Charles Fuller

Charles H. Fuller Jr. (March 5, 1939 – October 3, 2022) was an African American playwright.

Quotes

• I didn’t start writing to tell happy, little stories. I started writing to make some impact on the world in which I live. If you don’t want to say anything about sexual assault, that’s your business, but I want to say something about it. I think it is absolutely and unequivocally wrong. We have no right because we are in the military to rape fellow soldiers who just happen to be females. A lot of victims are male as well. In the Army I was in, the life of the person next to you was as valuable as your own. You would never do anything to hurt your comrade. Your life depended on him, and in the case of Iraq, those gentlemen’s lives depended on the women they were raping. It’s horrifying.
  • On writing about a female sexual assault victim serving in the military in his play One Night in “Charles Fuller Discusses ‘One Night’” in Contemporary American Theater Festival (2014 Jun 1)

• What happens is this: when we come to believe that the only way to make change is to murder one another, the idea of “the other” makes less valuable the human life it possesses. As a consequence, we can kill the “other” and not feel guilty. Unfortunately, human beings spend too much time rationalizing that war is right under certain circumstances; that it’s okay to threaten and kill other human beings.
  • On whether war corrupts the military in “Charles Fuller Discusses ‘One Night’” in Contemporary American Theater Festival (2014 Jun 1)

• We’re just getting out of domestic situation plays in which we were examining our lifestyle. We’ve been portrayed as a unique, complex kind of people…and there’s a lot more that we can bring to the public. The truth is we do everything.
  • On how plays about Black people are changing in “Pushing Beyond the Pulitzer” in Jet Magazine (Mar 1983)

• We speak [in traditional portrayal] one abominable language—hip; we have one interest—women. Our lives have no beginning, no ending. We’re highly emotional in terms of reactive violence, and we do not use our minds in any way.
  • On the portrayal of Black men in “Pushing Beyond the Pulitzer” in Jet Magazine (Mar 1983)