Library hosts screening of award-winning film ‘John Laurens War’

A screening of the award-winning film “John Laurens’ War” was held Jan. 24 at the Nancy Carson Library in North Augusta.  The docudrama, which has won six international film awards, is about the South Carolina abolitionist of the American Revolution’s “fight for freedom for every slave in America along with every colonist.”

The screening was made possible by a grant the library received to launch a program series related to the American Revolution and the nation’s early years.

The Revisiting the Founding Era grant was awarded to 100 public libraries across the country and is a three-year national initiative of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, presented in partnership with the American Library Association and the National Constitution Center, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

According to a summary of the film on IMDb, “John told his slave-owning father, ‘We have sunk the Africans ... below the Standard of Humanity.’ Along with his freed slave, he defies his father and becomes a trusted top aide to George Washington, willing to risk everything to create liberty in the new nation. As a an extraordinary warrior, brilliant visionary, charming enigma, John takes on the British army, his father, the new congress and before his death at 27, becomes one of our greatest abolitionists 90 years before slavery ended in America.”