Last Sunday, Sept. 13, Jeanne and I walked from our home in
North Newton, Kan., over to the Bethel College campus to attend a showing of
the documentary Slavery by Another Name,
which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national
broadcast on PBS on Feb. 3, 2012. KIPCOR (Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution)
sponsored the showing and the discussion that followed.
Slavery by Another
Name is a powerful film, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas
Blackmon. It challenges one of our
country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts
how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor
emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African
Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until
the onset of World War II.
The film uses
archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments to tell forgotten stories of both
victims and perpetrators of this neoslavery and includes interviews with their
descendants. It also features interviews with Blackmon and leading scholars of
the period.
The film
recounts how, since slavery was unconstitutional, local authorities in the
American South arrested African Americans, often on trumped-up charges, and
sent them to prison farms, where they served years in hard labor, to the profit
of local businessmen. And when courageous people brought this practice of
penury to the attention of the U.S. government, President Teddy Roosevelt
looked the other way, not wanting to displease his wealthy supporters. After
all, this penal servitude, unpaid labor, was good for business.
Only during
World War II, when someone pointed out to President Franklin Roosevelt that
this practice would provide the Japanese with propaganda, did the government
act to end it. Still, its practice continued for some time.
Slavery by Another
Name is hard to watch and elicits strong emotions. In a discussion after
the film, Galyn Vesey, Ph.D., director of the Research on Black Wichita
Project, asked people about their feelings, their thoughts and their own
experiences.
In the audience were many people from Wichita, Kan., most of
them African Americans, and what they had to say was as moving as the film. A
pastor said that our nation is cursed because of its racism, which he defined
as prejudice plus power. A woman pleaded for some kind of change in a society
where her son is arrested by police and held in jail when he did nothing
illegal. One man told of his experience as a veteran who was arrested at a gas
station while simply sitting in the car while his friend pumped gas.
An eloquent man who said he will turn 83 in December
recounted how talented blacks are leaving Kansas because jobs are closed to
them. He said he has three daughters, all of whom have doctorates, as does he.
Two are architects. One of them works at a firm in Atlanta that designed
buildings for the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta airport. Yet when Wichita decided
to do a major expansion of its airport, she couldn’t even get an interview.
A white woman in the audience asked what many felt, What do
we do? What will help?
A good question. One thing we can do is relearn our nation’s
history, like this period that is ignored by most textbooks.
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