Ed Bullins

Edward Artie Bullins (July 2, 1935 – November 13, 2021), sometimes publishing as Kingsley B. Bass Jr, to Bertha Marie ( Queen) and Edward Bullins. He was raised primarily by his mother. During this period, he won a boxing championship, returned to Philadelphia, and enrolled in night school. He stayed in Philadelphia until moving to Los Angeles in 1958. He married poet and activist Pat Parker (then Patricia Cooks) in 1962. Parker accused him of violence

After completing his G.E.D., Bullins enrolled in Los Angeles City College and began writing short stories for Citadel, a magazine he started. He joined Baraka at Black House, the Black Arts Movement's cultural center, along with Sonia Sanchez, Huey Newton, Marvin X, and others. A 2005 history of the Black Arts Movement described Bullins as among the "leading … theater workers" of the Movement. The Black Panthers used Black House as their base in San Francisco, where Bullins was their minister of culture as of the 1960s. Black House eventually split into two opposing factions: one group, led by Eldridge Cleaver, considered art to be a weapon and advocated joining with "all oppressed people", including whites, to bring about a socialist revolution; while the other group, represented by Marvin X and Baraka, considered art to be a form of cultural nationalism. Bullins was part of the latter group. While in San Francisco, Bullins founded Black Arts/West, a theater collective inspired by Baraka's Harlem-based Black Arts Repertory Theatre project.

New Lafayette Players The director Robert Macbeth read Bullins' plays and asked him to join the New Lafayette Players, a theatrical group. The first production the New Lafayette Players performed was a trilogy called The Electronic Nigger and Others at the American Place Theatre. Electronic Nigger was about a Black man who imitates the views of the white majority. The trilogy earned Bullins a Drama Desk Award for 1968. The trilogy's title was later changed to Ed Bullins Plays for what Bullins called "financial reasons". Bullins worked with the Lafayette Players until 1972, when the group ended due to lack of funding. During these years, ten of Bullins's plays were produced by the Players, including In the Wine Time and Goin' a Buffalo.

1970s and later Bullins returned to the East Coast in 1967. From 1973, he was playwright-in-residence at the American Place Theatre. He founded the Bronx-based Surviving Theatre, active from 1974 to around 1980. From 1975 to 1983, he was on staff at The Public Theater with the New York Shakespeare Festival's Writers' Unit. During these years, Bullins wrote two children's plays, titled I Am Lucy Terry and The Mystery of Phillis Wheatley. He also wrote the text for two musicals, titled Sepia Star (1977) and Storyville (1979).

Bullins later returned to school, and received a bachelor's degree in English and playwriting from Antioch University in San Francisco. As of the late 1980s, Bullins taught drama at the City College of San Francisco. In 1995, he became a professor at Northeastern University.

Bullins died aged 86 on November 13, 2021, in Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, due to complications from dementia. He received an Obie Award for The Taking of Miss Janie, which also received a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Also in 1975, he won the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award, four Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grants, and two National Endowment for the Arts playwriting grants. In 2012, Bullins received the Theatre Communications Group Visionary Leadership Award.

Selected works

Anthologies Five Plays (Goin' a Buffalo; In the Wine Time; A Son, Come Home; The Electronic Nigger; Clara's Ole Man) The Electronic Nigger (1967) King Aspelta: A Nubian Coronation (2000) Blacklist City Preacher The Devil Catchers The Gentleman Caller