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Many of the victims were descendants of the enslaved who had been forced into sharecropping.

Just moments earlier, Harrison had reached into his own history to hail the nation as one in which a "round-headed kid" from South Carolina, raised by grandparents with elementary school-level education and sharecropping, cleaning and road-paving jobs, could see the success of convening a convention with a Black chairwoman to nominate a Black woman to the presidency.

Discrimination and legal apartheid kept Black people from economic opportunity, relegating most to sharecropping and domestic work.

The title of “Gun & Powder,” a thrillingly original new musical about mixed-race twin sisters who cut a path through Texas in 1893, refers to their travel essentials: a shrewd parting gift from their sharecropping mother and a touch of makeup to brighten their toasted-ivory complexions.

The industry has a long way to go, but if Monk’s tossed-off manuscript were to shoot past the ranks of genre standard-bearers and be anointed by the mainstream establishment, a release this year would be competing with hits by James McBride, Zadie Smith, Jamel Brinkley, Victor LaValle, Brandon Taylor, Colson Whitehead, Bryan Washington and Teju Cole, none writing about thug life or sharecropping — and none recognized by this film.