Fifty years ago, African-American playwright Alice Childress wrote a play about the racial climate in her home town of Charleston, SC—the racial climate, that is, of fifty years before that in 1918. It's called Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, and it laments the perpetual cycle of racial separation that seems impossible to overcome. This lament is embodied in the star-crossed lovers of Julia and Herman, who are black and white and very much in love, but whose people cannot abide their mutually-expressed union—the one side out of fear and suspicion, the other out of bigotry and privilege, the both institutionalized.