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Honorable Mention, 2024 Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies (New York University)
2024 College Language Association Book Award Winner
2023 Hooks National Book Award Winner (Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change)
Honorable Mention, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2023 Book Prize
Honorable Mention, 2023 John W. Frick Book Award (American Theatre and Drama Society)
Finalist, 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theatre Library Association.
Finalist, Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR)
Finalist, ATHE Outstanding Book Award
A bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of Black theater
“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait—in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards—for their long-deferred liberation.
In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.
Offers crucial insight into debates about black political action by carefully and convincingly locating progress in the ephemerality of the now. Adding a distinctive and powerful addition to the history and critical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, Julius Fleming details the impact of direct action in the present to establish the importance of black theatre to black freedom.
Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that.
Fleming successfully accomplishes what he describes as a key purpose of the book: “to map a new cultural and political history of the Civil Rights Movement” (41).