New Screenings of Dare Not Walk Alone for Black History Month 2011

Great to see a new screening of Dare Not Walk Alone in Florida in February. Check out the Tallahassee Film Society website. Showing is February 3 through 8, with an appearance by Tom Roche who was closely involved in bringing the film to its finished state.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday Observed

Today we honor and remember the man born yesterday, January 15, in 1929. He would be 83. Dr. King left us with so much good advice, including my favorite quote:

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?”

Over the years I have tried to do my part to keep Dr. King's legacy fresh in the minds of new generations, for example by helping others to capture the genius and bravery of his campaign of non-violence against segregation. (You can catch a glimpse here or spend 80 minutes to watch the whole story.)

We should never forget how much the civil rights movement was a fight to wrest equality and human dignity from the hands of those who would forever have denied it. To win that fight with a minimum of bloodshed was one of the great human achievements of the last 50 years.

At Last! The St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument

This month, May of 2011, St. Johns County in Florida took another step towards reconciling its racial divisions: the unveiling of the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument.

Photo by Carlstak

Built to honor citizens of all ages who endured harassment, beatings, jail time and worse, in their efforts to bring civil rights to that city during the 1960s, the monument was the result of many years of hard work by a nonprofit group called the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers.

As noted by Ken Bryan, chairman of the St. Johns County Commission, in the St. Augustine Record, the fundraising efforts of the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers included screenings of Jeremy Dean's "Dare Not Walk Alone," the award-winning documentary about local events that precipitated passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

These screenings served a double purpose, raising funds while also raising awareness of just how great were the sacrifices of the Foot Soldiers. And throughout the movie you see the brilliance of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s strategy of non-violence, often orchestrated by Andrew Young, and executed by "ordinary" men, women, and sometimes children, who became, through their actions, "extraordinary."

As a nation, we owe these foot soldiers a debt of gratitude for daring to put their lives on the line for what is right, and to cement for all Americans the equalities first envisioned in the country's constitution.

Dare Not Walk Alone Documentary Has Made a Difference: But the pace of change is too slow

Things can change for the better and movies can help make positive change happen, we just wish the world moved faster. On Thursday the 9th of last month, the state of Florida officially expressed regret to civil rights marchers who were beaten and jailed for protesting segregated beaches and lunch counters in St. Augustine in the 1960s, as detailed in this report in the Tampa Bay Tribune and documented in Dare Not Walk Alone.

As the article notes, the highly emotional events of last December 9th "were set in motion by state Sen. Tony Hill, a Jacksonville Democrat who unsuccessfully sought to pass a bill in the 2010 legislative session to clear the marchers' records." What the article does not mention is that Sen. Tony Hill himself was set in motion by Dare Not Walk Alone. Here's what he wrote about the film back in 2006:

"The documentary was so moving that, as chairman of the Black Caucus of the State of Florida, I have filed a bill for the 2007 legislative session in the House and the Senate to have all records cleared for anyone who was arrested because of segregated laws. That is how compelling the film was to me."

We applauded Sen. Hill for his actions then, and we applaud the Florida legislature and departing Governor Crist for this recent step in the right direction. However, I am sure that Sen. Hill is just as frustrated as we are that it has taken more than 45 years for this expression of regret to emerge. And it should not have taken 3 years for Sen. Hill's bill to result in action, and even then an action which falls short of a blanket pardon and clearing of criminal records that have encumbered these heroic marchers for decades (apparently it will be up to individual law enforcement agencies to clear the records, if they decide to do so).

But this was at least a step in the right direction, and it makes us feel better about all the time and money and effort we put into making the film. I guess it was unrealistic to expect one film to change the world overnight, but perhaps incrementally, over time, it will chip away at the lingering issues of racial injustice that still must be addressed.

Rent Civil Rights Doc "Dare Not Walk Alone" at BestBuy's CinemaNow

The ways of watching a movie they are a'changing, and we can now offer one more way to watch Dare Not Walk Alone: the CinemaNow digital rental service from BestBuy. Click here to check it out.

Digital rental of the film will cost you $3.99. You can also buy it digitally for $9.95. Be sure to check out the compatibility of your hardware before downloading. (BTW, if you do watch the movie using this service we'd love to hear about your experience.)

Enjoy the movie!

Watch on Amazon Video on Demand: The civil rights story like you've never seen it before

Just a quick update to let you know there is another way to watch the NAACP Image Award-nominated movie Dare Not Walk Alone: Amazon Video on Demand.

Amazon Video on Demand means you can buy the movie for $14.99 or get a 7-day rental for just $1.99.
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Black History, White Apology: Proof Obama's America is not post-racial

Stephen Cobb, Executive Producer of Dare Not Walk Alone writes:

At the end of February I posted a video on YouTube titled "Black History, White Apology." Using footage from Dare Not Walk Alone, the two and a half minute video shows a special church service held in 2004 in which the church apologized to African Americans who had been turned away from the church in 1964 and arrested. Within a few weeks it had been viewed over 1,000 times and received more than two dozen comments. Sadly, some of those comments were deeply racist in nature. I deleted the worst of them but what you read there now is representative and some of it is quite depressing.

I posted the video because of the "apologies" offered last month by Rupert Murdoch and his New York Post relating to a cartoon published in that paper. The cartoon portrayed the architect of our government's proposed stimulus package as very black chimpanzee lying in a pool of blood, shot dead by a pair of white and arguably smug looking white police officers from NYPD.

Coming less than 30 days into first African American presidency of these United States, this cartoon was loudly condemned as offensive. Personally, as someone who voted for Barack Obama, I found it not only offensive but deeply distasteful and frankly very worrying. Apart from anything else, the trigger for the cartoon, an incident in which a woman's face was savagely ripped off by a chimpanzee, was not something that should have been made light of in any context; add in the history of NYPD race relations and the widely known history of "monkey" and "ape" as racial slurs, plus the fact that the president is both black and the architect of the stimulus package, and I think a joke about a police shooting of said architect, comparing him to an animal that violently attacked a woman, is clearly very, very wrong.

In this context, the apologies by the NY Post and Mr. Murdoch were very, very weak. In fact, I'd say they bordered on smug and insulting. But as I was reading through blog posts about the whole incident I realized a lot of people didn't "get" what was wrong with both the cartoon and the apologies. Indeed, there was a lot of talk about how the cartoon was not offensive because it refers to the writer of the stimulus package and the president didn't actually write the package and so: no offense, no foul, no apology needed.

It seems to me that people who think like that probably don't spend much time thinking about what it's like to live your life on the receiving end of pervasive, violent, and demeaning prejudice. I thought the apology video might put things in perspective. However, in the description of the YouTube video I did not reference the cartoon or draw any direct parallels between the church apology and the New York Post incident. I assumed the connections were fairly obvious. (I had already posted a separate clip "Why the New York Post cartoon was offensive" in which two of the women involved in the 1964 church integration incidents described how a deacon of the church called them "monkeys.")

Basically I wanted to show the world what a heartfelt apology from white Americans to black Americans looked like. Then the reactions started to pour in. They ranged from the electronic equivalent of a Ku Klux Klan cross burning to a vicious condemnation of the minister leading the church service because he appeared to be reading the words of apology (maybe the video was misleading--he was actually struggling not to choke up with emotion).

The comments continue to come in. While nobody can reasonably claim that YouTube is an accurate reflection of a nation's state of mind, it's clear from some of these comments that we have not yet reached the "post-racial" state of mind that some have posited. Particularly worrying to me is this sense that "white people have nothing to apologize for."

Here's how I see it. I'm white. My ancestors ruthlessly exploited the people and resources of Africa, Australia, and North America. The standard of living and quality of education that I enjoyed as a child flowed from the "benefits" of that exploitation. In a very real sense that gave me an unfair advantage in life. So yes, if you are black, I'd like to let you know I'm sorry that happened. I apologize for what my people did. And I make that apology regardless of whether or not any actual relative of mine did anything wrong.

Sure, my parents were hard working white people. But they lived in a society, the standard of living of which flowed in no small part from massive theft of property and exploitation of people, the "benefits" of which are obvious to anyone who cares to look, in countries as diverse as Britain, the United States, France, and Belgium. Many citizens of those countries have worked for generations to make the most of what they have, but you can't escape the fact that some of what they had was at one point stolen (like the hill my house sits on in upstate New York, taken by force from the original owners of this land).

Living in denial of how we got here will not help us achieve a better future for ourselves and our children, a future of which we are all equally worthy.
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100 Years Ago: The Founding of the NAACP

This week, 100 years ago, a most amazing meeting took place, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. This meeting resulted in the formation of the NAACP which went on to become the oldest, and arguably the most influential, of the civil rights organizations. The stated mission of the NAACP is:

"To ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination."

It is hard to think of a more worthy mission than that, then or now. The NAACP has a year of events planned and a new drive to further its mission. Check it out at http://www.naacp.org/ and consider becoming a member.

As you probably know, NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People although the term colored people is these days retained mainly in accordance with tradition and is generally not used anywhere else.

One of the most amazing things to me about the founding of the NAACP is the diverse group of people who got things started at that first meeting. These days a cynic might think this group was assembled just for the sake of diversity. There several African-American men, two women (one white, one African-American) plus several white men, one of whom was Jewish.

But hey, their hearts were all in the same place, and it was the right place, and the rest, as they say, is history: a glorious 100-year history of improving the rights of all.
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