the Writers
Doug Hunt
In 1968, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Doug Hunt was in a classroom at a small college in Missouri, listening as Prof. John Randolph set aside the lesson for the day to describe an event that he had witnessed with his own eyes: the lynching of a Black man in front of hundreds of other eyewitnesses. In a sense, Hunt never recovered from the shock of hearing that story. He traveled to England to attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and returned to teach writing at the University of Missouri. For decades, his walk to his classroom took him quite literally over the ground where Scott was murdered.
In the early 2000s, Hunt began to write a series of non-fiction narratives that revealed the history of racial injustice in his adopted home town. His initial account of the James T. Scott murder, “A Course in Applied Lynching,” was listed as a “notable” in Best American Essays of 2004. His essay on the 1833-34 struggle of a slave named Sanford to win his freedom was a finalist in the Missouri Review editor’s prize competition for 2011. In 2010 the range and quality of his work was recognized with the Richard J. Margolis Award, given annually to a "journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice." His aim is to combine a historian's accuracy with a novelist's sense of story and character.
Doug Hunt is an emeritus English professor at the University of Missouri, a Rhodes Scholar, resident of Columbia, Missouri, and student of the city's past and its present. Hunt now focuses much of his attention on civilian oversight of the police force, on the creation of affordable housing, and on volunteering with agencies that serve the homeless.
Joe Rufo
Joe Rufo worked in various roles for corporate America, and was also a successful entrepreneur in the dot com era. He held sales positions in the K-12 marketplace with School Specialty and Aramark, managed four news gathering offices for McGraw Hill and sold financial instruments for John Hancock.
After developing a complex marketing program for a co-op of independent businesses, Joe was aptly qualified for his entrepreneurial role as co-founder and president of BuySuite, a first generation e-commerce and corporate purchasing platform he developed in the mid-1990s. In its first year, BuySuite rocketed to a leading position in the industry which led to a successful buyout by a key competitor.
Joe became involved in this project after reading Doug’s book, “Summary Justice: The Lynching of James Scott and the Trial of George Barkwell.” He immediately sought out Doug and over the next eighteen months they wrote the screenplay, completing it in late April, 2024.
Joe is based in the rural eastern Connecticut town of Lebanon where citizens are easily outnumbered by cows. Since retiring in 2022, Joe has concentrated on spending time with family, flying his drone, taking pictures, traveling, helping to support Ukraine in every way possible, and working seven days a week to advance the story of James T. Scott.