in the opening epigraph arrived not simply as a political directive, but as an ancestral instruction: “The knowledge that you acquire here, you must bring back to the Black community to benefit that community.”⁹ As I listened to his 1967 debate on “Black Power and the Future of Negro America” with Reverend Samuel Williams and Vincent Harding, I was reminded that Du Bois’ 1916 premise begins with the insistence that Black art must teach Black people “the meaning of their history.” The question became unavoidable: even as Black students can encounter their cultural inheritance in other disciplinary formations and wrestle with the political, emotional, and existential implications of Du Bois’ aim, their underrepresentation in Africana Studies and theatre courses reveals a disciplinary hierarchy. How, then, do I ensure that Wilson’s dramaturgical vision remains accessible as a form of knowledge and a site of performance?  

Sitting in this tension with these questions doesn’t break the work, but stretches it, revealing that one classroom alone cannot bear the full weight of the ancestral directive; another space had to be made. If Du Bois casts the function of Black drama as a dual project—one that instructs within the Black community and reveals to white audiences—my work must extend into a second site of practice. Drawing on the legacy of the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, which were designed to cultivate political literacy, historical awareness, and collective agency, I developed a Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. I co-host this initiative through my own platform, Omiwerx, with The Village Initiative for Equity in Education, founded by Jacqueline Bridgeforth-Williams. It is free, and participating students, aged 11-18, receive a complete set of the American Century Cycle plays. We gather monthly in church and community spaces, studying Wilson’s cycle not as a curriculum but as a cultural inheritance, with each meeting serving as a rehearsal in collective study and shared memory. Offered for the first time in fall 2025, the series will culminate in a performance on Juneteenth 2026, followed by a public dialogue where participants share their voices, histories, and insights in a communal space. Teaching the cycle under the Freedom School model, the plays serve as mirrors, imparting what Wilson believes to be essential for Black Americans:  

In this framing, Wilson positions theatre as a site of knowledge transfer, a means of cultural exploration and grounding that can prepare students for the world beyond the theatre.  

In 1926, Du Bois insisted that a “real Negro theatre” must be about us, by us, for us, and near us.¹¹ A century later, as academic freedom narrows and Black cultural autonomy is cast as a threat rather than a right, teaching the cycle at a PWI (even with its tensions) and in a community-rooted Freedom School is not simply pedagogy; it is an act of ancestral fidelity and a performance of resistance. In both settings, I am not just teaching plays. I am tending a lineage and guarding the ground from which it grows. Wilson, like Du Bois, recognized that Black art is inherently bound to Black being, history, and struggle. Thus, through my Freedom School Series, the cycle becomes a form of propaganda for Black human flourishing, shaping the “spiritual temperament” essential for confronting, withstanding, and surviving anti-Blackness.¹² What follows interprets Du Bois’s four imperatives not as historical artifacts but as living methodologies for teaching the American Century Cycle in an age of democratic decline, expanding from pedagogies that invite white students to recognize the human depth they have been socially trained not to see, to practices in Black communities where Wilson’s drama operates as nourishment, lineage work, and a form of collective care. 

About Us: Centering Black Life in a Predominantly White Context 

If Black drama, as Du Bois argued, must “reveal Negro life as it is,” then teaching Wilson in an age of democratic decline is not merely a syllabus choice, it is an act of refusal against erasure and revisionist comfort. Since I first offered “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” in 2012, 183 students have taken the course. The plays of the cycle have seen us through four presidential elections, political upheaval, racial reckonings, and pandemic grief. Each semester the course is offered, we confront how America rehearses its own amnesia. The erosion of democracy in 2025 is not theoretical for my students; it is unfolding in real time on their newsfeeds, in their families, and in the policies that govern their lives and education. At the time of this writing, the government has been shut down for 35 days. Across the country, the study of race, gender, and history is being reframed as divisive rather than foundational. The arts are being defunded. Books are being banned, and in Virginia, at least one play of the American Century Cycle, Fences, is on a list of challenged books in Loudon County Public Schools.¹³ Universities are being conscripted into ideological battles that mistake compliance for patriotism and silence for neutrality. 

Against this backdrop, studying Wilson, playwright, prophet, and chronicler of the costs of forgetting, is a rehearsal for conscience, and an inquiry into what happens when a nation, its institutions, and citizens lose sight of their moral center. As authoritarian currents quietly advance, to teach “about us” in such times, and specifically to teach about Wilson’s warriors, is to affirm that the quest for knowledge itself is a form of protest, and that the classroom—like the theatre—must keep open the fragile space where human beings can still imagine their way toward freedom. Imagination is not ornamental, and cultivating it is an insurgent, sovereign, and necessary preparatory work for the pursuit of freedom. As Angela Davis reminds us in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, drawing on the insights of Orlando Patterson, the very idea of freedom—so cherished in Western political thought, so often claimed as its inheritance—was first imagined by enslaved people. Before freedom could be enacted, it had to be envisioned.¹⁴ 

By Us: Stewardship, Mutual Aid, and the Work of Returning Home 

If “about us” affirms the centrality of Black life in the study and making of American democracy, “by us” emphasizes reclaiming authorship (or ownership) of the institutions where that study takes place. Du Bois believed that only those who know “from birth and continual association just what it means to be Negro today” can create truthful art. As a Black woman, my teaching is rooted in both my lived experience and the ongoing effort to reshape the institutions through which that knowledge is taught. At W&M, “August Wilson’s American Century Cycle” is housed in Africana Studies, not as an afterthought but as a core part of the program. As a freshman writing seminar, it serves as one of several entry points to the Africana major. This structural choice matters: it asserts that Black dramatic art is central to the study of African-descended peoples, not just an add-on. Housing the course in Africana Studies also safeguards the integrity of its epistemic roots. In that space, Wilson’s plays are seen not just as repertoire or roles but as theory, philosophy, and a historical archive. This approach ensures that Black students experience the cycle as an inheritance, not just an elective, and that the course remains grounded in a tradition of knowledge-making rather than exercises in performance.   

However, even within Africana Studies at a PWI, I often feel the tension between preserving Wilson’s legacy and the conditions under which that preservation occurs. Wilson wrote about a community that mostly existed outside the academy, as well as the elite, regional, and predominantly white institutions in which his work was frequently developed and encountered. This tension, not incidental, is a constitutive feature of the American Century Cycle's dramaturgy and central to teaching it. Yet it is precisely the misalignment between Wilson’s dramaturgical commitments and the institutional conditions under which his work is most often taught that compelled me to develop this series, to relocate the plays within the Black social, vernacular, and spiritual ecosystems that shaped them.    

I extended my teaching of Wilson into the community through a Freedom School model, where these same plays are not studied for course credit, but within a familiar glow of fellowship, collective memory, and song. At the heart of Du Bois’s concept of “by us” is mutual aid, the oldest form of Black institutional practice. Mutual aid reminds us that Black survival has always depended on collective care, involving the pooling of resources, sharing of knowledge, and mutual support when formal systems fail to provide the critical assistance needed. It is both economic and spiritual, an ethic that links my teaching to the same communal networks that have long sustained Black art and life. Support for the 2025-2026 Freedom School Series was provided through the generosity of individuals and local organizations, such as Omiwerx, An Achievable Dream, The Links, Inc., Newport News (VA) Chapter, and Black-owned businesses like Resist Booksellers and Cory’s Southern Kitchen & Catering. This economic reciprocity—circulating the fruits of art back into the community that gave birth to it—is itself a Du Boisian practice. Local churches also play a vital role: Williamsburg Christian Church distributed copies of Wilson’s plays, while St. John’s Baptist Church hosts the monthly gatherings, connecting the series to the sacred heritage of the Black church as a place of education, performance, and prophecy. In this way, “by us” becomes more than just curricular facilitation and ownership; it transforms into an ecosystem of care where mutual aid, curricular reclamation, and spiritual fellowship converge. Together, these practices honor Du Bois’s call for art that reveals “The Souls of Black Folk” and Wilson’s insistence that we stand firm on the ground that made us, ensuring theatre remains accountable to the people whose stories gave it life.¹⁵ 

For Us: Centering the Local Black Community  

In Du Bois’s third principle, the audience is important. The “real Negro theatre” must be “for us…the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences.” In our Freedom School Series, many participating students are descendants of families displaced by the expansion of Colonial Williamsburg, which abutted university expansions.¹⁶ We explore Wilson’s cycle alongside local Black history, guided by oral histories and walking tours through historic sites curated by Mrs. Bridgeforth-Williams, with the support of other members of the descendant community. These gatherings remind me that our work is not simply pedagogical but ancestral. Teaching “for us” steadies my spirit in a time of hyper-surveillance of faculty and renews my sense of accountability to those whose stories I carry. 

We do not view Wilson’s plays solely from a safe perspective of literary analysis; we see them as rituals, and our reading, teaching, and analysis as acts of remembering. Students are asked to consider the following questions: 

1. How do they see themselves building on the legacy of enslavement?   

2. What new observations are they making about Black life in Williamsburg, and where can they intervene in addressing the most pressing issues facing their community?   

3. How does their engagement with the American Century Cycle ignite the revolutionary spirit within and motivate them to challenge the forces aiming to oppress and dehumanize them?  

4. How does the cycle motivate them to become students of history and their own “blood memories” so they can understand the story of America’s history correctly as the semi-quincentennial approaches, and uncover the stories of their mothers, fathers, and ancestors?  

5. How are they defining, rethinking, and shaping their own ideas of freedom during this moment of national crisis?¹⁷ 

The gatherings are intentionally intergenerational, with parents and grandparents seated behind and around middle and high school students, as well as members of the descendant community. Within that circle, knowledge isn’t just passed down but shared outward; the room acts as a rehearsal for collective memory. As Wilson instructs, we place culture before them so that:  

These acts of remembering cannot remain abstract, especially within classrooms, removed from the communities whose stories we bear. Every revolution of consciousness must be grounded in the soil that bore both the wound and the witness. The question, then, is not only what we teach, but where we teach, and whose footsteps echo beneath our classrooms. 

Near Us: Place and Proximity 

Du Bois insisted that Black theatre must be near us, rooted in the communities where Black people live. After all, a theatre detached from Black people’s daily rhythms risks becoming a monument to itself in service of white needs, rather than a mirror for the Black community.¹⁹ Teaching the American Century Cycle in Williamsburg—part of the trifecta of cities that make up the Birthplace of American Independence—means teaching within earshot of auction blocks, plantation fields, and the echoes of once-thriving Black communities displaced by urban renewal and gentrification. Wilson’s Hill District is not my classroom’s geography, but it is its mirror: a concentrated stage through which the wider Black American story refracts. Its specificity invites us to look closer to home, to see how the same forces at play in the American Century Cycle have and continue to shape Black life in Williamsburg and beyond. In a political climate where policy shifts will undoubtedly constrict Black enrollment at PWIs, I may never see any of these 11-18-year-olds at William & Mary. Thus, the prospect of teaching Black theatre in the richly diverse classrooms of my early career feels increasingly remote. In bringing the cycle near Black students, we fulfill Du Bois’s fourth principle in its fullest sense: art that not only remembers the people but returns to them. 

“About us” names the courage to study Black life as a form of cultural transmission, and an act of repair and protest in an age of democratic decline. “By us” affirms that such a study must be authored and governed by those who live its truths. “For us” extends the circle of learning to the communities that continue to bear both the burden and the beauty of those truths. “Near us,” in this instance, refers not to the Hill District itself, but to places closer to home, such as Williamsburg, where the same forces of urban renewal, exclusion, and resilience have shaped the landscape. Thus, the Freedom School Series on August Wilson’s American Century Cycle is a Du Boisian imperative enacted: teaching about us, by us, for us, and near us, where Wilson’s plays are not simply studied but engaged as inheritance, and where participants—including me—are strengthened to make our freedom mean something in this age of democratic decline.²⁰ 

A luta continua for all stewards of Black theatre pedagogy and production. These times are unprecedented for many of us, but not new. The cycle we face now is one that many of our ancestors recognized, resisted, and survived. In this repetition lies both a warning and the inheritance Wilson makes clear: the strategies for navigating this moment already exist in our collective memory. May Ògún continue to be the force and energetic link that bridges the distance between our visioning, our efforts, our accomplishments, and our survival.²¹