A Lesson Before Dying is sponsored by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library.

Based on Ernest J. Gaines’ National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, Romulus Linney’s adaptation of A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The disheartened Wiggins had once harbored dreams of escaping from his impoverished youth, yet he returned to his home town after university, to teach children whose lives seemed as unpromising as Jefferson’s.

Recorded before a live audience at Voice of America, Washington D.C. in July of 2001.

Directed by Nick Olcott

Producing Director: Susan Albert Loewenberg

Rick Foucheux as Paul Bonin

Keith Glover as Grant Wiggins

Jamahl Marsh as Jefferson

Linda Powell as Vivian Baptiste

Jefferson A. Russell as Reverend Moses Ambrose

Jerry Whiddon as Sam Guidry

Beatrice Winde as Emma Glenn

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