First picture: from National Archives (p.d.), Ku Klux Klan march (web picture); others, from the 2005 session in the Capitol.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
"The Black American Experience: Famous Human Rights Crusaders", important educational film; also more on Gode Davis and "American Lynching"
There is a company called TMW Educational Media in Venice, CA (“on the beach”) that produces educational films for school
systems, and there is one particular series of short films called “The Black
American Experience”, a series name that seems related to a famous PBS public
television American history series.
I reviewed a 2009 DVD from the company (through Netflix)
called “Famous Human Rights Crusaders: Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer”.
Ida B. Wells was a journalist (1862-1931) who documented
lynching starting in the late 19th Century, still during
Reconstruction. She was fired from a paper in Philadelphia in 1891 for exposing
abuses, and three of her friends were lynched.
The film says she had saved money to start her own paper. She was also active in women’s suffrage. The short film (14 min, 1993) is directed by
Brian Stewart.
The film biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) is longer
(about 30 min, 1999), and is directed by Rex Barnett. Hamer became a civil rights leader and voting
rights activist in Mississippi in the early 1960s. She eventually passed the “poll test” by
proving she knew the state constitution in 1963. The film documents the slaying of three civil
rights volunteers, two of them white, in Mississippi in August 1964, an event
well covered in the Washington papers and I remember it well. I was 21 at the
time and going to GWU while “living at home” in Arlington, VA, in a relatively
sheltered life. (Well, not exactly, but I cover that elsewhere.) I saw the young men as heroes.
Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, to
challenge the old establishment, even at the 1964 Democratic Convention in
Atlantic City, where she spoke, before Lyndon Johnson’s unopposed nomination
and landslide win. Her activism
certainly helped motivate LBJ to push the voting rights act.
Hamer also documents the abuses of sharecroppers by plantation owners, who often held tenant farmers in debt for the income they made from "rented land" and then evicted them, as happened to Hamer's family herself. The History Channel has a film."Sharecropping" 40 Acres and Mule", link here (the inspiration for Spike Lee's trademark.) .
I also looked at the “remnants” of a film project, “American
Lynching”, by Gode Davis, who is now deceased.
On January 1, 2003 I actually visited Mr. Davis in his home in West
Warwick, RI, and watched about fifteen minutes of interview footage for the
film. Later, in June 2005, Mr. Davis
came to Washington DC and made some footage of an interview with Louisiana
Senator Mary Landrieu, Va, Senator, George Allen, and Senator John Kerry, I accompanied him
in the Capitol for that day and made some footage. There was an interview of a
man over 100 years old (James Cameron) who had survived a lynching in the 19th
Century. I had it saved on a harddrive
that was lost in a crash in 2008, but I believe I should be able to recover it
from an old videocam backup. (I do have some clips in the photo directory of my "doaskdotell.com" site labeled "lynching"; I'll try to get these into better shape,) Davis had
actually asked if he could stay in my home, but with mother still here then it
was impossible, but I should be ready for something like that today if another
such opportunity arose.
See also my TV blog, Aug. 9, 2011.
The estate of Gode Davis maintains his website.,
with a link to a 9-minute YouTube segment where he speaks. Davis says “America is a great country but it
has warts in its history.” He says that
in white society young men participated in lynching because they thought it
raised their social standing under segregation; it was a lot like today’s
bullying. Note Davis's mention of the film "The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords" by Stanley Nelson.
Early in 2014, I will try to contact the estate and see what
can be done to produce the whole film. I
do have my own material to produce, but there could be some synergy, I think I do know of production entities or
outfits that might be interested in working with this material.
First picture: from National Archives (p.d.), Ku Klux Klan march (web picture); others, from the 2005 session in the Capitol.
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