(Image by Lorie Shaull)
As fate or nature would have it, I was born a white man in the Middle West of the US. I was raised a white man, and, again, as nature would have it, I am still a white man, but no longer in the North. My family moved to the South in 1955, the same year that Emmet Till traveled from his home in the Middle West, Chicago actually, to the South, Mississippi that is, to visit his relatives. Emmett was older than I by six years.
Chinonye Chukwu, writer and director of the film do that was released in 2022, is a Nigerian-born filmmaker. She was, of course, not born white nor male, and while it is wholly understandable that she is the one who brought insight, art, courage, and an essential woman’s perspective to this powerful film, it’s disappointing that a US-born individual did not make such a film long before nearly 70 years had passed from the time of Emmett Till’s murder. I say disappointing not out of any sense of nationalistic pride or male prerogative, but because there should have been at least one US person who felt the moral responsibility to tell this story. But, this too, says something about the times and country in which we live even in 2023,
I was born in Indiana, in fact, in Marion, Indiana, where according to reports the “last lynching of negroes took place north of the Mason-Dixon Line.” I learned this quite by accident one Sunday afternoon when a weekly news program told about this event when I was a young teenager in the 1960s. Like the murder of Emmett Till, this lynching in my birth town took place on a hot August night in 1930, twenty-five years before Emmett’s death.
Three black men were abducted from the Grant County jail in Marion, miraculously one survived and the story was later told by James Cameron, the survivor who was 16 years old at the time. When I learned of the event, I was, of course, surprised and asked my parents if they knew of this. They said yes, but I never heard of or knew about it until many years later on a fortuitous Sunday’s news program. As a result, I did contact Mr. Cameron and we had a good conversation. He sent me a copy of the book he had written telling of his experience. It played a part in my own awakening to the Civil Rights Movement. At the time I lived not in exactly the Deep South, but it was Florida in the 1950s when my family moved there and it was deeply entrenched in segregation. As a child I remember asking my mother one day why in a main department store there were two drinking fountains, one labeled “white” and the other “colored,” and in my eight-year-old innocence I asked my mother if the sign strangely referred to white and chocolate milk, something I had never seen in Indiana.
Later on I would learn, too, that Indiana was a state with a large contingent of members in the Klu Klux Klan. I even learned that in the 30’s my parents had been invited to and attended at least one Klan meeting, although they said they never were interested in joining. I remember, too, as an eight-year-old traveling from North to South, when we passed through portions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia before reaching Florida, that there were fields of černosi picking cotton just as one sees in the do movie, and even as a youngster I remembering being surprised and asking about what I was seeing.
While I do not remember the Emmett Till murder in 1955, undoubtedly about the same time as we were migrating south that summer, I do remember clearly the murder of Medgar Evans eight years later, and then the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April, 1968, three weeks before my birthday in my junior year at the University of Florida. I remember clearly the premonition I had of what was to come. And it came.
My life has been shaped by three powerful and portentous movements in those young formative years before legal adulthood, but continuing thereafter—the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and the movement for women’s equal rights. Yes, I had no choice but to remain a white man, but I was shaped in a way that lifted me out of what might have been the usual path of cultural, racial, and gender formation. Many years later I would live for many years in Latin America and I would go through other powerful and sometimes, too, shocking transformations. There have been social changes, of course, in the US I now know, but social and cultural changes still collectively move far too slowly to ensure a just society or country.
Living once again in Florida, the state Board of Education under the governor’s leadership, a governor who wishes to be president, seeks again to rewrite history according to a white, nationalistic agenda. How ironic that a powerful film like do will reach more than distorted curriculums will in public schools, in fact I watched this film at home on cable television. The film certainly belongs in homes. I have been in education pretty much all my life, first as a student and then as teacher and professor. I, too, was greatly limited as a student in the 1950s and for many decades, but the mind can roam free and explore, read, and watch good films, and forever ask right questions. After all, at the core of life we really all can be and must be autodidacts—self-educated.
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