Early Acts: A Black Playwright Comes of Age

Celebrated 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 high 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. Rather, this is the story of 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.