Freedom Road

Muhammad Ali, in a rare acting role and in his TV-movie dramatic debut , plays Gideon Jackson, an former slave in 1870's Virginia who gets elected to the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C. and battles other former slaves and white sharecroppers to keep the land where they were enslaved. Though some of the names are changed, the story concerns the true-life efforts of senators Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens to bring political order and racial equality to the post-Civil War South. Based on the novel by Howard Fast.