Charles H. Fuller, Jr. (born 5 March 1939) is an American playwright, best known for his play, A Soldier’s Play for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Fuller vowed to become a writer after noticing that his high school’s library had no books by African American authors. He achieved critical notice in 1969 with The Village: A Party, a drama about racial tensions between a group of mixed-race couples. He later wrote plays for the Henry Street Settlement theatre and the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, who have performed several of his plays. His 1975 play The Brownsville Raid is based on the Brownsville Affair, an altercation between black soldiers and white civilians in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, which led to an entire black regiment being dishonorably discharged though later pardoned in 1976.
He won an Obie Award for Zooman and the Sign in 1980, about a black Philadelphia teen who kills a young girl on her own front porch, and whose neighbors eventually rise up against him after being goaded out of their apathy by the girl’s father with a sign. Zooman presents himself as a helpless product of his society, but his victim’s father convinces their neighbors that they need to stand together and achieve justice.
His next work, A Soldier’s Play, told the story of the racially charged search by a black captain for the murderer of a black sergeant on a Louisiana army base in 1944, as a means to discuss the position of blacks in white society. Although the play enjoyed a long run, Fuller has said it never played on Broadway because he refused to drop the last line, “You’ll have to get used to Black people being in charge.” It nevertheless was a critical success, winning Fuller a Pulitzer in 1982, and being produced as the 1984 film A Soldier’s Story, for which Fuller himself wrote the screen adaptation. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award, and it won an Edgar Award. After this play, Fuller switched his focus to movies for several years, saying “I always wanted to reach the most people with my work. Not enough people go to the theater.”

Of his methods for advancing the African-American cause, Fuller said in a 1982 interview, “My argument is on the stage. I don’t have to be angry. O.K.? I get it all out right up there. There’s no reason to carry this down from the stage and into the seats. And it does not mean that I am not enraged at injustice or prejudice or bigotry. It simply means that I cannot be enraged all the time. To spend one’s life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I’m not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?”

Fuller has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, State of New York and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also written short fiction and screenplays, and worked as a movie producer. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 7pm – Film & Discussion
RE-THINK AFGHANISTAN
presented by The World Can’t Wait, Philadelphia
This well-made documentary, produced by The Brave New Foundation and directed by Robert Greenwald, takes a sober and somber look at what 8 years of U.S. led war of aggression against the Afghani people has meant. It delves into this question as well as what a “surge” in troops that Obama is close to announcing, will mean in lives, destruction, and its impact on the world as well as the lives at home in the U.S. Not only do we need to raise these questions of why we are there; we also need to raise the much needed discussion and action on how to resist these crimes against humanity committed by the government.