Letters to the Editor
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Melvin Tolson & Langston University
Thank you for this review, and insight into Denzel's anger (I noticed it long ago, but then again, I'm black.)
I graduated from Langston University (as did my parents, and maternal grandmother). The main library at the school is named after Melvin B. Tolson. Any Langstonian worth his/her salt knows the history of all the buildings there. The very first thing I thought of when I heard about the movie was, "Melvin Tolson has a history at Langston, too!" I'm going to see this movie if I see no other in 2007.
Thanks again.
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Deacons for Defense and Justice
Anyone interested in the Jim Crow bigotry aspects ought to educate themselves about the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group of black manual laborers for the most part, who were also WW II and Korean war veterans, who decided to defend themselves against the KKK night riders and protect boycott picketers and civil rights marchers from KKK mobs who beat them. Right wingers avoid mention of them because the idea of blacks using the second amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms against whites makes them uncomfortable, and left wingers avoid the subject because using guns for self defense makes them uncomfortable.
There's an excellent book on the Deacons, and a pretty good movie, starring, I believe, Forest Whitaker. The movie consolidates many true events into a few fictional events, but get the spirit down pat.
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Denzel must be a great actor
I met him once and he seemed like a shy, internal kind of person. Not at all like the men he plays. It's amazing that he can create such huge personalities on screen. I guess that's where the enormous talent part comes in.
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Comment on the review itself
I've heard nothing about the movie, just clicked on it because I saw the headline and thought, "Huh, if that's a good review, I might see where that's playing." It semi-interested me, but one sentence just stopped me short.
"They come upon one of the defining institutions of Southern living: a lynching."
Amazing, isn't it, that I lived in the South for almost 30 years and never actually saw one? According to Mr. O'Hehir, that must make me some sort of statistical abnormality. I NEVER got invited to the lynchings. And I lived right next to LYNCHBURG (seriously true, but pun definitely intended). According to this school of thought, we might as well start saying in inner-city communities that gang rapes and robberies are cultural events - even though they are, of course, deviations from the norm propagated by stupid people . . . just like lynchings.
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a comment on the review itself
This quote caught my attention and I had to say something about it:
"there's an angrier and much more interesting movie about the ugliest aspects of American history, about the classics professor and the pig farmer, about stuff that bedevils us to this day. I wish it would come out already."
That may be true, but there's no way a movie like that, if/when created, would ever get significant attention in this country. Mainstream America would never get over it. Y'all are still mad about O.J.
.02
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good review, weak history
Thank you, Mr. O'Hehir, for pointing out the way our films about racism nearly always follow pat formualas of transcendent hero vs. black-hatted villians. It would indeed make for interesting cinema to see a film that talked about the finer, more subtle dynamics of racism ("he's so clean and articulate" might make a good opening line), or dramatized the debates among African Americans themselves (or any other group that has suffered) about how to address it. I'd love to see an adaptation of James Baldwin's amazing *Blues for Mr. Charlie,* his treatment of a Mississippi town during a lynching trial (based on the Emmett Till murder trial) written on the eve of the Voting Rights Act passage.
Just a couple of points of fact here -- lynchings occurred all over the U.S., not just in the South. NAACP secretary James Weldon Johnson named the summer of 1919 "Red Summer" for the race riots that swept major U.S. cities across the country (Chicago, Omaha, Washington DC) that included lynching in most of those locations. Lynchings were also regularly used in California, but against Asian immigrants (primarily the Chinese). Lynchings were a technology of racist control that structured all of American life; in no way were they limited to the south. It would be amazing to see a film about the Omaha or Chicago or DC riots, which were among the worst in the nation.
Also, while the Depression did indeed find black Americans twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts, the worst period of white-on-black violence actually began after Reconstruction and reached its peak in the late teens and early 1920s, when African Americans moved in great numbers from the rural south to the *urban north* in The Great Migration. The violence began to soften when the economic boom of the 1920s set in, and the NAACP began to lobby congress hard for anti-lynching legislation. Perhaps a film about black New York in this period, when the NAACP and Marcus Garvey's UNIA engaged in intense debates over how best to change the state of black rights in the U.S. would be in order. Big differences between and within those groups, and lots of good group scenes with possibilities for wonderful ensemble acting.
"The Civil Rights Struggle" has been going on for a long, long time in this country -- in fact, it's still going on. It makes for important, fascinating history. It would be a gift to us all for our national cinema to treat this facet of our shared history -- over the entire country -- in a manner that reflected its nuances, complications, and contradictions.
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America is embrassed and shamed by it's civil right's legacy and not interested in that reality
Most white people will claim they had nothing to do with that era yet many will celebrate all kinds of american history which they were not a part of nor has any meaning today...
Black folks like me ignore that legacy and history becuase we live verious versions of it today...
Other ethnic groups are so into thier own ethos and drama that only white folks register on thier radar...
The beat goes on.....