August Wilson Fences Play Analysis

August Wilson was a famous African American screenwriter from the nineteen-fifties, known for his production of Fence, a play about disfunction African American family during the nineteen-fifties, was revered for his contribution to the Black Arts Movement. Along with his piece Fences, it brought forward the work and brilliance of the Black Arts Movement to a wider audience, across the United States’ mostly-white dominated theaters. This was no small task; Wilson states the hardships when asked in an interview with Paris Review “ If you had to construct an imaginary playwright, with what qualities would you endow him or her?”, he answer with the word ‘Honesty’, which is the way Wilson wanted to make his plays, because he wanted others to know

A double-sided word, which is hard to come by in a society that was and in many ways still is racist, sexist, and corrupt. Wilson didn’t want to paint people a picture of a nuclear family with no problems, but instead one of the truth. Wilson realized if he wrote an honest play people would come to understand just how dysfunctional the majority of communities he was raised in were. Where poverty was widespread, local governments were discriminatory against the African Americans community, its people had little education, and therefore hurt their chance of success. Along with problems families faced, Rose, Troy’s wife and Cory’s mom, starts off her marriage to Troy with an ultimatum in Fences she says:”I told him if he wasn't the marrying kind, then move out the way so the marrying kind could find me.”.While the majority of the children of these communities were doomed to work the same low paying jobs as their fathers. Wilson knew that his passion was the Arts so he did what he could to combat the harsh lifestyle black communities were facing. He accomplishes this reality with Fences, therefore his work is praised by people across the country and is seen that his ‘Craft’ was used to the best of his abilities and ends up merged with majority of Arts departments, making a more racially diverse