Continuing in my moviequest to educate/re-educate myself during Black History month, last weekend I watched Fences and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

Fences was released in 2016, starring Viola Davis and Denzel Washington, who also directed it.

From IMDb: A working-class African-American father tries to raise his family in the 1950s, while coming to terms with the events of his life.

The performances were excellent. The stories were anecdotal, and woo-boy, hard to watch. Troy, the character played by Denzel, is admirable in some ways, a total asshole in others. His jealousy and sabotage of his son’s potential sports career hurt the heart.

It felt a lot like a play, so I was not surprised, upon looking it up, that it was based on a stage play.

There were a few lighter moments, some camaraderie among the friends, but mostly, it was the opposite of a feel-good movie. Do I feel like I know better what it was like to be a working class Black family in Pittsburgh in the 1950’s? Maybe.

Many moons ago, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was broadcast on, I believe, CBS, in 1974. I saw it, as a child, and was very curious to see how it held up. It won nine Primetime Emmys.

IMDb says: Beginning during the racial turmoil of 1960s Louisiana, 110-year-old ex-slave Jane Pittman grants an interview to a persistent journalist and relates the remarkable story of her life. Orphaned early, she toils on a plantation until a chance meeting with a white Union soldier named Brown changes her outlook. Jane’s emancipation marks only the beginning of an arduous and heartbreaking odyssey, framed by the horrors of slavery and the justice of the civil rights movement. 

The author of the book, Ernest J. Gaines, was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2012. The screenwriter who converted the novel into the screenplay was Tracy Keenan Wynn.

There were some incredibly moving moments in the story, and other parts that made me painfully aware this work was written, back in the day, by two white dudes, who had to throw in some “well, black people are the ones who started slavery” and #NotAllWhitePeople references. Maybe it’s what they believed, maybe they had to throw that in to appease the network. See the speech below, powerfully delivered by Thalmus Rasulala. CW: N-word.

So how does the movie hold up? Ms. Cicely Tyson gave an extraordinary performance, and well deserved her Best Actress in a Drama Emmy, as well as a special Actress of the Year award. She was in her forties when it filmed, and taking on a character who ages, from her twenties to about a hundred and ten (they brought in a child actress to play her at about ten) was about so much more than the makeup. Although that, too, was impressive.

She is a film goddess, and why we don’t think of her right alongside Meryl Streep is a mystery. (Not.)

If you are a POC and haven’t seen this, or haven’t seen it in a while, be aware there is a LOT of violence shown. It kind of surprises me that they went as far as they did, for a prime time network show in the 1970’s, but even if it’s not as graphic and bloody as it could be, it is still very disturbing.

More disturbing to me is feeling like we haven’t made ANY progress, from the pre-Civil Rights Movement times. When I saw this movie as a child, I was horrified, but comforted by the thought that this was the distant past, and well, that was the South. We didn’t have segregated drinking fountains any more, and nobody was bombing or burning down churches and schools. My family was interracial, my schools were interracial, everyone got along fine.

I lived in that bubble for a long time.

And now I know better. I know that when we are not outright killing young Black men at the hands of cops and vigilantes, we are targeting them for minor drug charges or misdemeanors and incarcerating them for dis-proportionally long sentences. We simply don’t call it “slavery” any more, we call it “prison labor” and give them matching uniforms.

We reward them for beating their wives and girlfriends, in the NFL, and punish them for taking a knee for injustice. We berate strong Black women for raising children outside the nuclear family, when in most cases WE are the ones who’ve broken up families for generations by killing or incarcerating the fathers.

Did you know that a white man with a criminal record is more likely to get a job interview than a black man without one? But “those people” should just get jobs and support their families, right?

And we still don’t want to let people of color vote. From racist trash like Kris Kobach and his Cross-Check program, to voter suppression and purges by Brian Kemp, self-dealing *Governor of Georgia, to Vermont where, with Blacks accounting for less than 1% of the total state population, more Black men as a percentage of the population are incarcerated than in any other state in the USA. Meanwhile, the sole Vermont legislator who was a WOC was racially harassed out of office, and the most nationally prominent Vermont Senator keeps quacking on about how we shouldn’t get distracted by “identity politics.”

Racism isn’t just an issue in the deep South.

To my sorrow, it’s happening everywhere in the USA. And so, it’s on my shoulders as a white person (which I can type, but did you know that POC on social media like Facebook have to type yte ppl or some other code to avoid getting banned for “hate speech”?) – anyway, I need to be aware, to try to inform myself, and to leverage my white privilege to protect the rights of Black people, where ever, whenever I can.

I hope you’ll join me.

Got a good movie about Black history to recommend?
(Or see my list here.)
Your thoughts?