While Ye West busied himself with triggering urbanites once again, this time with his buffoonery and race-bating by slapping the words “White Lives Matter” on a sweatshirt, award-winning playwright Charles Fuller quietly died at the age of 83.
Fuller, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play, has not been a household name for the past four decades, if he ever was one among young pop culture observers. But he is held in absolute reverence by the who’s who of Black acting talent, including Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as actors David Alan Grier, Anthony Mackie, Steven Pasquale and Taye Diggs.
Washington loved Fuller’s masterpieces so much, most particularly A Soldier’s Play, that the Training Day star acted in both the Broadway play as well as the big-screen adaptation two years later under the title of A Soldier’s Story. Fuller wrote the screenplay for the movie version for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen, his genius will be missed,” Grier tweeted on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022.
Fuller’s words in his plays were more relevant, timely and devastatingly on-point as it discussed Black Americans’ love for a nation that has, all too often, not loved them back.
Perhaps, instead of Black Twitter being consumed by the inflammatory rhetoric and idiotic meanderings of a hopeless and incorrigible narcissist named Ye, we should pause to salute the playwright who wrote of how Blacks helped defeat Adolf Hitler while operating under oppressive and hateful circumstances in segregated military barracks.
Perhaps more publications, particularly African American ones, need to devote more ink to paying homage to the former Army veteran who penned one of the greatest and most important plays in modern U.S. history.
