A discussion with Julius Fleming, Jr., who teaches in the Department of English at University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. He has published widely on African American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on how cultural production functions at the very heart of political movement, mobilization, and demands. In this conversation, we discuss his new book Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, which was published in late-March 2022 by New York University Press. Our conversation focuses here on its key arguments about the place of theater in the Civil Rights Movement and the long project of Black freedom struggle.