While he fights to be paid a fair price for his property, his employees and regulars search for work, love, and justice as their neighborhood changes around them.
Directed by Lloyd Richards, the cast featured Roscoe Lee Browne as Holloway, Anthony Chisholm as Wolf, Laurence Fishburne as Sterling, Chuck Patterson as West, and Cynthia Martells as Risa.
[4] Seeking to escape from poverty, racism, and segregation imposed by "Jim Crow" laws in the South, more than 6 million Black Americans migrated to northern, midwestern and western industrial cities during the early and mid-20th century, a movement ending about 1970.
Broadly speaking, blacks who moved north could expect higher wages in industrial jobs, better educational opportunities, and greater potential for social advancement than possible in the South.
Though lynching was much more rare and de jure segregation did not exist in the North, negative attitudes towards blacks prevailed among many white citizens.
Suburban development, especially after World War II, attracted people who wanted newer housing and could afford to move.
Because of the loss of working-class jobs, these overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods began to be areas of concentrated high poverty and associated crime rates.
Like Hambone's "He gonna give me my ham", this indignant insistence represents an unyielding demand for dignity and respect from those who have historically been denied it.
[citation needed] Throughout Act Two of the play, Sterling (a young man from the neighborhood recently released from the state penitentiary) eagerly awaits a political rally, for which he tries to generate interest at the restaurant.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a wave of riots from grief and despair erupted in urban, black areas of the United States.
Though the riots in Pittsburgh were not as devastating as those in Washington, D.C., and Chicago that year, they resulted in extensive property damage to struggling black areas, and escalated tensions of their residents with the city police, who were still mostly white.
Those in the younger generation, such as Sterling, who had often grown up in the North, viewed this attitude as implicit submission—a remnant of slave mentality worthy of contempt.
In 1960, the movement relied primarily on legal action and political lobbying by organizations such as the NAACP, which conducted litigation to challenge disenfranchisement and segregation, as well as defend suspects in egregious cases of apparently innocent people being charged for crimes.
Over the next few years, however, nonviolent mass action emerged as the primary tactic in the South, organized through the strong church communities and led by such ministers as Martin Luther King, Jr and others of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and other states, blacks conducted boycotts and sit-ins of segregated buses and businesses, seeking change; they also organized voter education and protests.