How the beating death of Tyre Nichols made me take a second look at a 42-year-old play about internalized racism

When the playwright Charles H. Fuller Jr. debuted A Soldier’s Play in 1981, he introduced audiences to the members of an all-Black Army unit stationed in Louisiana during World War II — the central characters in what’s now widely considered one of modern theater’s most compelling whodunits.

Among the multilayered themes of A Soldier’s Play, which recently ended a weeklong run at the Forrest Theatre, is its exploration of the perils of internalized racism and the extent to which some Black Americans grapple with notions of assimilation, identity, classism, respectability politics, and the battle for social acceptance in the face of white supremacy.

“The day of the Geechee” — a slur long directed at African Americans from the South — “is gone, boy,” one Black soldier tells another at one point in the play. “White folks wouldn’t think we was all fools,” he continued, if not for poor and working-class Black Americans.

It was difficult to process A Soldier’s Play and its themes of self-hatred without also thinking about the five Black police officers in Tennessee who were charged last month in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, a Black motorist.

Of course, the officers have not yet been found guilty by a jury. And none of us may ever know what prompted them to give Nichols 71 commands in 13 minutes while administering a horrifying beating, all captured in bloody detail on police body-cam videos.

But while watching the real-life violence that unfolded in Memphis on Jan. 7 — carried out by Black officers who were part of a system that traces its roots to Jim Crow — I couldn’t help but think of the fictional violence that Fuller first brought to the stage in A Soldier’s Play 42 years ago.

That connection was not lost on the members of the Broadway revival cast who were in town recently, either. Fuller, a North Philadelphia native who died in October, was recognized last month by administrators at Roman Catholic High School, Fuller’s alma mater, who renamed the school’s theater in his honor. The stars of the play visited the school and discussed race relations with members of the student body — as it so happened, on the same day that the five officers were arrested and charged in Memphis.

The timing — which actor Norm Lewis, who portrays an Army captain assigned to unravel the murder mystery at the heart of the play, mentioned during his talk — was a reminder that much of the power of the play, which was honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, is the enduring resonance of its warning about internalized racism and oppression. Namely, how Black people and others who are oppressed can internalize the mind-set of their oppressors, and turn against themselves.

But when the play was first staged, Fuller’s message hardly received a universal welcome — and some of the most stinging rebukes came from other Black poets and playwrights, including Amiri Baraka. Baraka was an icon of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which produced works illustrating how white racism had mistreated Black people in America for centuries.

Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of Africology at Temple University, said that when writing A Soldier’s Play, Fuller was interested in the psychological aspects of internalized racism that led to violence and class strife between Black people.

Fuller “was a tall, handsome man, with an incredible mind and a deep sensibility regarding humanity and human nature,” Asante told me recently. “He was always willing to tell truth to power.”

Sadly, that truth Fuller told 40 years ago on a theater stage — that self-hatred and internalized racism can lead to violence — may have been acted out in real life in Memphis. And Tyre Nichols paid the price.

Asante said Fuller was so committed to stopping the kind of violence that can be attributed to internalized racism that he used some of the money that accompanied his Pulitzer Prize to erect billboard signs around Philadelphia encouraging young people to make good choices, like graduating from school.

Fuller wasn’t the only person to talk about internalized racism, which has been the subject of a robust body of research by scholars in African American studies, said Timothy Welbeck, the director of Temple’s Center for Anti-Racism.

People “want to identify with the powerful,” he said. “If you are denied power and resources, and you are told it’s because of a fundamental flaw in you, oftentimes some people begin to hate themselves and things that distinguish them from the majority. ... They try to find ways to assimilate and accept the racist behavior of the majority in order to gain access and acceptance.”

Welbeck said that Nichols’ race was undoubtedly a factor in the severity of the beating he endured.

“I struggle to believe that they would have beaten a white motorist in the same way,” Welbeck said. “They literally beat him to death, and I don’t know if they would have done that to an animal.”

Welbeck’s words, the video of Nichols’ beating, and the textured themes of A Soldier’s Play, all convey that it isn’t just oppression from others we need to challenge in what has been called a recent period of racial reckoning. For many oppressed people, that healing and reconciliation must also start within.