First Acts: A Black Playwright Comes of Age

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Playwright and television writer Kermit Frazier began life as a precocious Negro boy growing up in southeast Washington, D.C., during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. As a student at an all-Black elementary school, Kermit was selected for a newly formed honors track at a predominantly white secondary school. Traveling a complex path, Kermit tore down segregation barriers, balanced on an academic pedestal, and battled an internal war of denial against his same-sex attractions.

This memoir is not a story about a young man rising from the hood but rather a young Black man struggling with stereotypes, identity, and mild dyslexia while straddling two middle-class worlds, Black and white, and striving not to be everyone’s other.