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When Carl Lumbly was first cast as Isaiah Bradley for Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, he had no idea how important the character was. He wasn’t aware of the character’s legacy as the first Black Captain America, and how the character was a metaphor for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. All that changed when his son gave him a copy of Truth.

“I didn’t know about Isaiah Bradley before I got the role,” Lumbly says during a panel at Space Con. “In fact, when I auditioned, Marvel being the way they are, had me believe I was auditioning for a character named Howard Robinson or Howard Johnson, something like that. They didn’t say who it was.”

“When I learned that it was Isaiah Bradley, I still didn’t know, but my son gave me a copy of Truth," Lumbly said, referring to his son Brandon Lumbly. "And Truth was seven issues of Isaiah’s story, which was a story I did know because I did, maybe 30 years ago, a play called Miss Evers’ Boys, which was about a Tuskegee experiment that took advantage of sharecroppers.”

“I thought that was a very important story at the time. I played one of the sharecroppers, so to come forward in time and play Isaiah, in essentially the same situation, based on the same experiment, I thought was just the universe handing me something as a gift.”

Truth: Red, White & Black is available to purchase on Amazon. Don’t sleep on it, because it’s a very captivating series.

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