“There were a little over 100 people,” Wiley added. “Two gospel choirs from the community, and a couple of speakers. I was the main event.”

Also a faculty fellow and co-director of America’s Hallowed Ground at Kenan, Wiley is a prolific actor and writer who has written 15 solo and ensemble plays since 2000. It’s a body of work that pulls from a deep well of research and craftsmanship in the creation of theatre that documents some of America’s most compelling moments: the daring escape of the enslaved Henry “Box” Brown, the trial of Emmett Till, the hardships endured by the 1961 Freedom Riders jailed in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Wiley’s most recent play, “Changing Same: The Cold-Blooded Murder Of Booker T. Spicely,” co-written with Durham playwright Howard Craft, premiered last November at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. The play tells the story of Private Booker T. Spicely, a serviceman killed by a Durham city bus driver after he initially questioned the motorman why he had to move to the Jim Crow section of the bus.

“By most eyewitness accounts, he didn't refuse to move. He lambasted Durham’s segregation laws, yes, but obeyed them nonetheless,” Wiley told Duke Today.

The new work tells the story of what happened “from multiple perspectives from that time period; not only the Black perspective, but the White as well,” Wiley said.

Not unlike one of Wiley’s heroes, the late venerated Duke historian emeritus, John Hope Franklin, his plays focus on the missing pages of history.

In “Jackie Robinson: A Game Apart,” for instance, the play is framed with his birth in Cairo, Georgia, and ends with Branch Rickey asking him to sign with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Everything in between is about Robinson’s early life, even before he was born, but the play also introduces audiences to other Black athletes, like Isaac Burns Murphy, Fritz Pollard, Joe Louis and Wilma Rudolph.

Wiley’s plays also make space for audience participation. He may ask an older white man or a child, for example, to play Robinson when he refuses to move to the back of a bus so that white soldiers could sit in the front. During his performance in Clayton, Mayor Pro Tem Michael Sims played Robinson in the bus scene, while a child played Wilma Rudolph.

“Older individuals tend to get up and move, but young folks? They stay in place with their arms folded and refuse to move,” Wiley said. “It’s a beautiful thing to become the antagonist in my own play. It’s a beautiful moment.” 

Wiley, ever the educator, shared a Juneteenth lesson for all Americans. 

He noted that in his play, “The Parchman Hour,” Martin Luther King, Jr. says he will not ride with the Freedom Riders to Mississippi.

“For a moment the audience goes, ‘wait, what?’” Wiley said. “But these are individuals who have fears … who overcome these things because of who they are. It teaches young people: You can be afraid. You can make mistakes. But you can be brave.

“I tell young people: You don’t have to be perfect to be a hero.”