SOURCE: "Pre-Feminism in the Black Revolutionary Drama of Sonia Sanchez," in The Many Forms of Drama, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan, University Press of America, 1985, pp. 19-29.

In the following essay, Curb discusses Sanchez's revolutionary plays and states that the plays "dramatize the need for active cooperation among black women in political struggle for sexual as well as racial justice."

In 1960 when the first sparks of Black racial discontent were igniting the roaring conflagration of the Black Revolution, Sonia Sanchez was twenty-five. At twenty she graduated from Hunter College with a Bachelor of Arts and continued graduate study at New York University. She had been writing poetry since her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. By the mid-sixties, Sanchez was raising two sons as a single mother and declaiming her poetry at Black Power Conferences in northern cities across the country. She was generally regarded as the leading female literary...