On today’s date in 2013, the Jamaican-American pianist and composer Donald Shirley died at age 86 in New York City.

His death set into motion a plan that had been long in the works: a movie based on Shirley’s concert tour to the deep South in 1962, accompanied by Tony “the Lip” Vallelonga, a bouncer at the famous Copacabana night club who Shirley hired for protection.

In the 1960s Shirley was at the height of his popularity as the leader of a jazz trio he founded after being told by the great concert impresario Sol Hurok a career as a classical pianist was impossible due to his skin color.

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son Nick told Shirley and his father he wanted to make a movie about the indignities they suffered during that 1962 tour and the life-long friendship that developed between them. Shirley agreed, but said only after his death. "'You should put in everything your father told you, and everything I told you,” said Shirley. "'You tell exactly the truth, but wait until I pass.'"

In 2018, five years after Shirley’s death, the film was released, titled GREEN BOOK, after a guide for Negro motorists listing hotels and restaurants open to them in segregated states. Fact-checkers confirm the film is largely accurate, and, yes, for over 50 years Shirley did live in an elegant apartment over Carnegie Hall, where his jazz trio often performed.