NYPD Using Janet Langhart Cohen's Racism Drama ANNE & EMMETT To Train New Recruits

The New York Post reports that performances of Janet Langhart Cohen's one-act drama, ANNE & EMMETT, will be included in the New York City Police Department's recruitment training.

ANNE & EMMETT imagines a meeting between two teenagers who were murdered because of institutionalize racism by their home countries. Anne Frank died at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and achieved posthumous fame when her diary was published.

In 1955, in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered by the husband of a white woman he reportedly whistled at. The husband and his half-brother admitted to the murder in an article for Look Magazine after they were acquitted of the crime.

ANNE & EMMETT's intended premiere on June 10th, 2009 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. was postponed when that afternoon Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns was fatally shot inside the museum.

The play's website, anneandemmett.com, lists only one New York performance, held at the Harvard Club, starring Anna Deavere Smith, to benefit the Smithsonian Museum of African History and Culture.

Commissioner William J. Bratton called it "a poignant and thoughtful production that explores the respective histories and common experiences of two people cruelly victimized by racial and religious prejudice."

"If the play can reach one man or woman with a badge and a gun, I'm happy," says the playwright. "Their training can take them only so far. The body cams will only cover so much. At some point, I'm hoping their humanity will kick in and hopefully this play with revive that humanity."

The play begins with this introduction, voiced by Morgan Freeman.

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