Black artists living through the Civil Rights Movement used theater as a tool for activism, according to author Julis B. Fleming Jr.

In particular, Fleming believes theater was a way to resist calls for “Black patience” — for Black people to suffer and wait patiently to receive equal rights.

In his book “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation,” Fleming analyzes the works and actions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington and Oscar Brown Jr. in the context of and response to the times.

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The University of Memphis’ Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change named the work its 2022 National Book Award recipient in December 2023.

The award is given annually to an author of a nonfiction book centered on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.

Forty-five titles were nominated.

The Tougaloo College and University of Pennsylvania alumnus received the award Tuesday, Feb. 27, at a ceremony that included a lecture given by Fleming.

Fleming, an assistant professor of English, spent more than a decade morphing his dissertation into the book. His research included travel to New York, Memphis, New Orleans, Mississippi and Amsterdam.

One example of the theater-activism in practice, Fleming said, is Free Southern Theater, which Tougaloo founded in 1963. 

The theater group performed primarily in Mississippi, but also in Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama.

Due to lack of funding, the group would perform for a working-class Black audience in cotton fields, on back porches and even shacks. 

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“The question then comes: what was so powerful and salient about the Free Southern Theatre message that this population, this demographic of sharecroppers were thirsty, right?” Fleming asked.

“And a part of what was so moving about it is that the theater was saying, ‘We want our freedom. Now, we can no longer wait.’

“The performance of patience is at its core a performance of suffering,” Fleming said. “Indeed, to demand that Black people be patient in the way that I am describing is to demand that Black people suffer within this context.”

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In his Tuesday talk, Fleming also noted the 1963 Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin In The Sun” as a prime example of a play that was celebrated by the masses for its triumph and hopefulness during its time.

Fleming argued the general premise of a Black family picking themselves up by the bootstraps and moving out of poverty into a white, and better neighborhood was not actually a “hopeful” story. 

“It’s not a hopeful story that a family is left sitting in that living room at the end of the play waiting for those movers to come,” he said. “They never come.

“If this play is about integration, there’s a very radical message that (writer) Lorraine Hansberry has about integration, which is that Black people are still asked to be patient.”

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Fleming said that prosperity through integration wasn’t always a guarantee for Black people during the time period he examined.

“What we are told in that play is that even if a family moved into that integrated neighborhood, what would generally happen to, or often happen to, Black families who move into these white neighborhoods,” Fleming Jr. asked.

“(That) they would be bombed, which also isn’t a hopeful story.”