A Beating, Racism, Justice Denied--in 1880 : Television: Hollywood snubbed a little-known chapter in U.S. history until L.A.’s 1992 riots. On Sunday, Showtime will air ‘Assault at West Point.’

It took the Rodney G. King case and the Los Angeles riots of the 1990s to get a movie made about the Johnson Whittaker case of the 1880s and its tangled roots of racism.

The movie, “Assault at West Point,” written, directed and produced by Harry Moses for Showtime, debuts Sunday as part of the cable network’s programming for Black History Month.

The 21-year-old Whittaker, one of the first blacks at West Point, was found beaten and tied to his bed April 6, 1880, a few months shy of his graduation. In an apparent cover-up, the cadet was charged with staging his own assault to avoid a pending philosophy examination. In turn, to test the charges, he demanded a court-martial rather than expulsion.

The media and national attention to the trial and its verdict, according to documents of the period, share many similarities with the events in Los Angeles some 110 years later.

But nothing in his career quite prepared producer Moses for the trials he faced to get his movie made.

Moses is no outsider to the way television works, having been with CBS News and “60 Minutes” for 14 years, heading up investigative news units and producing projects. He and his wife, Judith, a former “20/20” staff member, have their own television production company, the Mosaic Group Inc.

He found out that the true story of an obscure 19th-Century Army cadet was not exactly high-concept, green-light, fast-track development marquee material.

Looking for a follow-up courtroom drama in 1988 after directing and producing an “American Playhouse” production about Bernhard Goetz, the so-called New York subway vigilante, Moses came across the story of Whittaker in a high school text about American trials, which led him to an earlier book on the Whittaker case by historian John Marzsalek.

“The nature of drama is conflict and the nature of the courtroom is conflict,” Moses says. Whittaker’s case had conflict inscribed all over it.

Moses went to the National Archives in Washington and started reading through the original 12,000 handwritten transcript pages of the court-martial.

“It was the most racist document I have seen,” Moses says, referring to racial stereotypes and personal characterizations made by the prosecution and others during the trial. “But you have to understand the past if you want to mend the present. I never understood the nature of racism in this country until I researched that transcript. I never saw it articulated before so publicly.”

He wrote a movie outline, took it to executives at most of the broadcast and cable networks and was unanimously turned down. He took it to Paramount, having heard that Eddie Murphy was looking for a serious feature movie. “I was laughed out of the office,” Moses says.

He offered the outline to an agent at CAA. “The agent liked the story,” Moses says, “but said the trouble with the project is that it’s about something and television is about nothing.”

Moses put the project aside.

Then Los Angeles, another April, this time 1992 . . . Rodney King . . . another courtroom drama . . . a verdict . . . an aftermath. . . .

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Moses had a luncheon date scheduled on the first day of the riots with Steven Hewitt, senior vice president of Showtime Entertainment. Hewitt was interested in a different project, a documentary on King. That morning Moses sent fax copies to Hewitt of his West Point outline plus some historic parallels he saw between the Whittaker case and King.

Before they could order lunch, Hewitt told Moses, “We’re making your movie.”

Despite the eventual go-ahead, Moses says his five-year effort to get the movie made shows “how wretched television can be and how difficult it is to get a story of this nature on the air. It is a serious subject. One should not have had to struggle this hard.”

Moses landed Samuel L. Jackson (“Amos and Andrew”) and Sam Waterston (“I’ll Fly Away”) for the movie’s key roles. The accused cadet, played by newcomer Seth Gilliam, was represented at the trial by two lawyers: white abolitionist Daniel Chamberlain and Richard Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard Law and the first dean of the Howard University law school.

But the two were not exactly a team. Something changed between them during the trial. What actually happened between the white 19th-Century liberal lawyer and the black activist lawyer in the defense of their client remains a mystery. There are no documented clues about how the five-month court-martial altered them and their relationship.

The white lawyer, Chamberlain, had led efforts to integrate public schools, had once commanded a black Civil War Army unit, but expressed racist views, endorsed lynching, then later said that he regretted becoming an abolitionist.

The black lawyer, Greener, took an active role in the defense early in the trial but “disappears” half way through the case, Moses says, the transcripts reporting little from him other than his apparent dislike of how the case was being tried.

And cadet Whittaker?

He was found guilty of all charges against him and was denied a commission for not taking a philosophy examination. He was sentenced to one year of hard labor, a sentence never carried out because Whittaker appealed to President Chester Arthur, who pardoned him. He served no prison time.

Whittaker went back to his native South Carolina, took up law and became a high school principal. He moved to Oklahoma City and was the first black to move into a white neighborhood there.

Forty years after his court-martial, he found himself defending his family and his new home as a cross burned on his front lawn.