- Playwright, producer, actor and professor, his brother Frederick was the first African-American officer of the Marines.
- He was a prominent black playwright who brought the African American experience to the off-Broadway stage, then to radio and TV as a writer, director, and producer of works that explored race in the United States. He also taught drama and literature, and edited two anthologies of plays.
- He won public speaking competitions and scholarships that helped him attend Northwestern University. He received a bachelor's degree and moved to New York, later receiving a master's in dramatic arts from Columbia University and doing postgraduate work at Yale.
- He started out as an actor, appearing with Sidney Poitier in an all-black production of Sidney Kingsley's "Detective Story" at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
- He served two years in the US Army, mostly in West Germany.
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