'Politics, Passion, Prejudice: Alice Childress's Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White'

Abstract

Love and hate, varying degrees of colour, patriarchy, and bigotry prevail in Alice Childress’s drama Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Originally penned in the early 1960s, the play was not printed or performed professionally until 1966, despite some interest in producing the play on Broadway. However, due to its alleged controversial subject matter the play remained largely unknown to audiences. Childress, it appears, unfashionably portrayed a loving, enduring interracial early twentieth-century relationship conflictingly juxtaposed with the fervent, civil rights atmosphere of the mid 1960s. Furthermore, with predominantly black and white male civil rights activists peacefully enforcing laws upholding desegregation in the South , Childress demonstrates segregation’s insidious nature purely through the perceptiveness of black women.