Playwright Lorraine Hansberry devoted seven years to a stage adaption of Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition about the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina coup and race massacre. The earliest draft is dated 1955. She imagined a cast, a set, and wrote stage directions. She revised and revised, for years. She marked up her copy of Chesnutt’s second novel, and she was determined to revisit his work and the events of Wilmington 1898.