First Encounters

Excerpt from an interview with Michael Tigar in Austin, Texas on August 1-2, 2016.

In this clip, Tigar references a 1963 criminal case involving two African-American defendants, Freddie Lee Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who were placed on death row after being charged by an all-white jury with the murder of two white men after an altercation at a whites-only bathroom.

At the end of the clip, Tigar references a play he wrote, Haymarket: Whose Name the Few Still Say with Tears, based roughly on the events of the 1886 Haymarket affair, a series of events that resulted from a bombing at a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago.