Brotherhood of Death

Brotherhood of Death is a low-budget 1976 action film in the blaxploitation genre, directed by Richard F. Barker and Bill Berry, and starring Roy Jefferson, Le Tari, and Haskell Anderson. The film featured appearances by several members, including Jefferson, of the Washington Redskins professional football team of the National Football League.

Plot

In the mid-to-late 1960s, three young men leave their small Southern hometown to join the United States Army and fight in the Vietnam War. Upon their return home, they take up the cause of battling the racial injustices prevalent in the town. When the town's Ku Klux Klan members offer a murderously violent reaction to their efforts, the trio uses the lessons they learned in the Special Forces, fighting the Vietcong, to conduct an all-out war against the Klan.

Cast

Production

The film was the brainchild of its executive producer, Ronald K. Goldman, a Washington, D.C. native and a veteran of blaxploitation film production. Guided by his previous experiences, Goldman devised a plan to make a film with a very low budget, to be produced entirely outside of the Hollywood establishment, and which he felt highly confident would still prove to be profitable.

Specifically, Goldman had deemed the quality of the acting in blaxploitation films to be unimpressive, even in those films which had been financially successful. Reasoning that even untrained actors could provide performances of similar quality, Goldman leveraged the fact that he knew some members of the Washington Redskins football team and convinced them to appear in his film. He thus gained some marquee value from their sports celebrity status without having to pay the higher salaries that would have been required to employ experienced actors who would have generated a similar level of public interest.