Director thanks late Avoyelles historian for preserving "12 Years a Slave"

A true story which took place in Avoyelles Parish before the Civil War took the top Oscar award Sunday night for best motion picture of the year.
The director of the movie thanked the late Dr. Sue Eakin, professor, historian and newspaper columnist, “who gave her life’s work to preserve this book.”
“12 Years a Slave” is the story of Solomon Northup, a free man who was kidnapped in Washington D.C., enslaved near Bunkie and finally freed at the Marksville Courthouse. The movie was filmed in the New Orleans area.
Norhtup spent 9 of his 12 years as a slave on the Bayou Bouef plantation of Edwin Epps, south of the present town of Bunkie. Epps, who died in Avoyelles after the Civil War, was also mentioned in the opening nominations of the Oscars.
Brad Pitt produced the movie and played the part of Sam Bass of Marksville, who helped Northup regain his freedom. Northup returned to the North where he had been a free black citizen.
He wrote his first-hand account of the horrors of slavery in the South. The book was a bestseller before the Civil War.
Eakin was professor at LSU Alexandria and author of a Louisiana history textbook used for years in public schools. She spent decades researching the Northup story after she saw a copy of his original book when she was a young girl. Her goal was to give credibility to the story by documenting the names and facts Northup mentioned in his book.
“He had a tremendous memory, to be able to recall all of those names with such accuracy after so many years had lapsed,” she said in an interview years ago.