In The Colored Patriot, Thomas Laws, an enslaved Black man whose covert intelligence work helped secure the Union victory at the Third Battle of Winchester, places American History on trial.

Set in a contemporary courtroom, the play imagines a case where Laws, represented by journalist and truth-seeker Ida B. Wells, demands accountability for his erasure from the historical record. Through testimony and reenactment, the court revisits Laws’ dangerous work as a Civil War spy, carrying secret messages concealed in his mouth between Union General Philip Sheridan and Quaker abolitionist Rebecca Wright, while confronting the systems that benefited from his bravery but failed to remember him.

As witnesses are called, including Laws’ wife Mary, Union and Confederate leaders, and modern historians, the courtroom becomes a battleground of competing narratives. Confederate General Jubal Early testifies to the fatal underestimation of Black intelligence, while the defense insists that history is neutral, incomplete, and selective by necessity.
Blending historical fact with theatrical imagination, The Colored Patriot challenges audiences to serve as the jury in a trial about memory, power, and patriotism. The verdict is not delivered by the court, but by those who must decide whose stories are preserved, and whose are allowed to disappear.