Photos by Marva Sneed
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, brought 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, 2023.
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, Emmett 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.
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