Ron Whyte

Ronald Melville Whyte (1941–1989) was an American playwright, critic, and disability rights activist.

Whyte was born November 18, 1941, in Black Eagle, Montana, to Eva Ranieri, a homemaker. and Henry Melville Whyte, a railroad machinist. The family moved to Great Falls, Montana and later to St. Paul, Minnesota.

Whyte was born with congenital birth defects of both legs and one arm, and as a child he was put in leg braces built by his father and walked with the help of these devices. He was run over by a school bus in an accident while he was in high school, and both of his ankles were crushed. By the time he was at the end of his college years in San Francisco, he opted to have then-experimental surgery that amputated both legs below the knees, and after a period of recovery he began wearing prostheses.

Whyte attended University of Minnesota High School, studying with Arthur H. Ballet, among others. He completed his studies in Spokane, Washington, where the family had moved as his father held a series of increasingly responsible positions with the Great Northern Railway.

He attended Whitworth College in Spokane for one year, then transferred to San Francisco State University, where he studied drama. Among his professors was Kay Boyle. After receiving a bachelor of arts, he was accepted for graduate study at the Yale School of Drama, from which he received a master of fine arts degree in 1967. His professors at Yale included Dean Robert Brustein, theater historian John Gassner, film and theatre critic Stanley Kauffmann, critic Harold Clurman, with whom he later worked at The Actors Studio in New York, and Stella Adler. He subsequently enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, from which he received a master of divinity degree in 1976. At Union, his mentor was the founder of Black Liberation Theology, James H. Cone. He was a member of The Riverside Church in New York during the ministry of William Sloane Coffin and was in care for ordination as a minister in the United Church of Christ.

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