Category: Art

It’s been 38 years since dynamite killed Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley in Birmingham, Alabama; 37 years since members of the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi; 36 years since a lone gunman shot and killed Jon Daniels outside a rural grocery in Lowndes County, Alabama; and 35 years since fire bombs hit the home of Vernon Dahmer near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, leading soon after to Dahmer’s death.

Dahmer was a middle-aged black businessman and landowner respected by blacks and whites alike. Daniels, age 26, was a white seminarian originally from Vermont. Chaney, 20, was a black from Meridian; Goodman, 20, and Schwerner, 23, were whites from New York. All five participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, and all, for that reason alone, were objects of suspicion, potential targets of white violence.

Denise, Carole, Addie Mae, and Cynthia were not local civil rights activists, however, nor were they “outside agitators” acting on conscience and publicly calling for an end to bigotry. They were, on September 13, 1963, four girls in their early teens in Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. But their church had been the starting point the previous April for a march led by Martin Luther King Jr., and when dynamite ripped through its foundation, the blast blew their Sunday best from their backs.

Who was directly responsible for these crimes? Initial investigations on top of reopened investigations over the past several decades have identified the guilty, overturned in some cases innocent verdicts, and put those guilty behind bars. But several new books — one memoir, one biography, a photography collection, and two major histories — depict more than the well-covered events enacted by equally well-known players. Together they concentrate on individual figures, some known, some not-so-known, who shaped or were shaped by the uncivil Sixties South.

One of those not-so-knowns was a minister named Robert Marsh, who moved his family from the relative quiet of southernmost Alabama in the spring of 1967 to become pastor of the First Baptist Church of Laurel, Mississippi. This was a plum assignment for an up-and-coming “Man of God, revered by everyone who knew him for his preaching and teaching and spiritual insight,” a Man of God equipped as well with the build of a line-backer and “killer good looks.” The words are those of Marsh’s son Charles, who in The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South (Basic Books) tells of just how unquiet Laurel’s corner of Mississippi was in 1967, especially unquiet if a pastor so much as questioned his white congregation’s basic stand on race. And it was Bob Marsh’s basic stand too until two events drove him near to breakdown: his handing of the Jaycee of the Year award to a man who within the hour was arrested for killing Vernon Dahmer; and his subsequent talk with a black minister in Laurel who gave Bob Marsh a lesson in the price paid for taking an honest stand. But the book is more: an especially close look at the fine-tunings of racism within a single, extended, Southern family — from the author’s grandfather, Kenneth Toler, who “dared to tell Jim Crow’s dirty secrets” as a reporter covering Mississippi politics for The Commercial Appeal, to an uncle in Kosciusko who helped found that town’s virulent Citizen’s Council.

Any wonder, then, that Bob Marsh, on the invitation of Green Acres star and Laurel native Tommy Lester, preached to Jesus freaks for a few weeks north of San Francisco? Laurel had changed him, California changed him, and Bob Marsh (along with the political gains of blacks in the South generally) helped change Laurel upon his return. Author Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia, changed too — into directing the “Project on Lived Theology,” a topic his father taught him even as his father perhaps scarcely realized it.

Lived theology took a life-ending turn, however, in 1965, in Alabama, in the person of Jon Daniels, subject of Charles Eagles’ recently republished Outside Agitator (University of Alabama Press). A child of New England Congregationalist parents, the quiet, bookish Daniels hardened himself at the Virginia Military Institute, quit Harvard as an English graduate student his first year, and turned his sights to the priesthood when he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There his training required work with the inner-city poor, and there, in the spring of 1965, he heeded Martin Luther King’s call for clergy to march from Selma to Montgomery. And it was in Alabama that Daniels mostly remained — registering black voters, integrating churches, manning protest lines — until August, when he and other demonstrators (including Stokely Carmichael) were arrested in the town of Fort Deposit for marching without a permit.

The mayor was advised to release them, but he could not advise Tom Coleman, who encountered Daniels, along with the Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe and two black women also serving as civil rights workers. Outside a grocery near Hayneville, Coleman pulled out a shotgun, fired on Daniels, who died instantly, and fired on Morrisroe, hitting him in the back, an injury from which he eventually recovered. An all-male, all-white jury took 1 hour, 31 minutes to find Coleman not guilty of manslaughter. The defendant, the jury informed the court, was understandably acting in self-defense against two churchmen Coleman alleged were armed

In 1994, the Episcopal church officially made Daniels a martyr of the church and added his name to its Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. And in the Chapel of Saints and Martyrs of Our Own Time at Canterbury Cathedral, his name appears alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop Oscar Romero. This for a man Charles Eagles in his thoroughly researched and equally troubling Outside Agitator calls “a civil rights activist who was not a leader.” What Eagles means is a self-knowing leader in his own eyes in his own time. But T.S. Eliot, with eternity in mind, called a martyrdom “a design of God, for his love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to his ways.” Make God, then, the designer; Jon Daniels, the non-knowing means back to God’s ways. (And if this makes Tom Coleman an unwitting tool, you are welcome to your beliefs.)

A year before Daniels’ murder, the look, the black and white look of civil rights volunteers from North and South, you can find in the photographs by Herbert Randall in Faces of Freedom Summer (University of Alabama Press). Published here are a handful of the 1,759 negatives Randall’s camera generated thanks to a fellowship which enabled him to spend a year creating a photographic essay on black life, an essay, thanks to the urging of Sandy Leigh, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, Randall centered on the committee’s work that summer in Mississippi, Hattiesburg in particular.

Randall’s end-products were negatives not even he had thought to print until a University of Southern Mississippi staff photographer went to work producing them for the school’s archives and an exhibition in 1999. And what the resulting photographs lack in polish they make up for in immediacy: whether it’s Pete Seeger smarting under the glare of a Southern sun, Vernon Dahmer topped in a pith helmet and instructing Northern volunteers on the anatomy of a cotton plant, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld’s blood-stained head and shirt, or Sandy Leigh’s anxious expression during a community center get-together in Palmer’s Crossing — an expression denoting full knowledge that Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had disappeared. Did Leigh know or not know then that on August 4th their bodies would be found?

What he certainly did know was Birmingham 1963, “Magic City” turned “Bombingham,” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What we now know, thanks to S. Jonathan Bass’ Blessed Are the Peacemakers (Louisiana State University Press), is not only a textual analysis of that landmark document but the lives of the men to whom it was ostensibly, though not formally, addressed: the eight city clergymen who had called on King, in print, to follow a gradualist course of action in order to safeguard the nation from what they sincerely feared to be guaranteed acts of further violence. But it was King who changed these clergy to varying degrees, not the clergy who changed King, and none more so than then Catholic bishop of Alabama Joseph A. Durick, soon to be bishop of Tennessee and, as events in Memphis would prove, the greatest risk-taker of the group. Bass focuses squarely on these men, respectfully: their careers, their ministries, their heartfelt beliefs, their sense of justice applied and misapplied, what they stood to gain and loose, what they owed to the culture that produced them. What history makes of them isn’t Bass’ job because a history this comprehensive has yet to be written.

Just as no future history of Birmingham the city can now do without Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon and Schuster), the product of 15 years of research by New York Times reporter and privileged daughter of Birmingham society Diane McWhorter. Privilege blinded the author’s eyes to much as a 10-year-old in 1963, as sheer or willed ignorance did to privileged and unprivileged alike throughout much of Birmingham’s story. But with close to 600 pages of highly readable text and 70 pages of microscopically sized notes, it will be impossible not to cite McWhorter in future books on the period and place. From anti-unionizer industrialists to nascent Communist cells, from tough-as-nails Dixiecrats to New Dealer sympathizers, from prominent city politicos and white-shoe lawyers to Ku Klux Klanners and the truly psychopathic fringe, from hardhead City Commissioner Bull Connor to equally hard-headed civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, from Hoover’s FBI to Kennedy’s White House, there was hardly room for King to engineer the publicity he needed to restore his flagging image, and “engineer” is the right word for King’s tactics, as both Bass and McWhorter leave us without doubt.

Whenever McWhorter questions her own father’s capacity for trash-talk and his knowledge of explosives, however, the view in Carry Me Home presents a truly chilling prospect, one even Vulcan, Birmingham’s good god on Red Mountain, can’t warm. Trust then to the arm of justice, not to the arm of a torch-bearing god: In May 2000, two longtime, still-living suspects in the deaths of Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley were indicted by a state grand jury and turned themselves in to Birmingham’s county jail. The charge: murder. No bond.

Lindsey Roberts says she feels like Wonder Woman these days. You wouldn’t guess this by looking at her. She doesn’t quite fulfill the Linda Carter six-foot height requirement or the cup-overfloweth bustline, but she does have dark hair. As for flying in her invisible jet and using the golden lasso to gain the truth, well, both could be in the near future for Roberts, most recently known for her role as Harper in Craig Brewer‘s award-winning, made-in-Memphis, independent film, The Poor and Hungry.

At 22, she claims she didn’t always shine so brightly. “I was a bad seed as a kid. Everyone goes through that period of teen angst.” Then a traumatic accident led to a premature epiphany for the 16-year-old. “A police-man ran a red light and hit me,” she says.

“At that point I realized that life wasn’t something to toy with and that I needed to take it seriously.” She turned to school work and dancing to channel the energy. She ended up becoming homecoming queen and Wonder Woman at Germantown High. “My economics teacher, Coach Armstrong, nicknamed me Wonder Woman and the name kind of stuck, but I’ve sort of felt somewhere between Wonder Woman and Peter Pan since I was a little kid.”

“I’ve been a dancer since I was 3 years old,” Roberts continues, “and acting is relatively new for me.” She danced at Martha Scott Dance Studio for years and in 1995 her teacher, Otis Smith, persuaded her to try out for West Side Story at Bartlett Community Theater. “When I went to the audition, they asked me what I had prepared to sing, and I said, ÔSorry, prepare?’ So they said, ÔCan you sing “Happy Birthday”? And I said, ÔThat I can.’ ” In West Side Story she worked as a dance captain, assisting Otis Smith with choreography, which continued to be her major role in later theater performances.

Her dance experience continued to get Roberts gigs at Theatre Memphis in The Music Man and A Christmas Carol, “which was great, because I got to fly in the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past. I always wanted to play Peter Pan; it was a lifetime dream of mine.”

While majoring in English at the University of Memphis, Roberts did some small lunch-box theater with playwright and director Megan Jones, and 26 Men and a Girl, in which she choreographed her own role. She continued to work with Theatre Memphis in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1998, until moving to Playhouse on the Square, first in The Who’s Tommy and Cabaret, and later as their resident dance captain.

Her first starring role was in Megan Jones’ two-person play, The Golden Fleece, at the University of Memphis. “I had never done anything like that before,” she says. “I finally felt like an actor. I felt like I could work a script and come up with a character in no time. That was just the kick I needed to make me feel like an actor, because up to that point, I had only been a dancer.”

Then Craig Brewer entered the picture. After two attempts at trying to fill the role of Harper in The Poor and Hungry, Craig hesitantly called some of Roberts’ contacts at Playhouse and Theatre Memphis. He was wary of the difficulties of transitioning from theater to film but he described the character of Harper to directors Ken Zimmerman, Jackie Nichols, and Michael Fortner, and all three zoned in on Roberts.

After a meeting and informal audition at T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant, Roberts read part of the script and Brewer, though impressed by her reading, rejected her because she was “too pretty.” Roberts claims the only way she got the role of Harper was due to P&H cafe owner Wanda Wilson‘s determination. The P&H Cafe, a favorite hangout of the local theater crowd, also lends its name and ambience to the film. Roberts says, “I would go up to the P&H with all of the theater people, and one night Wanda said to me, ÔHoney, I think we can make you ugly. I’m going to call Craig.'”

Lead actor Eric Tate agreed that Roberts could be Harper after only one reading with her. Brewer still maintained that Roberts was “too cute,” but her finally concluded, “I think we can work with you. Let’s try it.”

With the help of a spray bottle of water to make her hair look street funky, and an endless supply of Visine to keep her eyes glazed over, Roberts rehearsed with Brewer, Eric Tate, and other cast members for months before finally “getting” the voice, walk, and character of Harper. “And then one day,” she says, “I just knew I had her.”

The total production for The Poor and Hungry took less than $20,000 and over two years, shooting on video with only the small crew of Brewer and Seth Hagee. Roberts worked on the film while attending classes at the University of Memphis and performing at Playhouse, where, during 1999, she had roles in Children of Eden, Light Up the Sky, Secret Garden, Chess, and finally Peter Pan, her dream role. “Peter Pan was by far one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s something else to be sitting up there in that dressing room getting ready for the show to begin and those kids are all out there in the audience, yelling, ÔPeter, Peter!’ That was it for me.”

Despite her busy schedule with school and theater, coupled with the long hours of rehearsing and filming, Roberts saw the rewards. “I knew, even then, that this film was going to be good. And those people are my family,” she says. “When you work on something for that long, for that hard, you get close to the people you are working with. I trusted them and their decisions.”

Roberts trusted Brewer when he suggested that actor John Still violently kiss her during the climactic moment of the movie. Brewer said, “I feel like the way your eyes pop open so wide is exactly what the audience will do.” He was right. Roberts adds, “That fear that you see in my eyes in that scene. That was no acting; that fear was real.”

After being nominated last August for best digital feature and best feature at the Hollywood Film Festival, most of the cast made the trip to celebrate their film in Hollywood. “I knew we were going to win. I was so certain. I’m too confident in this film. I know it’s good,” Roberts confirms. In fact, P&H did win best digital feature and resulted in both Brewer and Roberts retaining Mark Litwak, a prominent entertainment attorney in Hollywood. While in Hollywood, Roberts auditioned with Linda Phillips Palo, Francis Ford Coppola’s casting director, and she will return to Los Angeles in January to sign with a manager and agent. In the meantime, she has started working on a short film with the independent film company Fine Grind, and is considering a role in Anthony Pound‘s play, Steel Magnolias.

P&H also continues to succeed nationally, and negotiations are in the works with two companies, Lion’s Gate and Zentropa, for theatrical distribution. Craig Brewer will go on to write and direct a new film for Front Street Productions titled D.J. Demo, which he will begin shooting in Memphis in December.

As for the future, it seems Roberts will indeed get to fly again. After promoting P&H until the end of the year at other film festivals, including the Austin Film Festival, and possibly at events in Milan, Toronto, and Sundance, she will move to Los Angeles to see how close to the sun she can get. And though she is “cute” in a girl-next-door kind of way, you can see glimpses of Wonder Woman beneath the surface of this unpretentious actor through her words and insights: “I do everything that I can. I’ve worked so hard for the last few years, doing everything that I really want to do. I feel so blessed to be where I am and doing what I’m doing.”

Few among us will ever dive with dolphins — but viewing the latest IMAX film Dolphins may be the next best thing. MacGillivray Freeman Films, the makers of Everest and The Living Sea, deliver another compelling film with an equal measure of exotic beauty and interesting science. Shot largely under the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, Dolphins gives us a rare, intimate look at these intelligent creatures and the research being done to better understand them.

In the film we meet Kathleen Dudzinski, a marine biologist currently working on her Ph.D, along with her two colleagues, Dr. Alejandro Acevedo and mentor Dr. Bernd Wursig. Together they use sophisticated listening and recording devices to eavesdrop on wild dolphin pods. The researchers are attempting to decode the noises dolphins use to communicate, a complex mix of whistles, chirps, and clicking sounds that continually pass between the animals as they swim.

While scientists have long observed dolphins in captivity, less is known about these mammals in their natural habitats. Dudzinski, following in the footsteps of animal behaviorists like Jane Goodall and Dianne Fosse, hopes to remedy that. Through her hours of underwater observations, Dudzinski has discovered that dolphins not only communicate through sound, but body language as well, using posture, gestures, and touch to convey meaning to other pod members. That communication isn‘t limited to their own species either, as demonstrated through the touching, 15-year relationship between a wild male dolphin named JoJo and his friend, naturalist Dean Bernal.

My 5-year-old son Evan comments on how amazing it is that dolphins eyes move independently of one another (scientists believe that when a dolphin sleeps, only half of its brain rests), enabling it to close one eye to sleep while the other eye keeps watch for predators. “I can ‘t do that,” he aptly demonstrates. He ‘s also impressed by the fact that dolphins can jump higher than a basketball goal. Dolphins typically leap while swimming because becoming airborne enables them to make better time (due to less resistance). While in the air, they also search the sea for feeding gulls, a sign that dinnertime is not far off!

Much of the factual information will be over the heads of kids under 8. But between the beautiful scenery and the engaging subject, there ‘s something here for everyone. Dolphins is the perfect holiday getaway.

To be honest, it did not bother me. I was the only person at the movie theater over the age of 10 who was not accompanied by an adult or accompanying someone under the age of 10. But that’s cool, because I do like Disney’s full-length animated features, yes indeed.

That’s not to say I like all of them. Pocahontas was an embarrassment and last summer’s epic Dinosaurs (was that even animated? I am not sure computer art necessarily counts) lacked the heart of Disney’s other creations. But, and this is a big but, at least those previously two flicks were well made. The animation was incredible; the production looked like someone cared deeply for the subject matter. They were — if you forget about the bad stories and bad characters — well-done films.

So what to make of Disney’s mid-term effort, The Emperor’s New Groove? Unfortunately, not much. The story line revolves around one Emperor Kuzco (played sarcastically by David Spade) and his unfortunate transformation into — of all things — a llama. Why a llama? I guess the Disney focus groups figured that were llamas were all the rage this season. His only companion is village head and chief-llama herder Pancha, portly played by John Goodman. While I sincerely appreciate the Disney artists’ interest and ability in portraying their voice-talent as new creations in drawing, did they really have to make Pancha grossly obese like Goodman? Just a question. The bad guys are former advisor to the emperor, Yzma (Eartha Kitt) and her sidekick Kronk (Patrick Warburton).

My biggest problem with this film is that Disney cartoon flicks have generally balanced kid moments with adult moments. While there is usually a lot of funny stuff, there is also plenty of serious stuff as well. Spade is by definition incapable of any sort of depth in his performance, relying solely on a single-sided, arrogant, and typically half-assed performance. Yeah, he’s funny, but the act got old during Saturday Night Live.

Spade even finds ways to distract the audience from the rest of the story. Providing voice-over (to create a singularly confusing narrative) from the start, Spade forces himself on the viewers, even at the most inappropriate moments. For example, the young pre-llama Kuzco wants to demolish poor Pancha’s village for a swimming pool. After the film makes pains to show how much Pancha loves his home, Spades character literally stops the show to explain how the real focus should be — of course, on Kuzco and not on the concerns of Pancha. Director Mark Dindal should have recognized a good scene and left it alone. Instead, Dindal sacrifices the good scenes for cheap laughs.

That’s a recurring problem. The Emperor’s New Groove relies almost entirely from tried and true gimmicks for humor. Grant it, Kronk in the kitchen provides very funny moments, but at other times even the visual humor (a trademark of Disney films) seems forced and clichŽ. At one moment, there is even a recreation of a famous Spaceballs moment with Yzma swinging out a statue’s nostril via a curtain.

Why this movie is not a straight-to-video release probably has something to do with the voice talent and their price tags. To be fair, Spade and Goodman do have good chemistry and are more funny than not. I smiled through most of the film and was only vaguely aware of how disappointing this effort was overall, which I guess is a good thing. If you want a movie that is light and superficial as its main character who unabashedly proclaims “It’s All About… ME!” then enjoy this film. If you would rather watch a better idea of what Disney filmmakers are capable of, watch any of the other full-length animated features.