pelling dramatist as well as a forceful spokesman
on behalf of the aesthetic and economic inde-
pendence of the black playwright. In the 1970s,
Milner chose to return to live and work in his na-
tive Detroit, where he organized his own theater
company, The Spirit of Shango, a community-
based black theater. Milner opened his Langston
Hughes Theatre in 1975.
Milner’s many plays are characterized by their
attention to African-American social and psy-
chological culture. As critic Beunyce Rayford
Cunningham notes, “Ron Milner’s is essentially a
theater of intense, often lyrical, retrospection de-
voted primarily to illuminating the past events,
personalities, and values which have shaped his
struggling people.” In 1967 his first major play,
Who’s Got His Own (1966), a furious fever-pitch
drama inspired by Billie Holiday’s song “God
Bless the Child,” premiered in Harlem. In 1974,
Milner’s What the Wine-Sellers Buy, which won
the Audeloc Award and earned more than $1 mil-
lion, became the first play by an African-Ameri-
can to be produced by Joseph Papp at the New
York Shakespeare Festival at Lincoln Center. Set
in the 1950s and 1960s Hastings Street of Detroit,
What the Wine-Sellers Buy examines the conflict
between the lure of the streets and a mother’s
teachings. Milner’s tribute to jazz, the highly in-
novative Jazz-Set, was one of Drama Circle’s Ten
Best Plays for 1979. Produced in 2000 by Plow-
shares of Detroit, Jazz works like a jazz composi-
tion, where the music and musicians are one and
characters’ life experiences and memories are
“played” as music. Checkmate (1987), the recipi-
ent of the 1998 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE Image Award,
which ran on Broadway and starred Denzel
Washington, Paul Winfield, Ruby Dee, and Mar-
sha Jackson, is a comedy about the relationships
of two black couples who are generations apart
in age and attitudes. Urban Transition: Loose
Blossoms (1996) picks up on themes introduced
in What the Wine-Sellers Buy to examine how the
drug subculture has made its way into current
mainstream culture. In 1997, Milner wrote Inner
City Miracle, a musical, about then 36th District
Court Judge Greg Mathis’s rise from young crim-
inal to respected jurist—before Mathis got his
own television show. The play was produced at
the Scottish Rite theatre at the Masonic Temple
in Detroit.
Milner’s other plays include The Monster
(1968), M(ego) and the Green Ball of Freedom
(1968), The Warning—A Theme for Linda (1969),
These Three (1974), Season’s Reason’s: Just a Natu-
ral Change (1976), Work: Don’t Let Your Attitude
Intrude (1978), Crack Steppin’ (1984), Roads of
the Mountain Top (A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.; 1986), Don’t Get God Started (1987; with
music by Marvin Winans), Life Agony (1965), The
Greatest Gift, and Looking for Ronnie Savoy.
Milner also expressed his vision of the world
in mediums other than plays. His novels include
The Life of the Brothers Brown (1965), and Don’t
Get God Started (1988). His screenplays include
The James Brown Story. His articles and plays
have appeared in Negro Digest, Drama Review,
and BLACK WORLD. Also, in 1972, Milner, in asso-
ciation with Woodie King, Jr., edited the seminal
Black Drama Anthology.
Over the years, Milner has received several other
awards and honors. He is the recipient of the John
Hay Whitney Award (1962), a Rockefeller Grant
(1965), and a National Endowment for the Arts
playwright grant (1985). He received an honorary
doctorate from Wayne State University (2001) and
was honored for his contributions to the theater at
the Charles H. Wright Museum of African Ameri-
can History (2004).
Known affectionately as the “people’s play-
wright,” Milner was considered a pioneering force
in African-American theater for more than four
decades, ranking with playwrights such as AUGUST
WILSON, AMIRI BARAKA, LOFTEN MITCHELL, and Pu-
litzer Prize winner SUZAN-LORI PARKS. Since the
1960s his plays have been produced at African-
American theaters around the country. Ron Mil-
ner died from liver cancer at Harper Hospital in
Detroit on July 9, 2004.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cunningham, Beunyce Rayford. “Ron Milner.” In
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 38: Afro-
American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and ProseMilner, Ronald 361