Race Relations, African American Drama, and Sociological Practices of Literature

This study focuses on race relations and their impacts on African American drama. For the purpose, the study foregrounds the effectiveness and productiveness of sociological practices of literature. It then applies a sociological practice to two African American plays published in the early 1950s, William Branch's A Medal for Willie (1951) and Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step (1953). The “sociological” approach to the two plays reveals several interrelated facts. Due to the changing social mood toward racial integration in the 1950s, the two playwrights had to deal with the problem of the double audience carefully. Their selection of an audience from the black and white audiences affected in a significant way their representations of race relations in American society. This is shown in their employment of contrasting dramaturgical strategies, use of antithetical settings, different characterization, and, above all, varying degrees of straightforwardness and intensity in their representation of race relations.