The Outcasts - 1968 - 1969

Don Murray and Otis Young


The Outcasts is an American Western genre television series, from 1968-69

The series stars Don Murray and Otis Young. It is most notable for being the first television Western
with an African American co-star.


PLOT
"Jemal David and Earl Corey. One black, one white; one ex-Union soldier, one ex-Confederate officer;
one ex-slave, one ex-slave owner. Together, they are the Outcasts."

Those words opened a series telling the story of bounty hunter Earl Corey (Murray) who teams up with
newly released slave Jemal David (Young) in the 1860s.

Several dynamics ran through the show. For one, the two heroes were not friends - Corey would frequently
to call David "Boy" and David would call him "Boss". They were reluctant partners, both very fast and deadly
with a gun, who were thrown together by circumstance when Corey walked into town carrying his saddle
and needing a job, and David badly needing another gun to watch his back. Each had something the other
wanted. And David was a realist, knowing there were places Corey could enter that he, a Black man, could not.
There were times when Corey had to ponder whether to side with other Whites or back up his new partner.
And David had to learn to trust a man who, a few years before, had held the whip hand - literally - and who
once considered slaves as "inventory". But, as they moved through their new situation, a grudging respect
came into being. It was not real friendship. "We ride together" Corey said, when asked.
But there were hints along the way.

A rich - poor dichotomy was very subtle. Earl Corey had lived on a Virginia plantation, a rich man, who returned
after the war to find his plantation untouched, everything just as he left it - but now in the hands of his pro-Union
brother whom Corey, and other Southerners, considered a traitor. With the Union army and the carpetbaggers
now in charge, Corey found himself with nothing. Jemal David, on the other hand, had been a slave who had
never owned anything. Even his name was manufactured from a bottle of hair tonic. But he was now fairly
prosperous, at least by his own standards. Earl tended to be tense in this "new" environment, but Jemal took
things in stride, having come up, as he said: "a tough road... a long, hard road..." Both men lived only for today.

The Outcasts was cancelled after its first season. An article in The Los Angeles Times about violence on
television stated that “shows like ABC’s Outcasts, which depended heavily on violence, were scrapped.

Here we have a Very Rare Collection of 22 out of the 26 Episodes.  7/7.5

DVD 1

The Outcasts
A Ride to Vengeance
Three Ways to Die
The Understanding
Take Your Lover in the Ring

DVD 2

The Heroes
My Name Is Jemal
The Night Riders
The Heady Wine
The Man from Bennington

DVD 3

The Bounty Children December
They Shall Rise Up
Alligator King

DVD 4

The Glory Wagon
Act of Faith
The Thin Edge
Gideon

DVD 5

And Then There Was One
The Town That Wouldn't

DVD 6

Give Me Tomorrow
The Long Ride
How Tall Is Blood?