Tag: Jim Crow

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Nickel Boys

One of my favorite film noirs is Dark Passage, a 1947 Warner Brothers film by director Delmer Daves. Humphrey Bogart stars as an escaped convict trying to clear his name. With the help of Lauren Bacall, he gets facial reconstructive surgery in an attempt to evade police. What’s great about Dark Passage is that the entire first hour of the film is shot from a first-person point of view. We hear Bogart’s voice, but we never see his face — at least not until he gets a new one. POV had been used before, but never so successfully. Only a handful of other films have attempted such a trick, most recently the 2015 shoot-em-up Hardcore Henry, which played on modern audiences’ familiarity with first-person shooter video games. 

Done well, POV camera helps a viewer identify more deeply with a character because we see what they see, which is why director RaMell Ross chose to shoot Nickel Boys in the first-person perspective. Based on a 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp as a child, and later Ethan Herisse), a Black teenager in 1962 Tallahassee who is generally quiet, studious, and likes to read stuff like Pride and Prejudice. The Civil Rights era is in full swing, but life is still tough for Black kids in Jim Crow-era Florida. Luckily, Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is very supportive, and he has a great teacher (Jimmie Fails) who sees his potential. When he gets an opportunity to take college classes at the Marvin Griggs Technical School, he jumps at the chance. Lacking transportation, he decides to hitchhike to his first class. But it turns out that the man who picks him up is driving a stolen car, and the police don’t believe Elwood had nothing to do with it. So Elwood finds himself at Nickel Academy, a reform school that is notorious for its cruelty towards its charges. When Elwood arrives in the back of a police car, the two white punks he rides with are dropped off in front of a nice-looking Antebellum building. The Black kids live in dilapidated dorms out back. 

The nerdy Elwood doesn’t get along with the other kids at the school, but Turner (Brandon Wilson) stands up for him, and the two become friends. When he gets mixed up in a restroom altercation with bully Griff (Luke Tennie), Elwood finds out exactly how brutal the Nickel Academy is. Administrator Mr. Spencer (Hamish Linklater) personally whips Elwood so badly that when his grandmother arrives for a visit, they won’t let her see him. Instead, she runs into Turner, who can’t assure her that everything is all right. 

Elwood and Turner try to survive Nickel Academy, as we switch back and forth between their viewpoints. Later, in flash-forward sequences set 20 and 30 years in the future, the POV changes, so we see the back of Elwood’s head (now played by the dreadlocked Daveed Diggs) as he encounters people from his past he might rather forget. 

Herisse, Wilson, and Tennie offer solid performances, and Ellis-Taylor’s turn as a loving grandmother who is losing the fight to bring her kin home brings the tears. But they all get overshadowed by the film’s technical achievements. The POV shooting works, for the most part, but Ross has trouble committing to the bit. His intention is to make us feel Elwood and Turner’s visceral fear and despair, but when he intercuts the action with archival footage to represent the passage of time, as well as the occasional dream sequence, it undercuts the effect he’s going for.  

Whitehead based Nickel Academy on the Dozier School for Boys, a Florida reform school that was shut down in 2011 after 111 years of burying, sometimes literally, “undesirable” young men. But the problem of minority juveniles caught in an uncaring and cruel system hasn’t gone away. As Turner observes late in the film, “There’s Nickels all over this country.” 

Nickel Boys opens in theaters Friday, December 13th.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Red Summer in Elaine, Arkansas

Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden

Join me today for a trip to Elaine, Arkansas. It’s a long drive, and I could use some company.

As Highway 61 winds its way down the bluffs to the big-sky alluvial plain of the Mississippi Delta, towering clumps of clouds drift on the western horizon, distant rainstorms visible in the morning light. We’ll probably get wet later.

In Tunica County, signs for casinos appear. Some are thriving, others are ghostly shells, losers on the gaming wheel of fortune that began spinning 30 years ago. The outlet mall south of town, once a thriving retail mecca, now features several empty storefronts, the formerly heady thrill of wandering through J.Crew, Victoria’s Secret, and Nautica having been replaced by porch-box fairies in FedEx trucks.

We turn onto Highway 49, a slim two-lane running string-straight to the Helena Bridge, a narrow and rusty looking structure with kudzu and trumpet vines adorning the side rails. It does not inspire confidence. Once across, we take the Great River Road 20 miles south to Elaine, where in 1919, the greatest race massacre in U.S. history occurred. But you knew that. Didn’t you?

Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden

Late winter through early autumn of 1919 has become known as “Red Summer,” a time when white supremacist terrorism and racial riots took place in more than three dozen cities across the U.S. — and in one small town, Elaine, Arkansas — where we are now parked in front of a vacant building with a sign that says “Birdhouse Capital of the World.” There are no people in sight. In 1919, thanks to Jim Crow election laws, Black Americans couldn’t vote, hold office, or serve on juries. At the same time, thousands of African-American soldiers were returning from World War I and were beginning to feel resentment at the racism they came home to. The nascent NAACP had begun to speak out for racial justice.

The reaction to Black activism was swift and brutal. The KKK and other groups began ginning up violence and hate against the “negroes” for “spreading socialism.” Jingoistic newspapers around the country fed the fire with articles about “armed negroes in revolt.” Racial violence soon broke out in Chicago, Omaha, Tulsa, Washington, D.C., and more than 30 other cities. Black communities were destroyed. Hundreds were killed. Lynchings were common.

In Phillips County, Arkansas, 100 residents of Elaine held a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in a church north of town on September 30, 1919. Three white men monitored the gathering. Shots were fired and returned. A white security officer was killed; a deputy sheriff wounded. The word went out in Helena that there was an “armed negro revolt” underway.

Over the next couple of days, as many as 1,000 vigilantes, soldiers, and police swarmed into Elaine and committed horrific acts of violence. From an eyewitness account:

“Soldiers in Elaine committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn. … several hundred of them began to hunt negroes and shotting [sic] them as they came to them.”

Accounts of how many Black men, women, and children were killed range from 150 to 800. No one knows for sure, but there is little doubt that it was the worst race massacre in U.S. history. The ensuing kangaroo court trial and imprisonment of 12 Black “rioters” changed U.S. civil rights history and is worth your time to learn about, because like most Americans, you’ve probably never heard about any of it.

Thanks to the folks at the Elaine Legacy Center, that’s changing. They are organized and pushing forward with presentations, lectures, and other programs to restore life to the area and tell its story. On September 30th, there will be a service to honor the victims of the massacre. I’m going to write more about Elaine and the Legacy Center later this summer. I hope you’ll join me for a return trip.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Take ’Em Down

The protests and marches all over the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police have once again roused the zombie corpse of the Confederacy — and have once again brought to the surface the ugly truth: Many Americans still venerate the racist, traitorous, losing side of a brief and bloody civil war that happened more than 150 years ago. 

Statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, formerly in Memphis

Thousands of Americans wave Confederate flags and wear Confederate T-shirts and ball caps and put Confederate bumper stickers on their cars and trucks. They are outraged when it is suggested that statues honoring the leaders of this rebellion against the United States should be taken down. They fiercely defend their heroes as paragons of “history” and “heritage,” not hate. The truth is, these Americans are insensitive and ignorant at best, racist at worst.

They’re right in one regard: There is history in the country’s Confederate monuments and statues, but it has little to do with honoring war heroes and Southern heritage. It’s instead a history of ugly politics, intimidation, and a not-so-subtle reinforcement of segregation. According to Mark Elliott, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “The vast majority of [Confederate monuments and statues] were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center says there are around 1,500 Confederate memorials, statues, and other public memorabilia in 31 states in the U.S. Reminder: There were 11 states in the Confederacy. So why are there Confederate memorials in Idaho, Kansas, Arizona, and 17 other states that have no connection to the Confederacy, no reason to celebrate a Southern “heritage” that included human slavery? I wonder, don’t you?

And I wonder why a statue of Jefferson Davis would be erected in a downtown Memphis park in 1964. Could it be because the nascent civil rights movement was gathering steam across the country and a new statue of ol’ Jefferson Finis Davis, the president of the Confederacy (who wasn’t from Memphis), would serve to let the uppity locals know just who was still in charge? (Wink, wink. Remember when we owned y’all? Those were some good times, a way down yonder in the land of cotton!) Heritage!

Elliott again: “All of those monuments were there to teach values to people. That’s why they put them in the city squares. That’s why they put them in front of state buildings.” Many earlier memorials had instead been placed in cemeteries. Jim Crow brought them front and center.

The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.” That’s why, to name two more examples, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag in 1956, and why South Carolina placed the Confederate flag atop its capitol building in 1962.

The bottom line: Most Confederate monuments and statuary were not put up to venerate and preserve history. They were put up to make a political statement. That’s why taking them down — also a political statement — is happening, and why it is justified.

The bottom line: Most Confederate monuments and statuary were not put up to venerate and preserve history. They were put up to make a political statement. That’s why taking them down — also a political statement — is happening, and why it is justified.

It’s why even such a bastion of Southern culture as NASCAR decided to ban the Confederate flag at its races. The organization had become uncomfortable with the political baggage that comes with the stars and bars, a symbol that says that you’re okay with — in fact, you even celebrate — the “heritage” of owning human beings as slaves.

NASCAR isn’t exactly cutting-edge “woke,” but the organization clearly can see the writing on the wall. The future does not look bright for the Confederacy. At long last. More than 150 symbols of the Confederacy have been taken down in the past five years, including those in Memphis. And more will fall in coming months and years. Count on it.

If you still see de-glorifying the Confederacy as a problem, let me suggest that you reconsider the wisdom of building a lifestyle and value system around a losing war that consumed four years and three months of your great-great-great-great-grandparents’ lives more than 150 years ago. The Walking Dead has lasted 10 years, more than twice as long. 

Let me further suggest that you stop and consider that that flag on your truck or your T-shirt is the symbol of a traitorous rebellion built around defending the horrific concept of owning human beings like livestock, putting human beings in chains and selling them at auction, separating human beings from their families, beating them, breeding them, putting them in deplorable housing, and lynching them at will.

It’s a shameful, revolting heritage. Those statues and busts and monuments you revere as history glorify the worst aspects of humankind, and are a recurring insult to millions of African Americans. It’s a history we need to study and learn from; it’s not a history we should honor in our public spaces.

Take ’em down.