assinated. Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. And Nixon is the President, to whom black minorities don't matter, since they didn't vote for him the year before.
What do these characters know about Woodstock? Even though there were black performers there, like Jimi Hendrix and Ritchie Havens, the 300,000 young people who sat through rain were primarily white. 1969 was the year of the Mets winning the world series- not Pittsburgh, and the Stonewall riots in New York's Greenwich Village, a battle about "gay rights". None of these mattered to the people whose neighborhood was fast disappearing, and whose lives seemed to have no future.
In this play, Wilson again composes a cast of characters of black men (and one woman) who represent different sides of the same coin. Wilson himself writes: "reduced to its most fundamental truth, black men are a commodity of flesh and muscle which has lost its value in the marketplace. We are left over from history" (Belton, 1997, xci).
In the diner, Memphis has obviously made something of his opportunity- buying the diner and now holding on for what he hopes is a good price. Wilson, in an essay, praises those black men who have "forged
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