The Legacy of August Wilson

After reading the article Influences by Boris Kachka I learned one significant part of August Wilson's legacy. August didn’t start out great with literature but he strived to excellence, shown in this quote “You dropped out of high school but spent a few years reading alone in a library. What struck you most? I remember Levi-Strauss’s The Origin of table manners; I couldn’t read it, didn’t understand what it was about, so I put it back. I read Margaret Mead and worked my way up.” (Kachka) During our class discussion I found out that August wrote plays about the struggles that African Americans went through, which was a firsthand experience for him. During the NPR radio show they said, he was one of the best play writers at the time let alone an African American play writer. He created a ten part play that all went together but also if you just watched one play it could stand alone. The ten plays he wrote correlated to each decade of the 20^th century. He was even the first African American to have a broad way theater named after him. His legacy had a great impact of race, power and language in the United States. Since his plays were focused on the African American’s life it opened the eye of a lot of other races. He wanted equality no matter the race, which you can see in our history has happened. One example is from an article wrote by Steve Bogira he sates “Or, as the rapper Mos Def told Blaze madazine in 1999: “When we call each other ‘n***a,’ we take a word that has been historically used by whites to degrade and oppress is, a word that has so many negative connotations, and turned it into something beautiful, something we can call our own. I know it sounds cliché, but it truly becomes a ‘term of endearment.”(Bogira) I think this quote shows that times have changed dramatically. Also in this quote it states the N-word was used by whites and the title of this article is “A thought lesson about the N-word: Should a Chicago Public Schools teacher have used “n***er” in a sixth grade class” Which shows the equality pieces also, before, whites would use it all the time to insult blacks, and now there is a lawsuit because a white teacher said it one time.