Bro. Askia
New Member
Film exposes ?deep racial divide?
http://www.nccu.edu/Events
By Kimberly Sweet, The Herald-Sun
January 12, 2003 10:47 pm
http://www.herald-sun.com/sports/nccentral
DURHAM -- On June 8, 1998, James Byrd Jr. was beaten, chained by his ankles to a pickup truck and dragged to his death along a stretch of rural road near Jasper, Texas.
A few days later, documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow decided to take a trip to the eastern Texas town that was suddenly in the national spotlight for a crime reminiscent of lynchings of a century earlier.
"I went down there thinking I was going to see a very clich?, Southern town," said Dow, a New Yorker who had visions of the stereotypical old white sheriff ambling around town. "I had a very North-biased view of what the South was like."
His assumptions were quickly dismissed after he arrived in Jasper and met the town?s black mayor, superintendent and black city council members. On paper, it seemed the town was the model for the New South, with a mixture of black and white leaders representing the town?s 45?55 percent population split between blacks and whites.
Dow wondered what could have led three white men to commit such a heinous crime against a black man in a town that seemed to be an example of successful integration.
After interviewing a string of community members, Dow decided a film documenting the attitudes of Jasper residents about race relations in the community and the crime might help him find an answer. He invited friend and fellow documentarian Marco Williams down to Jasper to help him out.
Williams, who is black, and Dow, who is white, assembled separate production teams to interview Jasper residents about the incident. Williams and an entirely black production team interviewed the city?s black residents, while Dow?s white production team interviewed the white residents. They were the first documentarians to use the approach.
They filmed in 1999 -- the year the three men responsible for the crime were tried.
The result is a documentary called "Two Towns of Jasper," a film the producers say exposes a deep racial divide that, until the James Byrd incident, lurked subtly below the surface of what appeared to be a happily integrated town.
It?s a divide that isn?t limited to Jasper but extends across America, they say.
"These people worked together in both professional and civic ways," Dow said. "But, like most towns, they had very separate towns in private."
Williams said when the production teams came in, people were finally able to talk about it.
"All kinds of things pirouetted back to race," he said.
The film made its North Carolina debut earlier this year at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. It won the Center for Documentary Studies filmmaker award.
This week it returns to the area, with showings at both Duke and N.C. Central universities as part of their Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemorations. It makes its national debut, airing on PBS on Jan. 22. It will appear on UNC-TV on Jan. 23, followed by a broadcast of a town meeting in Jasper hosted by Ted Koppel.
When he first heard about the incident, Williams recalls having similar questions as Dow did, wondering how such a crime could have happened "in the last half of the last decade of the 20th century."
"When I arrived in Jasper, I was brimming with rage and anger and had a high level of agitation," said Williams, who has served a stint as a visiting professor at Duke.
But he didn?t find the same level of anger when he interviewed members of Jasper?s black community. And after making the film, Williams said he discovered the "muted rage" and silence of many blacks in the community is part of the answer.
"The common phrase was ... ?You didn?t ask nothing, do nothing, see nothing. How do you know it?s not going to be you next?? " Williams said. "This was not the first time a black man had been killed suspiciously -- they were afraid for their jobs and afraid for their lives."
Williams said he thinks the black community is partly culpable, because of its fear of speaking out. He said that viewers can see the fear in the film.
"When looking at the blacks, you have to listen to what they say," Williams said. "Their mood is much more subtle and muted than the whites."
Despite knowing each other for nearly 20 years, the filmmakers said the documentary had a big effect on their friendship and that it helped give insight into each other?s lives.
On the surface, their lives are very similar, Williams said, both having grown up and attended colleges in the Northeast.
But the project helped them understand the different lenses through which they viewed the world because of their race, he said.
Dow agreed. "We realize how little we know each other on some levels," he said. "We have a shared history; we?ve known each other for 20 years, but when it comes to race, our viewpoints diverge dramatically at almost every point."
The two filmmakers will appear at both Duke and NCCU this week for discussions after the film?s showing. It plays at NCCU?s School of Education Auditorium on Thursday at 7 p.m. and Duke?s Richard White Auditorium on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Other events during the next couple of weeks in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day include a speech by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, who became the first black female professor appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. She speaks at Duke Chapel at 4 p.m. Sunday.
State Rep. Mickey Michaux will speak at NCCU?s universitywide convocation honoring King. That event takes place Wednesday at 11 a.m. in the McLendon-McDougald Gymnasium.
Both events are free and open to the public.
URL for this article:
http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-308647.html
http://www.nccu.edu/Events
By Kimberly Sweet, The Herald-Sun
January 12, 2003 10:47 pm
http://www.herald-sun.com/sports/nccentral
DURHAM -- On June 8, 1998, James Byrd Jr. was beaten, chained by his ankles to a pickup truck and dragged to his death along a stretch of rural road near Jasper, Texas.
A few days later, documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow decided to take a trip to the eastern Texas town that was suddenly in the national spotlight for a crime reminiscent of lynchings of a century earlier.
"I went down there thinking I was going to see a very clich?, Southern town," said Dow, a New Yorker who had visions of the stereotypical old white sheriff ambling around town. "I had a very North-biased view of what the South was like."
His assumptions were quickly dismissed after he arrived in Jasper and met the town?s black mayor, superintendent and black city council members. On paper, it seemed the town was the model for the New South, with a mixture of black and white leaders representing the town?s 45?55 percent population split between blacks and whites.
Dow wondered what could have led three white men to commit such a heinous crime against a black man in a town that seemed to be an example of successful integration.
After interviewing a string of community members, Dow decided a film documenting the attitudes of Jasper residents about race relations in the community and the crime might help him find an answer. He invited friend and fellow documentarian Marco Williams down to Jasper to help him out.
Williams, who is black, and Dow, who is white, assembled separate production teams to interview Jasper residents about the incident. Williams and an entirely black production team interviewed the city?s black residents, while Dow?s white production team interviewed the white residents. They were the first documentarians to use the approach.
They filmed in 1999 -- the year the three men responsible for the crime were tried.
The result is a documentary called "Two Towns of Jasper," a film the producers say exposes a deep racial divide that, until the James Byrd incident, lurked subtly below the surface of what appeared to be a happily integrated town.
It?s a divide that isn?t limited to Jasper but extends across America, they say.
"These people worked together in both professional and civic ways," Dow said. "But, like most towns, they had very separate towns in private."
Williams said when the production teams came in, people were finally able to talk about it.
"All kinds of things pirouetted back to race," he said.
The film made its North Carolina debut earlier this year at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. It won the Center for Documentary Studies filmmaker award.
This week it returns to the area, with showings at both Duke and N.C. Central universities as part of their Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemorations. It makes its national debut, airing on PBS on Jan. 22. It will appear on UNC-TV on Jan. 23, followed by a broadcast of a town meeting in Jasper hosted by Ted Koppel.
When he first heard about the incident, Williams recalls having similar questions as Dow did, wondering how such a crime could have happened "in the last half of the last decade of the 20th century."
"When I arrived in Jasper, I was brimming with rage and anger and had a high level of agitation," said Williams, who has served a stint as a visiting professor at Duke.
But he didn?t find the same level of anger when he interviewed members of Jasper?s black community. And after making the film, Williams said he discovered the "muted rage" and silence of many blacks in the community is part of the answer.
"The common phrase was ... ?You didn?t ask nothing, do nothing, see nothing. How do you know it?s not going to be you next?? " Williams said. "This was not the first time a black man had been killed suspiciously -- they were afraid for their jobs and afraid for their lives."
Williams said he thinks the black community is partly culpable, because of its fear of speaking out. He said that viewers can see the fear in the film.
"When looking at the blacks, you have to listen to what they say," Williams said. "Their mood is much more subtle and muted than the whites."
Despite knowing each other for nearly 20 years, the filmmakers said the documentary had a big effect on their friendship and that it helped give insight into each other?s lives.
On the surface, their lives are very similar, Williams said, both having grown up and attended colleges in the Northeast.
But the project helped them understand the different lenses through which they viewed the world because of their race, he said.
Dow agreed. "We realize how little we know each other on some levels," he said. "We have a shared history; we?ve known each other for 20 years, but when it comes to race, our viewpoints diverge dramatically at almost every point."
The two filmmakers will appear at both Duke and NCCU this week for discussions after the film?s showing. It plays at NCCU?s School of Education Auditorium on Thursday at 7 p.m. and Duke?s Richard White Auditorium on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Other events during the next couple of weeks in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day include a speech by Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, who became the first black female professor appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. She speaks at Duke Chapel at 4 p.m. Sunday.
State Rep. Mickey Michaux will speak at NCCU?s universitywide convocation honoring King. That event takes place Wednesday at 11 a.m. in the McLendon-McDougald Gymnasium.
Both events are free and open to the public.
URL for this article:
http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-308647.html
