Charles Gordone was born on October 12, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio. Born Charles Edward Fleming, he took the surname Gordon when his mother remarried. When he was two years old, he and his family moved to his mother’s hometown of Elkhart, Indiana. As an African American growing up in Indiana in the 1930s, Gordon experienced discrimination both because of his race (white children would not associate with him) and due to cultural norms (other African Americans shunned the family because they lived on the “white” side of Elkhart).[1] He graduated from Elkhart High School in 1941.  

In 1942, Gordon joined the U.S. Air Force after spending a semester at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).[2] After two years of service, Gordon returned to Los Angeles to study music and drama. It was there that he first experienced racial discrimination in the performing arts as “I was always cast in subservient or stereotypical roles.”[3] These experiences with racial discrimination in Elkhart and Los Angeles would influence the rest of his career as he worked for civil rights in the performing arts and theatre industries. After graduating from California State University, he relocated to New York City to pursue an acting career. It was then that he added an “e” to his surname, to become Gordone, to avoid confusion with another actor with the same name.[4] 

In the 1950s and 1960s, Gordone became a director in addition to acting. He directed productions such Rebels and Bugs (1958), Peer Gynt (1959), Faust (1959), Tobacco Road (1960), and Detective Story (1960).[5] From 1961 to 1966, he performed in the play The Blacks: A Clown Show, directed by Jean Genet, with other talented African American actors such as James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, and Cecily Tyson.[6] It was this play, according to Gordone, that changed his life. The play’s theme of African Americans waging war against the white power structure and becoming the oppressor instead of the oppressed enabled Gordone, in his own words, to acknowledge the “hatred and fear I had inside me about being black”.[7] He founded a theatre in Queens, New York and in 1962, he founded the Committee for the Employment of Negroes. This organization helped increase career opportunities in theatre for African Americans. He organized protests against Broadway theaters to provide better opportunities for young African American actors.[8] He was also involved in a committee for the Congress on Racial Equality. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Gordone to the Commission on Civil Disorders.  

Inspired by his personal experiences, he wrote what would become his most famous play, No Place to be Somebody. It opened in May of 1969 at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre.[9] Set in the Civil Rights-era, the play highlights racial and cultural pressures in context of the characters’ ambitions and limitations because of their race.[10] The play would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making the play the first off-Broadway production to win a Pultizer and making Gordone the first African American to win a Pulitzer for drama.[11]  

Gordone continued his civil rights activism throughout the rest of his career. In 1981, he helped form The American Stage, a theatre production company with the purpose of casting minorities into non-traditional rules, such as starring two Mexican-American actors as George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men.[12]  In 1987, he began teaching theatre and theatre history at Texas A&M University, advancing racial diversity through theatre at the predominantly white campus. He passed away in1995 at the age of 70 in College Station, Texas. 
 
In 2009, the Indiana Historical Bureau erected a marker in front of Gordeon’s hometown Elkhart Public Library to highlight and honor his achievements and contributions to civil rights and theatre.[13]