Two Trains Running

Among Wilson’s plays, Two Trains Running has often been called Wilson’s most overt social commentary. His characters always live their lives in their historical moments, enduring the injustices and hardships that come along with being Black in a certain time period, but they rarely discuss direct social action. Wilson’s choice to set his 1960s play in the last year of the decade indicates his personal commitment to the Black Power movement, which reached its peak at this moment. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 and Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, the Civil Rights movement found itself rudderless. After King’s death, riots and civil disturbances erupted in 110 cities across the country. Notably, the riot in Pittsburgh, which occurred in April of 1968, started in the Hill District when a group of rioters broke into a meat market—a moment that echoes in the last moments of Two Trains Running, when Sterling breaks into Lutz’s Meat Market to seize a small and specific piece of direct social justice. The Black Power movement was focused on self-determination rather than assimilation, and the celebration of Black pride as a radical act in a society that insisted that Black people were lesser.