Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom

Charlotte Forten's Mission: Experiment in Freedom (1985)

DramaHistoryTV Movie

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."

Director: Barry Crane

Casts

	Mary Alice as Blind Lily
	Ned Beatty as Rev. Mansfield French
	Carla Borelli as Laura Towne
	Ariane Brandt as Ellen
	Ed Danilowicz as Commissioner McKim
	Micki Grant as Lena
	Moses Gunn as Hannibal
	Anna Maria Horsford as Hannah
	Robert Jacob as Soldier in the Band
	Bruce McGill as Edward Philbrick
	Melba Moore as Charlotte Forten
	Jay Patterson as Edward Pierce
	Vyto Ruginis as Col. Thomas Higginson
	Connie Trask as Mrs. Lawrence
	Glynn Turman as Joshua
	Lou Walker as Sgt. Rivas
	Rodrick F. Wimberly as Jacob
	Oyafunmike Ogunlano as Slave / Ring Shout Dancer

Crew