A legal legend lives again on stage
Laurence Fishburne is Thurgood Marshall on Broadway

Kristen A. Lee

NEW YORK — Laurence Fishburne has been taking risks since the age of 14, when he spent 18 months in the Philippines playing a young soldier in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Since then, he has won Tony, Drama Desk and Emmy awards, as well as an Academy Award nomination.

Fishburne’s latest challenge is “Thurgood,” his first one-man play, which opened yesterday at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. For 90 minutes with no intermission, he fills the stage as the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black American to sit on the Supreme Court.

In a rehearsal hall off Times Square before the play entered previews, Fishburne, 46, was coolly confident and ready to test himself. Full story

Filmmaker works with FBI on civil rights cases

Shelia Byrd

JACKSON, Miss. — As an African American teenager in Louisiana, Keith Beauchamp tried interracial dating — behavior that prompted his parents to tell him the grisly tale of Emmett Till, who was murdered for whistling at a white woman.

The story of Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who had come to Mississippi to visit his uncle in August 1955, was seared into Beauchamp’s mind, and when he moved to New York to begin his career as a filmmaker, the slaying was his first major project.

Beauchamp’s 2005 documentary on Till, in large part, led the federal government to reopen the 1955 murder case. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham, the object of the whistle, on a manslaughter charge. The two men who brutally beat the teen and dumped his body in a river died years ago. Full story