Ron Milner

Ronald Milner (May 29, 1938 – July 16, 2004) was an African-American playwright. His play Checkmates, starring Paul Winfield and Denzel Washington, ran on Broadway in 1988.

Early life

Ronald Milner was born on May 29, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up on Hastings Street, also known as "Black Bottom". It had "muslims on corner, hustlers and pimps on another, winos on one, and Aretha Franklin singing from her father's church on the other", said Geneva Smitherman, author of Black World. Milner would tell David Richards in a Washington Star interview: "The more I read in high school, the more I realized that some tremendous, phenomenal things were happening around me. What happened in a Faulkner novel happened four times a day on Hastings Street. I thought why should these crazy people Faulkner writes about seem more important than my mother or my father or the dude down the street. Only because they had someone to write about them. So I became a writer." He attended Northeastern High School. He also briefly attended Highland Park Junior College and Detroit Institute of Technology.