Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom

Synopsis

At the beginning of the Civil War, Union gunboats sailed into Port Royal Sound, on the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia. White plantation owners fled, and the 10,000 blacks who lived there, almost all of whom were slaves, were freed in the first test of President Abraham Lincoln's dream of emancipation. Charlotte Forten, a 21-year-old educated black woman, helped the freed slaves to begin to build a new society. That experience forms the plot of this drama, based on Charlotte Forten's journals, which was telecast on "American Playhouse."

Cast

• 

  Mary Alice

  Blind Lily

• 

  Ned Beatty

  Rev. Mansfield French

• Carla Borelli

  Laura Towne

• Ariane Brandt

  Ellen

• Ed Danilowicz

  Commissioner McKim

• Micki Grant

  Lena