David J. Garrow’s books include “Bearing the Cross”; “Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade”; and “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.” He contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. He has lived in Squirrel Hill since 2011. www.davidgarrow.com
His Father’s Son
For the first 37 years following his 1945 birth, August Wilson was a Pittsburgh nobody, abandoned by his white German father, Frederick August Kittel, and disdained by his black mother, Daisy Wilson, once he dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Self-educated thanks to thousands of hours spent in multiple Carnegie Library branches, Freddy …