Ron Milner
| Ronald Milner | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 29, 1938 Detroit, Michigan, USA |
| Died | July 9, 2004 (aged 66) Detroit, Michigan, USA |
| Occupation | playwright |
| Nationality |
 American |
Ronald Milner (May 29, 1938 – July 16, 2004) was an African-American playwright. His play Checkmates, starring Paul Winfield and Denzel Washington, ran on Broadway in 1988.
Ronald Milner was born on May 29, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up on Hastings Street, also known as "Black Bottom". It had "muslims on corner, hustlers and pimps on another, winos on one, and Aretha Franklin singing from her father's church on the other", said Geneva Smitherman, author of Black World. Milner would tell David Richards in a Washington Star interview: "The more I read in high school, the more I realized that some tremendous, phenomenal things were happening around me. What happened in a Faulkner novel happened four times a day on Hastings Street. I thought why should these crazy people Faulkner writes about seem more important than my mother or my father or the dude down the street. Only because they had someone to write about them. So I became a writer." He attended Northeastern High School. He also briefly attended Highland Park Junior College and Detroit Institute of Technology.
In 1962 he won the John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship to help aid him to complete a novel, "Life With Father Brown," which remains unpublished. He went to New York City to join Harvey Swados's writing workshop at Columbia University. Under the mentorship of Langston Hughes, Milner was able to get a Rockefeller Foundation grant.
His first break came in 1966 with Who's Got His Own. The play begins with the funeral of a harsh father, Tim Bronson, and ends with a tentative rebirth for his long-suffering widow and his embittered son and daughter, Tim, Jr., and Clara. The unsuspected truths that Mrs. Bronson is driven to reveal about their father ultimately enable Tim and Clara to see the real lives of their parents, as painful as it is. The expression that has historically been thwarted, which is primarily at the core in the play, is the question of black manhood. The protagonist is a highly combative and alienated son, torn by despair over ever being able to respect or love a father he has long since written off as a fierce tyrant at home and a coward at work. The show toured colleges in New York before going to the Lafayette Theatre in 1967.
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