The Lesser People — Lee Thompson

The Lesser People is a poignant, brutal, and touching story about how our decisions, and those of others, haunt us. It explores family and social conditioning, and how we exorcise our demons--often too late--in our struggle to become more human. On a snowy Detroit night Elijah Irons, now an old man, tells a black nurse a haunting story from the darkest summer of his childhood in Forksville, Mississippi. He shares his experience with the rising racial tensions in their community and the discord within their own home since Eli, like his father Hank, think of Negroes as ordinary people, while the rest of their community think of them as The Lesser People. He shares how his father arrests Uncle Tommy for stealing Army rifles and selling them to the KKK, and why he walks free since Eli's grandpa is the mayor. He talks about Isaiah -- a blind black boy, and servant of a local preacher -- who Eli finds murdered on a river bank, and how that boy had sung the blues until people robbed him of his innocence and his future. After the police investigate and brush Isaiah's murder aside, blaming a transient for the crime, Eli's father decides to make a stand against his father and the town. But things go severely wrong. Other than Preacher, everyone wants Eli's family to get out of town. Elijah's father refuses to go anywhere. The consequences of his decision, coupled with the desperate move his sons make, produce a mountain of heartache, grief and sorrow for his family, but they also produce unlikely heroes.