Pete and Toshi Seeger‘s 1966 film Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison, which captures the signing of an all-black field work crew at Ellis Unit, is mentioned in The Trials of Eroy Brown. The 29-minute black-and-white film, which is available to view online at this link, was made at Ellis 14 years before Eroy Brown killed Warden Wallace Pack and farm major Billy Max Moore there in 1980.
Brown had done six months’ service on an all-black, segregated field labor squad like this one when he first arrived at Ellis in 1977, including picking cotton and chopping sugar cane, author Michael Berryhill writes.
