Mr. Branch spent his first 13 years mostly in New York State before moving with his family to Charlotte, N.C., and then Washington, where, at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, he focused on acting and writing. In the mid-1940s he received a four-year scholarship to Northwestern University in Illinois, with the stage again in his sights.

He was still a freshman in 1945 when a chance meeting with the actor Canada Lee led to an audition that landed Mr. Branch an understudy role in Chicago in the all-black touring cast of Philip Yordan’s hit Broadway play “Anna Lucasta.”

After graduating in 1949, he moved to New York, intent on carving out a stage career there. But work for black actors was scarce, he discovered, and while holding down odd jobs he turned to playwriting.

One day he spotted a newspaper article about a three-star general who had been dispatched to a small Southern town during World War II to present a posthumous award for bravery to a black soldier’s mother. He clipped it out. Months later, Mr. Branch drew on that article in creating “A Medal for Willie,” a one-act play.

Produced by the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, a New York group whose sponsors included Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Langston Hughes, the play was staged at the popular Club Baron in Harlem in 1951, in the midst of the Korean War.

In the play — a moment that drew enthusiastic applause from audiences — the soldier’s mother refuses the medal, throwing it back at the general as a symbol of white hypocrisy and asking why her son, as a black American, had not been treated with such dignity and respect when he was alive.

“Mr. Branch, a 24-year-old actor-dramatist, here represented by his first produced play,” The New York Times said in a review, “is giving us a view of the intolerance and hypocrisy that are manifested as the result of Willie’s becoming the town’s first hero of the conflict.”