Set in the 1970s in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and depicting gypsy cabdrivers who serve black neighborhoods, Jitney is the seventh in Wilson's projected 10-play cycle (one for each decade) on the black experience in twentieth-century America. A thoroughly revised version of a play Wilson first wrote in 1979, Jitney was produced in New York for the first time in spring 2000, winning rave reviews and the accolade of the New York Drama Critics Circle as the best play of the year.

One of contemporary theater's most distinguished and eloquent voices, August Wilson writes not about historical events or the pathologies of the black community, but, as he says, about "the unique particulars of black culture . . . I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us . . . through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves."