About Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom
- Released on February 25, 1985
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."
Full Cast of Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom
Mary Alice
plays Blind Lily
Ned Beatty
plays Reverend Mansfield French
Carla Borelli
plays Laura Towne
Moses Gunn
plays Hannibal
Anna Maria Horsford
plays Hannah
Bruce McGill
plays Edward Philbrick
Melba Moore
plays Charlotte Forten
Jay Patterson
plays Edward Pierce
Vyto Ruginis
plays Col. Thomas Higginson
Glynn Turman
plays Joshua
Rodrick F. Wimberly
plays Jacob
Crew of Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom