Free State of Jones

Whenever a new movie comes out that addresses the period of slavery in the United States, viewers must confront that sordid history anew. In 2013, we saw 12 Years a Slave, and a month ago, we saw a remake of the miniseries Roots. Now comes Free State of Jones, another of the many films that are “based on a true story.”

 

 

In this new film, like many others, we get a mix of history and adaptation for dramatic purposes. The story of Newton Knight is certainly compelling. A native of Mississippi, he deserted the Confederate army with others from Jones County and led a guerrilla war against the Confederates with an army of up to 500 people that included runaway slaves.

Director and co-writer Gary Ross, who also made Seabiscuit and Hunger Games, tells the story with an eye on the motivations for Knight’s actions. He’s fortunate to have an actor as excellent as Matthew McConaughey to fill that role. His look and speech fit perfectly.

A medical orderly in the Confederate army, Knight leaves to bury a kinsman, a boy from his home county who was conscripted into the army by force, then killed on the battlefield. Back in Jones County, he learns that local Confederate soldiers are taking people’s food as a tax, leaving them without enough to survive the winter.

When he helps a family stand up to some soldiers, driving them away with guns, he becomes a fugitive and is hunted as a deserter. He hides in a nearby swamp with several runaway slaves.

The Newton Knight of the movie is a natural leader who gives speeches that draw on Scripture and class struggle. One motivation for him and others to desert the army is the “Twenty Negro Law,” which excuses one white man from the war for every 20 black slaves he owns. Knight says, “This isn’t our war.”

Ross keeps us informed of the time frame for different parts of the story by showing the dates. He also moves forward at different points to 1948 to show Knight’s great-grandson Davis Knight on trial for miscegenation, illegal according to Mississippi law. This is confusing at first but becomes pertinent as we learn more of Newton Knight’s story.

While it is a fascinating film, Free State of Jones raises several questions. One is how we view films like this that portray the evils of racism. Knight comes across early as a kind of white savior, though black slaves are given important dialogue and screen time. He also is a bit too good. A film (even at 2 ¼ hours) can’t cover the complexity of such an individual. But the real Knight had his share of flaws.

While the Knight of the movie has a son by Rachel, a slave played beautifully by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the real Knight had three families with three different women and fathered dozens of mixed-race children. He was a man of strong principles and quick to have a knife at the throat of anyone who rubbed him the wrong way, according to The Smithsonian.

A related question regards our response to such films. We easily decry the evil of “those people,” whose racism is so blatant and so violent. But this doesn’t necessarily challenge our more subtle or hidden racism today. This is not a criticism of the film, which is telling a story from the past. But it is a caution about how we view it.

Then there’s the depiction of religion in the film. Knight was a Primitive Baptist who often quoted Scripture. And references to Scripture and to God occur in the film. But you won’t find references to Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence. As McConaughey said in an interview with The Daily Beast, Knight “was not a ‘turn the other cheek’ New Testament guy.” Redemptive violence is clearly presented here, though ultimately it didn’t work. Laws changed, and people changed, though the film only implies that; we don’t see it.

Free State of Jones is rated R for brutal battle scenes and disturbing graphic images.

From 'protect and serve' to 'punish and profit'

The increasing number of cases of police officers shooting unarmed African Americans almost certainly reveals an inherent racism that afflicts U.S. society. But another, more economic factor may also contribute to these shootings.

Across the United States, police departments, like many other public-funded services, are increasingly short of money. As a result, cities look for more sources of revenue. One such source is arresting and fining people for petty offenses.

In “Collect and Serve” (Mother Jones, September/October), Jack Hitt points out that many of the victims of police shootings were apprehended for petty offenses. In April, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him.

 

 

When the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson, Mo., in March, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a woman in that town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like, writes Hitt. “She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued fees.”

The judge largely responsible for extracting these fees from Ferguson’s poor, writes Hitt, was Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who “owed $172,646 in back taxes. … Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends.”

Is this just one person’s bad personal ethics, or is it part of a pattern? In 2010, the Ferguson police and courts generated $1.4 million for the city. This year, they expect to make $3.1 million.

And it’s not just Ferguson doing this. In Oklahoma, Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant law enforcement background, was allowed to go out on patrol, “likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff’s office,” writes Hitt. He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser.

“Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” says William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice.

Thus you get laws like these (in Pagedale, Mo.): You can’t have a hedge more than three feet high or a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of your house. You can’t walk on the roadway. Pants may not be worn below the waist in public. Blinds must be neatly hung.

Why such laws? Maurer says that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue any agency could generate from traffic stops. Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests.

Scott’s busted taillight is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. Michael Brown was walking in the street. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this act were African American, writes Hitt, “meaning that ‘walking black’ is not a punch line. It is a crime.”

Police forces have become collection agencies for the municipal court. Jails have become debtors’ prisons. And who pays? We do.

Hitt quotes the director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program: “Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world.”

The mission of police departments have shifted from “protect and serve” to “punish and profit.” That’s just wrong.

A neglected period of history

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.

The terror African-American men face in America

In less than a month, from July 17 to Aug. 11, in separate incidents—in Staten Island, N.Y., Beavercreek, Ohio, Ferguson, Mo., and Los Angeles—four unarmed African-American men were killed by police (www.motherjones.com).

In his blog at sojo.net, Ryan Herring writes, “To be young and black in the United States means to live under constant pressure, something most non-black American citizens know nothing about” (“When Terror Wears a Badge,” Aug. 14).

War on terrorism: While our government fights a war on terrorism, many African Americans experience terror everyday. As Cornel West has said, “To be black in America for 400 years is to be unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence and hated.”

Herring notes that “more Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police since 9/11 than in acts officially classified as terrorism. A recent study showed that one black man was killed every 28 hours by police, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes in 2012.”

Beyond the threat of lethal violence is the daily grind of being constantly watched by police, suspected of wrongdoing simply because of the color of one’s skin.

Falsely accused: A further threat from police is being arrested and falsely accused. In The New Yorker (Aug. 4), Nicholas Schmidle writes about Tyrone Hood, who has been in prison for 21 years for a murder he likely did not commit. The article goes into great detail, with many interviews, to trace the course of events that led to Hood’s arrest and conviction.

Those events included witnesses who told the reporter that Chicago police threatened them with a gun until they said they saw Hood kill Marshal Morgan, a 20-year-old basketball star. Turns out, they didn’t witness that.

A series of articles ran in 2001 in the Chicago Tribune titled “Cops and Confessions.” The reporters described how Chicago police had relied on “coercive and illegal tactics” to solicit dubious confessions. Among the articles was a profile of Kenneth Boudreau, one of the officers in Hood’s case who had obtained incriminating statements from several witnesses.

The article pointed out that Boudreau “had targeted suspects especially vulnerable to intimidation, including teenagers and the mentally retarded, and stood accused of ‘punching, slapping or kicking’ them.” He had helped elicit at least five confessions from suspects who were later acquitted.

Schmidle interviews him, and Boudreau doesn’t budge from his belief that Hood is guilty, despite much evidence to the contrary.

The man who most likely did the murder later murdered several other people. Meanwhile, Hood remains in prison.

On the run: In the Aug. 11 and 18 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman, who for six years lived in a low-income neighborhood of Philadelphia and documented the lives of two young African-American men.

“They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted,” Gladwell writes. “Selling crack was a business they entered only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them.”

Gladwell compares the climb of Italian crime families in the 1950s and ’60s into legitimacy with that of African Americans today. Back then, cops were paid to overlook crime and focused more on hunting Communists.

Today’s law enforcement is different. “Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70 percent,” Gladwell writes.

A black man in America faces many systemic barriers. Whatever we can do to help change those barriers will help make God’s justice for all more visible.

A story about classism and racism

Amid the superhero movies or raunchy comedies, the Cineplex occasionally sneaks in a quiet, “inspired by a true story” film. Such is Belle, which is based on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mabatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral.

 

As I’ve written before here, many of these “true” stories stretch the truth quite a bit. Such is the case here. The film is actually inspired by a 1779 painting of Belle beside her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. It was commissioned by William Murray, who was at the time Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

But I don’t mind so much. Belle tells an engaging story and conveys information about a key moment in England’s history and in the history of the movement to abolish slavery.

After Belle’s mother dies, her father brings her to England to be cared for by his uncle (Tom Wilkinson), Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, at his estate. Despite the social mores of the time, they raise Dido as an aristocrat alongside her cousin Elizabeth.

When the girls reach the age to “come out,” the family looks for a good match for Elizabeth. Dido, however, has received a large inheritance from her father and doesn’t need to marry wealth. But Mansfield doesn’t want her to marry beneath her either.

As with almost any British show you can name, we’re dealing with classism. We’ve seen this before—the desire of a young woman to marry for love rather than money. Read Jane Austen for a wonderful examination of this issue. Added to the mix here is racism.

Also new here is the introduction of a famous slavery case, Gregson v. Gilbert, that is key in the annals of the abolitionist movement. Mansfield is to rule on the case, which has to do with a ship that jettisoned its “cargo” of slaves and wants payment from its insurance company for it losses.

Belle meets a young lawyer, John Davinier (Sam Reid), who wants Mansfield to rule against the ship’s owners. This case, often referred to as the Zong massacre, was also the basis of an episode of Garrow’s Law, an old BBC show, where I first heard about it.

There’s not much suspense about the outcome—both of the case and of Belle’s relationship with Davinier. And while the historical elements are interesting, I feel some caution about films like these.

Belle deals with the racism that existed then, and we view it with a self-righteous disdain for their backward ways. But it doesn’t confront us with our own racist structures today. I realize that’s not the film’s purpose, but I raise the caution for those of us who view it.

The film includes a cast of excellent English actors, including Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Matthew Goode and Penelope Wilton (of Downton Abbey).

Rated PG, Belle is a refreshing way to encounter some English history, think about racism and enjoy a good story.

Racism in hiding

Mennonite Church USA, like other Christian denominations, is committed to becoming an anti­racist church. One of the things that makes that difficult is that racism, like many systems and like the “powers” described in the New Testament, is pernicious and likes to remain hidden from our awareness. Part of becoming antiracist is keeping our awareness of racism alive.

The opposite of that awareness is denial, and such denial runs rampant in our society. We like to pretend we aren’t as racist as we may be. A recent article in The Atlantic (September) helps call us to task.

In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at the magazine, writes that as our first black president, Barack Obama has avoided mention of race almost entirely. He goes on: “In having to be ‘twice as good’ and ‘half as black,’ Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.”

The fact that Americans elected a black president is often cited as evidence that we have moved beyond race as a factor in our politics. But that notion is shown to be false.

This does not mean that opposing policies of the Obama administration signifies racism. Racism is a much subtler system.

Coates points to an irony of the United States: “For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

Coates shows this irony in the events around the death of Trayvon Martin last February. As soon as Obama addressed the parents and said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” the case moved from a kind of national mourning to what Coates calls “racialized political fodder,” and he gives numerous examples.

Historically, Coates writes, African Americans have been limited to protest and agitation in addressing the disconnect between democracy and white supremacy. Now, when Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of what happened” in the Martin case, he was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. “The power was black,” Coates writes, “and, in certain quarters, was received as such.”

“Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred,” Coates writes. “It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” He notes several studies that have shown the role of race in voting patterns and in opposition to and support for health-care reform. After Obama’s election, the rhetoric of fear became much more prevalent. Signs at Tea Party rallies read, “Obama plans white slavery,” and one congressman complained that Obama “favors the black person.”

The double standard of having to be twice as good “haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.” Coates points out that in the first two years as president, “Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961.”

The myth of “twice as good,” writes Coates, “holds that African Americans—enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors.”

Coates makes clear he does not agree with all of Obama’s views. He particularly abhors his embrace of a secretive drone policy. His point is about the pernicious presence of racism in our politics. “Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story,” he writes. “It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

The problem goes beyond politics and affects—infects—every area of society. Love, not fear, should guide us.

The shame of U.S. prisons

Most of us, I imagine, have not spent time in prison. Thus, we cannot know quite what it is like to be incarcerated. Yet many of our fellow citizens are incarcerated. In fact, writes Adam Gopnik in “The Caging of America” (The New Yorker, Jan. 30), “Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags.”

Gopnik writes that “a prison is a trap for catching time.” The relentless ennui is suffocating. “The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock,” he writes. Time stops.

Given the inhumane horror of being in prison, the greater horror is how ubiquitous it is in our country. “For a great many poor people,” writes Gopnik, “particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones.”

He adds that “more than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives” and calls such mass incarceration “the fundamental fact of our country today, … as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.” In truth, he writes, “there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation or on parole—than were in slavery then.”

Just as startling as the number of people jailed today is how much the prison population has grown in the past 30 years. “In 1980,” Gopnik writes, “there were about 220 people incarcerated for every 100,000 Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to 731.” This growth has huge consequences on our society. In the past 20 years, “the money states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.” The irony here is that the single greatest factor in reducing recidivism (relapsing into criminal behavior) is education.

And, as is pointed out often, the cost of keeping a prisoner is much greater than the cost of educating a person. For example, says Karin VanZant, CEO of Think Tank and the National Circles Campaign, studies show that by looking at third grade reading scores you can figure how many kids will drop out of high school before they graduate, and many of these will end up in prison. In Ohio, instead of investing $7,000 per year to raise reading scores, they are spending $37,000 per year for a prisoner.

Gopnik also points to the brutality of U.S. prisons. “Every day,” he writes, “at least 50,000 men … wake in solitary confinement, … locked in small cells where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo ‘exercise.’ ” Add to this the existence and threat of prison rape (see Gopnik’s quote on page 11), and you have a horrible situation.

Gopnik looks at some recent literature on prisons and crime and encounters some interesting insights. For example, “Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crime,” he writes. If you close down an open drug market in one neighborhood, it does not necessarily move to another neighborhood.

Another insight: “Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.”

Gopnik concludes: “Since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime.”

Take time to read the entire article. This huge problem in our country needs radical reform.

Two letters in the Feb. 27 issue respond to Gopnik's article. One, which I quoted from in my blog on immigration, is from Katherine Fennelly, who points out that "over 20,000 immigrants now languish in federal prison for no crime other than entering the United States without a valid visa."

The other letter is from Laura A. Tyson, who calls "our national obsession with imprisoning people for relatively petty and nonviolent offenses … a modern-day form of debtors' prison." She notes that many inmates she encounters "are arrested for outstanding warrants, some that date back as far as the 1980s. Nearly all of these warrants are for unpaid fines" for such things as loitering, "shoplifting, traffic violations, parking tickets and possession of small amounts of controlled substances." Since these women cannot pay the fines, they serve time in lieu of paying. They are "credited" about $30 a day toward their outstanding fines, but their stay in prison costs the public $100 a day. Talk about waste.

The U.S. prison system is not only immoral, it is wasteful, inefficient--in a word, stupid.

In the same chapter of the Bible (Matthew 25) where Jesus talks about welcoming him when we welcome the stranger, he also says, "I was in prison and you visited me" (v. 36).

Visiting is certainly important, but reforming prisons and removing prisoners is equally important. It's a shame.