Metzger is an adjunct professor at Embry-Riddle University. In this essay she examines some of the ways in which American society discriminates against African Americans particularly black women. She also discusses the manner in which Childress's play deals with these issues.

Alice Childress noted in a 1966 essay in Freedomways that America extends basic rights and opportunities to foreign visitors and to immigrants that are not offered to black Americans. She reminded her readers that visitors may "travel, without restriction, reside in hotels, eat at restaurants and enter public and private places closed to Americans who have built up the country under bondage and defended it under a limited and restricted liberty." This is the injustice that Childress illuminates m her play Wedding Band. Childress maintained in a 1993 interview with Shirley Jordan in Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and Women Writers that Americans who say they know nothing...