The limits to achieving the American dream for working-class African Americans are represented best by Troy Maxson. Troy had once been optimistic about his future, with a dream of playing baseball, but he largely lost hope after he went to prison. His outlook was shaped by racism as well as the class system. Troy believes that his cynical outlook is realistic and that he is trying to spare his son the disappointment he experienced. After hearing about Cory’s scholarship, Troy tells Rose:

The white man ain’t gonna let him get nowhere with that football. I told him when he first come to me with it. Now you come telling me he got more tied up in it. He ought to go get recruited in how to fix cars or something where he can make a living.

This outlook demonstrates his lack of faith in a young black person's ability to move up the economic ladder, which is the key ideal of the American Dream.

Troy’s dissatisfaction with what he perceives as his stalled-out life has led him into an affair with another woman. When he learns she is pregnant, he realizes—after some pressure from his friend Bono—that he has to tell his wife. She is angry in part because she had achieved much of her dream to have a traditional family after having grown up with numerous half-siblings and other half-relatives. Troy tries to explain his reasons, which she does not want to hear. He says he feels like he is just standing in the same place. Rose counters,

I been standing with you! I been standing right here with you! . . . Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me? . . . You’re not the only one who’s got wants and needs. But I held onto you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams . . . and I buried them inside you.

August Wilson, in his play Fences, explores the notion of the “American Dream” from the perspective of those who have been denied their rightful place in a democratic society.  Early suggestions that Wilson intends to portray his main protagonist, Troy Maxson, as a victim of a system, designed to keep him from the opportunities presumably afforded all American citizens, come in the playwright’s preface and directions intended to set the tone of the production.  In describing the play’s setting, the gritty steel town of Pittsburgh in the late 1950s (specifically,1957) Wilson notes the avenues to pursue the American Dream afforded the European immigrants who built that city while emphasizing the racist practices that kept African Americans from having a seat at the table:

“Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream.  The city devoured them. . .The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation.  They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.  They came strong, eager, searching.  The city rejected them . . .”

Troy Maxson is 53-years-old, and this former gifted baseball player is only now able to provide for his family by working as a garbageman.  Much of Wilson’s play focuses on the bitterness that lingers in this man.  Jackie Robinson has broken the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and teams are integrating their rosters to exploit the considerable pool of talent arbitrarily denied them by virtue of the nation’s history of racism and segregation.  For Troy, that integration of a game came too late.  His playing days are well-behind him, and all he can do now is watch others reap the benefits of his and others’ earlier efforts.  Wilson includes, early in Act I of Fences, an exchange between Troy and his friend Bono, in which the former laments the mediocrity that is visible on the baseball field in the person of white Yankees outfielder George Selkirk:

“Selkirk! That’s it!  Man batting .269, understand? .269.  What kind of sense that make?  I was hitting .432 with thirty-seven home runs!  Man batting .269 and playing right field for the Yankees!”

To Troy’s wife Rose’s observation that Jackie Robinson and other “colored” baseball players are now common sightings in the major leagues, Troy retorts:

“. . .What you talking about Jackie Robinson.  Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody.  I’m talking about if you could play ball they ought to have let you play.  Don’t care what color you were.  Come telling me I come along too early.  If you could play . . . then they ought to let you play.”

“They,” however, didn’t let him play, nor did “they” let hundreds of other gifted African American athletes play.  The Negro Leagues produced some of the finest baseball players in the history of the game, but few know their names because they toiled in obscurity as a direct result of racial segregation.  The “they” to whom Troy refers denied the opportunity to pursue the American Dream to blacks just because of the color of their skin.