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Cat Radio Cafe
Tue, Feb 18, 2025 9:00 PM
ESTELLE PARSONS ON RE-VISITING THE DRED SCOTT DECISION
ESTELLE PARSONS ON AMERICAN ROT, A PLAY RE-VISITING THE DRED SCOTT DECISION (Encore)
On tonight’s encore show, we’ll be joined by playwright Kate Tawney Billingsley and the great actress Estelle Parsons, here the director of American Rot, Billingsley’s provocative play presenting a face-to-face meeting at a New Jersey diner between two historically-linked descendants of the once-enslaved Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court Chief Justice who in 1857 handed down (until this decade) the worst legal decision in American history. denying enslaved people their basic human rights.
The play is inspired by Billingsley’s own family background, as a great-great-great-great niece of Judge Tawney. She researched this chapter of her roots, by tracking down, meeting and collaborating with Lynne M. Jackson, the great-great granddaughter of Dred Scott and President and founder of the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.