The Man from Banner Lake — Tim Black

In 1942 cab driver and World War I hero, Thomas Burk, "The Man from Banner Lake," unwittingly uncovers a Nazi assassination plot to kill FDR's Jewish advisor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. Enlisted by his brother, who works at the White House, Burk agrees to help in tracking down the assassins, one of whom is a relative of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi deputy fuehrer who strangely flew to England two years before. Burk is a complicated, self-educated man, extremely well-read and articulate, but hesitant to show intelligence around white people. He knows that a "smart Negro is a dead Negro" in the United States of 1942, so he wears a mask as many others of his race do as well. Even though he is a black man in a segregated America, Burk still believes in the promise of his country that all men are created equal. His quiet faith is sustained by an incident on a battlefield in France during "The Great War," as World War I was called before World War II began. He is also sustained by his love for his wife Rachel, the woman who helped him recover from his nightmares of battle with her devotion to him. When he agrees to help catch the Nazis, he is forced to leave her and only by leaving her does he realize the depth of his love and his need for Rachel. She is his heart. After the war, Burk becomes involved in the struggle for civil rights in the South, becoming an assistant to Harry Tyson Moore, leader of Florida's NAACP. Under Moore's leadership, one third of African-Americans are registered to vote in Florida by 1950. Hired by Burk to drive the NAACP lawyers at the Groveland Rape Trial, Moore becomes witness to one of the worst injustices in American history, which sorely tests his faith that the United States can live up to the words of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." "The Man from Banner Lake" covers a period from 1942-1951 and deals not only with World War II but with segregation decades before "Selma."