Spook™ Movie?

The Spook™ project is a collection of information and images that aren't available anywhere else. It is the only source available to focus on the detail of James' participation in the revolution. There are numerous sources that make reference to him as a subsidiary character, which is not an accurate portrayal of his crucial role as the primary intelligence source for both Lafayette and Cornwallis at the end of the war.

Secondarily my African-American family is the primary audience for this project. If we feel excluded from the story, the mythical making of America, then there may be other families, like mine, that would benefit from this project as well. The viewpoint & perspective of early African-American freemen laborers and slaves are not typically included as essential components to the history of the founding fathers. This I perceive to be a two-fold problem. First, the true goals of the revolution weren't achieved and masters, like Thomas Jefferson, who still needed slavery, systematically ignored the participation of Africans. Second, this led to a general lack of African diarists or biographers of early free Africans in the Americas. In the end, the two things worked in-concert, as a self-fulfilling process that produced an erasure of the African presence in American history.

As Tise discusses in The American Counterrevolution:

Armistead's vital contributions to the astonishing defeat of British forces in America, when joined with those of so many other black Americans made the achievement of American independence a prize shared jointly by whites and blacks. The Black Americans who joined in the war and the families for whom they fought had every reason to believe that the rights of man sooner or later would be extended to them. Not a soul in those heady days of revolution insisted that liberty was just for whites or for men. Although all of the claims were in the abstract and had yet to be made specific, no person residing in America was informed as they chose sides to support or throw off the British rule that, when the conflict was done, the highly vaunted rights of man would not be for him or her. (p. 119)

Spook™ is intended to re-shape and shift this landscape of historical erasure. It recasts the story of the struggle to grasp freedom in the Americas and the people willing to risk their lives for it and includes the viewpoint of a vital group of African participants and laborers.

Finally I believe Spook™ will also be of interest to a general audience internationally. The main characters are international icons; The Marquis Lafayette, a principal figure in Spook™, is not only one of the architects of our American Revolution but also a key activist in the birth of the French Revolution. The second Earl of Cornwallis, who not only presided over the single worst British defeat in the Americas, at Yorktown, also went on to be a premiere to India. Both of these figures, like our own George Washington, have a privileged space in the canon of history and any media portrayal of them will provoke general public interest.