POWERFUL NEW FILM, JUSTICE ON TRIAL: THE MOVIE, EXAMINES JUSTICE FOR BLACK AMERICANS FEATURING TIME-TRAVELER AFRICAN-AMERICAN ICONS HARRIET TUBMAN, EMMETT TILL AND MEDGAR EVERS

**** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ****

POWERFUL NEW FILM, JUSTICE ON TRIAL: THE MOVIE, EXAMINES JUSTICE FOR BLACK AMERICANS FEATURING TIME-TRAVELER AFRICAN-AMERICAN ICONS HARRIET TUBMAN,

EMMETT TILL AND MEDGAR EVERS

Virtual Premiere Scheduled for All Day July 4, 2020; Film Being Shown on Vimeo, Amazon Prime, The Holy Connection Network, and www.justiceontrialthemovie.com website with Over 250 Churches Nationwide & other Organizations Partnering.

In Justice on Trial: The Movie, Chad Lawson Cooper has given us a deeply American story about the slavery days and its aftermath.  No, not one of those long beloved Hollywood versions with genteel mannered, paternalistic slave-owners and bucolic plantations inhabited by fiddle-dee-dee black folks happily doing their chores.  On the contrary, this is an emotionally intense, at times viscerally jolting, “blacklash” film of our true American tradition from the racial injustices of the slaveocracy period to the present.  Cooper challenges us to ponder our heritage of racial terror and the ensuing segregation and discrimination against black people, to burrow into our souls and to find out just what we really think about racial equality and the cost of human suffering; in other words, who are we as a people in our own eyes.  Cooper pushes us to discover a better truth and, thereby, a better America by brilliantly mixing and matching documentary and fiction formats, blending a historical and existing narrative with real and re-created figures.  To this end, he summons time traveler witnesses – Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till and Medgar Evers – to testify in a lawsuit brought by the African American people of the United States against the United States Department of Justice for reparations.  He successfully creates a hybrid “imaginative reality” ….  an “alternate present.”

The lead civil rights attorney, Thaddeus Crump, who represents the African American people, is an older, distinguished looking, white fellow (portrayed by John M. Gesmonde).  He cogently argues for rehabilitative reparations (direct financial resources to impoverished African American communities, for public schools and historically black colleges, health services, housing, land and economic opportunities by way of a national fund to be established for such purposes), not cash handouts, for those who continue to suffer the greatest need from the vestiges of government sanctioned bondage, followed by the social and economic consequences of 80 years of legalized segregation and various forms of invidious and institutional racism since then.

The chief legal representative for the United States Department of Justice, Attorney Hong, (portrayed by David Arquilla) comes off as a young, flamboyant, white, out-and-out bigot.  His casual racist-tinged antagonism of the witnesses evidently is a source of great glee to him.  He is irresistibly watchable, even though we detest his character from beginning to end.  Crump and Hong palpably despise each other to the point where they engage in physical altercations inside and outside of the courthouse.  This does not go unnoticed by Judge William J. Henry (portrayed by Justice Lubbie Harper, Jr., a former Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court) who admonishes them outside of the earshot of the jury in no uncertain terms: “You muckamuckas better get it together.  If you don’t, I will levy a fine against the both of you the likes of which Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates will not be able to pay.  Do you feel me? Do you feel me?”

Attorney Crump and Attorney Hong, as the protagonists in the film, seemingly epitomize good and evil, respectively.  This suggests a possible sub-story of white redemption, but this hardly is a story about white people coming even close to making amends.

Mann Robinson artfully directs this film with dynamic rhythm through a collage of intense vignettes demonstrating his technical virtuosity, ensuring that this journey in self-awareness does not devolve into a rigid narrative.

The first witness, Harriett Tubman (portrayed by Alicia Robinson Cooper), is presented as the historical figure we think we all know about, who led enslaved persons she witnessed being horribly abused to freedom, or at least to a condition of non-enslavement; however, she also appeared at times to be playful, even frivolous, and unpredictable as she mocked “white man’s law.”  She sang in her “young girl’s voice” mournfully of the pain and sorrow of forced servitude, but also of her defiance never to succumb to a slave mentality.

Emmett Till (portrayed by Chad Cooper, II) was next.  At age 14, he was brutally beaten, tortured, mutilated and murdered by two white men for supposedly whistling at a white woman.  He hobbled to the witness stand in believable physical and emotional shock, yet he managed to defend himself for the first time.  He, too, sings lamentably over the inevitability of his fate, absolving his mother of any responsibility for his death by allowing him to visit his uncle in the South where “the rules were different.”  Absorbing this dirge into our senses, while his mother wails uncontrollably in the spectator section of the courtroom with outstretched arms trying to reach him, one’s jaw tightens and the eyes compress to hold back the overwhelming heartbreak we feel.

Medgar Evers (portrayed by Lane Harper), was the final witness.  A World War II US Army Veteran, an American civil rights activist, and the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, he was assassinated in 1963 (the first national NAACP officer to suffer such fate) for encouraging black people to patronize black owned businesses in their community.  Hong taunted him as a Martin Luther King “wannabe” claiming irreverently to the jury that he, like the other witnesses, were all troublemakers, indeed criminals, whose testimony should not be credited.  We also learn a lesser known fact from his testimony.  Evers did not die in his driveway in front of his family from a deranged sharpshooter’s bullet, as generally thought.  He died in a hospital lying on a gurney in a hallway bleeding over several hours to his death, while highly educated whites – nurses and doctors – advertantly ignored him because he was a “Negro.”

The racial caste system is still alive and well in America.  Justice on Trial: The Movie will emerge as an epochal American race trial for putting American racial injustice, unforgettable images and all, before the tribunal of public opinion. What it means to be enslaved – hour by hour, decade after decade, generation after generation – is laid bare.  As William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi wrote: “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.” How true that rings for so many African Americans.

(As a postscript, just after the film was shot, the advent of the coronavirus pandemic occurred, as well as the prospect of its continued presence and that of new and other deadly viruses in the future. During these past several months, African Americans have suffered and died in grossly disproportionate numbers.  That is because, as the perpetual underclass of our society, they dwell in the very breeding grounds for such viruses …. the mudsill, where poverty, poor housing conditions and crowdedness, inadequate access to healthcare and hygiene practices, inferior  education and lower paying jobs, albeit dangerously front-line and essential, prevail.  These are the same conditions many blacks have had to endure since Reconstruction and Jim Crow Segregation.  It will be interesting to see if Justice on Trial: The Movie can grip the moral consciousness of this nation and mobilize the force of organized political lobbying to remedy the wrong done over 150 years ago by the government when it broke its promise of granting former enslaved people reparations in the form of 40 acres and a mule (which roughly equates to 6.4 trillion dollars in today’s money).  Our nation cannot be “repaired” without “reparation” for the damage we visited upon our own people repeatedly over the past four (4) centuries.)

For additional information about the movie contact:

Doug McMillian, Publicist

blackbroadwaynyc@gmail.com 212.786.6460.