Between Men and Cattle

The title of the play is taken from the W.E.B Dubois treatise, Souls of Black Folk (1903) … that in the view of the old South the Negro is tertium quid, a third something… somewhere between men and cattle.

The play centers on the relationship between a precocious black child who won second place in a speech competition in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a white reporter whose interview ends with the boy in tears. When he becomes the president of a conservative white university 30 years later, the reporter arranges a second meeting with him, to find out, in part, what went wrong the first time.

Richard Kalinoski’s Between Men and Cattle reveals that “third something” thoughts are still deeply embedded in the American experience.