[2] Wilderson was born in New Orleans, and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
[3] Student activists and intellectuals were regulars in his parents' home throughout his early life, and his family was supportive of the Black Panthers.
"[5] Wilderson moved across the country to study European Philosophy and Comparative Government at Dartmouth College in September 1974 to begin his undergraduate education.
[6] After graduating, he worked for several years as a stockbroker in Minneapolis until returning to school to get an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University.
There, he was one of two Americans elected to the African National Congress in 1992 led by Nelson Mandela, and was a member of the paramilitary guerrilla group Umkhonto We Sizwe.
In Berkeley, he helped organized a protest against the arrest and trial members of the Third World Liberation Front[citation needed].
[citation needed] Frank B. Wilderson III worked as a dramaturge for Lincoln Center Theater's productions of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes's Mule Bone and Mbongeni Ngema's Township Fever; and for the Market Theater in Johannesburg's production of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum.