The Long Walk Home
1990 film by Richard Pearce
The Long Walk Home is a 1990 American historical drama film starring Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg, and directed by Richard Pearce.
Set in Alabama, it is based on a screenplay about the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956) by John Cork and a short film by the same name, produced by students at the University of Southern California in 1988.
Origins
The feature film is based on a short screenplay and film of the same name, written by John Cork, then a graduate student in directing at USC. He had submitted his script to the Cinema Department for consideration, hoping also to direct it. While USC selected Cork's script for production, the department assigned Beverlyn E. Fray, another student, to direct it.
The scenario on which the film is based, actually happened to Cork and his maid, Elizabeth Gregory Taylor, in his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.
The short film won several awards, including first place at the Black American Cinema Society. Cork, however, was unhappy with the finished project and unsuccessfully tried to block screenings of the short film.
Plot
The film was expanded as a feature.
Set in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, it follows Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg), an African-American woman who works as a maid/nanny for Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek). Odessa and her family confront typical issues faced by African Americans in the South at the time: poverty, racism, segregation, and violence.
“The Long Walk Home” enters the record as 1990 film by Richard Pearce. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Long, Walk and Home can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1199337. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1955, 1956 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Long Walk Home” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.