The late playwright August Wilson, renowned for his 10-play cycle about the African-American experience in each decade of the 20th century, has been much on my mind for the past six months.

From the film version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” to Black Lives Matter, from the move South of a New York Times columnist to a poet’s insistence on Black translators for her work, multiple events have reminded me of August and made me wonder what his take would be.

I knew him — hence my comfort in using his first name.

It all began late last year when Netflix released a sharply abridged version of “Ma Rainey,” set in 1927, starring Viola Davis as blues legend Ma, and the late Chadwick Boseman as the brash jazz trumpeter Levee. Both were nominated for Oscars after racking up other major acting awards.

“Thank you, August, for leaving a legacy for actors of color that we can relish the rest of our lives,” said Davis, who did win an Oscar in 2017 for her role in the film version of “Fences.”

“Fences” is the most-produced among August’s plays, and was his least favorite. “Ma Rainey” was always my favorite, perhaps in part because I was there as The Day’s arts editor when it had its first staged reading, in 1982 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.

That night arguably launched August’s career, and it certainly launched one of my best runs as an arts writer. I’ll always treasure the day I spent with him in New Haven, finding, at his insistence, a rare Ma Rainey album so I could hear the voice of the real “Mother of the Blues.”

Proudly calling himself a “race man,” August chose a restaurant reliably friendly to a Black man who kept his hat on and might hang around writing after he finished eating. After lunch, we hung around the table and talked, mostly about who would direct if and when “Ma” got made into a movie.

August had demanded a Black film director, and said he’d rather give up on films forever than give in on that point. I believed him. But I didn’t necessarily agree, mainly because I wanted to see that movie soon.

It would be 11 years after August died, in 2005 at age 60, before any of his plays became films. “Fences,” directed by and starring Denzel Washington, arrived in 2016, followed by “Ma,” directed by George C. Wolfe, in 2020.

Washington has since pledged to make sure that August’s entire 10-play cycle makes it on screen — doubtless with Black directors.

Times have clearly changed. When the young Black poet Amanda Gorman thrilled the world by reciting her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s inauguration, eminent translators were swiftly sought to make it available in multiple languages. Some of them were white.

But that was not going to fly in 2021. In the era of Black Lives Matter, shouldn’t Black sensibilities matter too?

A white Dutch writer, winner of the prestigious Booker International Prize, was pressured into withdrawing, and a Catalan writer was dropped because his “profile” (white) was wrong. A German publisher wound up hiring three translators — one Black, one white and one of Turkish descent.

Although I generally dislike theorizing what the dead would think about current events, I’m pretty sure that August, a poet before he was a playwright, would empathize with these publishing decisions.

As for me, I don’t think Wilson and Gorman should remain off limits to non-Black interpreters any more than Shakespeare requires a white director, or only a white person should translate Frost. But timing always matters, and for Black voices, the time is way overdue.

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” takes place in a Chicago recording studio where Ma, a Southerner by roots and sensibility, is determined to get every bit of what she’s worth both in terms of money and respect.

All of August’s plays except this one are set in Pittsburgh, where he grew up. And while he told me he had little interest in visiting the South, his work is inextricably tied to the Great Migration of some six million Blacks from South to North that took place roughly between 1915 and 1970.

When Charles M. Blow, a Black columnist for the New York Times, announced in January of this year that “we need another great migration,” from North to South, I immediately thought of something else August told me. He said the previous Great Migration might have been a mistake.

“Africans are a land-based people,” August said, and had they stayed in the South they might — after fighting off the Klan and Jim Crow — have managed to reclaim land promised to them and then stolen from them after the Civil War.

August, I think, would have welcomed recent news about Blacks doing just that, reclaiming stolen ancestral land in North Carolina and Florida.

Blow recently moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta, and is calling on other Blacks to move South as well. There, where they have bigger numbers and a deeper history, he believes they can expand their political power base.

“I am unapologetically pro-Black,” wrote Blow. And while I couldn’t picture August ever moving South, a race man would surely say “Amen.”

Bethe Dufresne is a former columnist and editor for The Day.