From Staff Reports
In the wake of criticism of history lessons taught in classrooms and the banning of books that depict a more accurate portrayal of life in America, Chad Lawson Cooper, NYC playwright and movie producer, is bringing the classroom to the church with his off Broadway play: Justice on Trial, for one show, at Friendship-West Baptist Church, 2020 West Wheatland Road, Dallas, on July 21, 2022, at 7:30p.m.
In this highly acclaimed-courtroom drama, starring veteran actress Alicia Robinson Cooper, and the great-grandson of Dr. W. E. B. Dubois, Jeffery Peck, the legacy of slavery is confronted.
The debt owed to the descendants of African Americans through reparations, not as a pipe dream but a realistic aim to begin to redress America’s racial wealth disparities is a central theme of the Justice on Trial, which is co-produced by television and movie actor, Harry Lennix, best known for The Five Heartbeats and The Blacklist.
“It is our responsibility to seek the repair and atonement for America’s ‘original sin’ at every opportunity and given any public platform,” said Lennix.
Featured witnesses for the people are the historic, time-traveling “resurrected” Harriet Tubman, Emmitt Till (14-year-old brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman), and civil rights legend, Medgar Evers; who each appear before a modern day court to testify to the ‘cotton picking’ realities of abolition-activism in pursuit of freedom from the claws of white dominance.
In the case of Till…demonstrating the danger of Black life at the hands of white racist terrorists for, well, just being a kid.
Setting it off is the vocal testimony by songstress Alicia Robinson Cooper (portraying Harriet Tubman) who delivers a riveting performance of an original arrangement of Go Down, Moses; transporting listeners back to the dark times of a horrifying holocaust where African Americans were considered chattel and sub-human by capitalist-colonialists.
Stirring powerful emotions, the audience will journey with Harriet on the wings of her phenomenal range through dangerous times to free her people.
Attorneys representing the Department of Justice oppose reparations with legal technicalities, length of time that has passed and other flimsy arguments detracting and disrupting the point at hand, clearly sending a message that some say is similar to the recent rulings of the SCOTUS.
The message, asserts Cooper, “The American justice system, despite numerous calls for reparations, has no intention of repenting nor atoning for its ‘sin’ upon African Americans who literally ‘backed’ America’s rise from a small colonial economy to an industrialized superpower with enormous wealth.”
The recipient of rave reviews as it makes its way across the country, Justice on Trial is sure to spark conversations and also shed light on the many inequities that still exist today.
For ticket sales, call 212-786-6460 or www.thechadcoopercompanyonbroadway.com
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