Resources for Week Five

 Responses to the Nightmare of the Jim Crow Era                                                              

                                     Motion Pictures

All three films vividly portray contentious issues of the Jim Crow era: The Great Debaters is set in a small all Black college in a small community in 1930s Texas in which several students develop formidable debating skills; Marshall is about a racial assault case in which the young Thurgood Marshall defends a Black defendant in 1940s Baltimore, and The Long Walk Home is set in 1956 Montgomery Alabama during the year-long bus boycott led by Martin Luther King in which a white woman and her Black maid decide how they will respond to the boycott. Based on a true story.

Documentaries

This documentary explores racism in schools, housing and jobs in Canada during the first half of the 20th century: revealing and poignant.

A powerful documentary about a group of courageous young supporters of civil rights who risked their lives to ride throughout the South on interstate buses in 1961 to challenge unconstitional laws that banned interracial people from sitting together.

Another insightful series written and hosted by Henry Louis Gates

This earlier series by Gates spans the history of African Americans from their time in Africa to the Civil Rights movement. Everything that Gates does is enriching.

 Books

This powerful film is based on the book Unexampled Courage; I highly recommend both the book and the film.  

This powerful book examines the difficult long-term relationship between Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, her tormentor who is behind her in the iconic 1957 photograph. The book also reveals the difficult life that Eckford experienced as a result of her decision to be one of the Little Rock Nine to desegegrate the local high school.

A wonderful, inspiring memoir about a young girl who was born into a poor sharecropper's family and yet eventually became a University President. 

 Suggested material for Week Four on the power of the Lost Cause

Three motion pictures set out below and the PBS series Reconstruction is a good start for this week.

Also

A PBS film that explores the controversy over Griffith's film Birth of a Nation

Canadian Paul Salzman returns to Mississippi aftter forty five years to encounter the individual who beat him up back in 1965. This excellent film would also be valuable for the subsequent 

week on the nightmare of Jim Crow

The first major television series to challenge the Lost Cause

   
Three articles worth reading are "Mildred Rutherford's War" in The  New York Review of Books, Dec. 7, 2023 and "Here's the Civil War  They Don't Want You Know," in The Washington Post, Dec.20, 2023

and "Kennedy and the Lost Cause," in The Atlantic, Dec. 2023.

Clint Smith, poet, scholar and writer for The Atlantic has written a series of essays about sites throughout America that examines how they are currently dealing with the racial cultural changes of recent years. In one of them, a Confederate cemetary he listens to Sons of Confederates who insist that messages that they learned over the years about the nobility and rightness of the Lost Cause are important to preserve. Smith rightly remains sceptical. This is a fascinating book.

 Suggested Books and Films for Week Three 

The best overall four-part documentary for understanding Reconstruction, hosted by Henry Lewis Gates. 

The motion picture dispels the notions that the Confederates were united and it is perhaps the film that dramatizes the attempt at Reconstructing the South and the vicious backlash to it. Based on a true story.

This documentary makes clear that Southern states made every attempt to punish Blacks that included the peonage system which those convicted of the most minor crimes were sent to mines and plantations to work in which some lost their lives. This oppressive system lasted until the 1940s.

An excellent overview of Reconstruction by one of the great historians on the subject. This book is enriched by supplementary visual essays.

               Films and Books that may be helpful to Week Two

This eight-part CBC series that can be seen on Gem or Googled is a good overview of topics about Canadian Blacks that may not be familar to most viewers. Part One explores the history of slavery in French and English Canada 

An excellent four-part documentary on Lincoln that gives a large billing to Frederick Douglass but at this point the series can only be seen on Apple TV

Possibly the most realistic and powerful motion picture on slavery, sometimes painful to watch but full of striking insights. The film is available on DVD in the public library system.

Based on a true story about a revolt on a slave trip, Amistad is also

at times a difficult film to watch at times but the scenes on the ship are visceral, more compelling than the trial that follows. The film features two memorable performances. You will know who they are if you see this 1997 film available on DVD.

This 1990 film is the first motion picture to celebrate the Black military participation during the Civil War.

   The Underground Railway (2021) now only available on Amazon

is based on the terrific 2016 novel of the same name by Colson  Whitehead. Director Barry Jenkins masterful ten-part adaptation

   is well worth watching for how he replicates and alters the novel. 

Harriet  is a powerful film that celebrates the accomplishments of the most important conductor of the underground railroad.

Two PBS documentaries available in the public library system well worth watching are Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom and Becoming Frederick Douglass.

Henry Louis Gates' The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song on PBS is a four-part series that explore the history and culture of the American Black Church. The series is available through the public library system. 

A good four-part overview of the history of slavery that is available in the public library system and some of it can be seen online. 

 

                                    Novels

Set during the 17th century, A Mercy explores why an enslaved woman might ask a stranger to take possession of her daughter and the generational repercusions of that decision.  A powerful and insightful novel about the early period of slavery.

                                        

Two wonderful novels by Geraldine Brooks, the first imagines the life of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's, Little Women, whose idealism is shattered during the Civil War, and the second toggles between 1850s Kentucky in which an enslaved young groom trains the greatest race horse of the 19th century and 2019 Washington D.C. in which a young Black academic finds a discarded painting of a Black groom and a horse. Brooks reveals the continuities between the forms of racism displayed during slavery and how they are expressed in the present. 

                                        Nonfiction

Regarded by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2023, Master Slave Husband Wife chronicles the extraordinary 

    escape of an enslaved husband and wife from Georgia to Nova         Scotia to Britain as the light-skinned wife poses as the master over     her darker skinned husband. This is a scholarly book that could          become a film adaptation.  

During the Civil War, Confederate agents used Montreal as a base to concoct plots, including an operation of biological warfare, against the Union government and Northerners. Canada after the Civil War became a haven for fugitive Confederates, including Jefferson Davis, who were welcomed by the most of the media and financial elites. These are only two of the compelling stories narrated by Julian Sher  about the role of Canada during the War and how Canadians supported both sides in his highly readable account.

 Books and Films that may be helpful to Week One

                                                                 Films

An excellent historical overview of racism
 in America

An overview of how indigneous peoples have been protrayed historically in films

An excellent portrait of a little-known civil rights
leader who organized the 1963 March on Washington

 Overview of Course on the History of American White Supremacy

I will be presenting over zoom the following ten-week course under the auspices of Learning Unlimited in Etobicoke in the west end of Toronto from Wednesday January 10 to March 13, 2024 at 10AM E.S.T.  If you are interested in this course, you can go to their website. Prior to each week, I will be offering a post with books and films relevant to that week.

American White Supremacy, its History and Spreading Threat 

Presented by Robert Douglas MA

What does the history of racial superiority, including the attempt to rewrite part of that history, tell us about the resilience and creativity of Blacks and other non-whites who resisted the assumptions underpinning white superiority and the horrific conditions they endured? To what extent did that struggle affect the development of Canadian history? How did that legacy in America morph into the Big Lie of our own times and pose threats to democracy, threats that could spill across the border into Canada?

1: Expressions of White Supremacy: An Overview

Manifestations of white supremacy, not only in the most overt forms of control and terror, but in its more subtle and myriad expressions, are pivotal in understanding the American experience. Beyond power politics or issues of war and peace, the corrosion of racism can be a central lens through which to view American history and its Canadian reverberations.

2: Free and Enslaved Blacks Challenge White Supremacy during Slavery and the Civil War

White Supremacy enabled exploitative enslaved labour to enrich Southern planters and Northern financial interests. Despite the exercise of raw power, Blacks demonstrated courage and resiliency through different forms of resistance to challenge the assumption of Black inferiority.

3: Reconstruction: A Multiracial Democracy Thwarted by the Re-emergence of the forces of White Supremacy

The end of the Civil War heralded the possibility of a biracial democracy but after a dozen years, that dream was eclipsed by white supremacists who instituted racial terror, economic control through sharecropping and disenfranchisement of black males, conditions that the nation accepted to promote national unity.

4: A Big Lie: Whitewashing the Narrative about Slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction

The narrative of the Lost Cause and its persistent power will be critiqued to demonstrate how it influenced historiography, education, memorial sites, and popular culture, notably films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.

5: Responses to the Nightmare of Jim Crow: The Great Migration, and the Birth of the Civil Rights Movement

From the 1890s to the 1950s, the South exercised a power that came close to recreating chattel slavery in which Blacks were subjected to police and vigilante violence supported by lawmakers and the courts. The Great Migration led to a demographic shift and the emergence of Black intellectual and cultural communities and white resistance. Grassroot activists in both the North and the South laid the foundation for the emergence of the civil rights movement.

6: Responses to the Civil Rights Gains: The Reframing of White Supremacy

The efforts of activists brought an end to legal segregation in 1965, but for over half a century since, explicit and covert racism was adopted by Republican and Democratic administrations and upheld by Supreme Court decisions. They weaponized racial justice notably through mass Black incarceration, dog whistle politics and policies that supported systemic racism.

7: The Consequences of Trump’s Gaslighting of America

Racism became more overt after the election of Barack Obama (2008) and contributed to the rise and power of Donald Trump. The latter’s incendiary rhetoric, his racist policies at American borders, his willingness to scapegoat others during the pandemic and inability to tell the truth, notably about the 2020 election and its violent aftermath, have resulted in an illiberal cult-like Republican Party. Trump’s authoritarianism and illiberalism have cast a dark shadow over Canadian life and politics.

 8: Attempts at Racial Reckoning: An Assessment

The widely publicized killings of Blacks, having spiked a national conversation about race ignited multiple controversies: the disproportionate continuing police violence against Blacks, the call for reparations, the efforts to address medical abuse, the efforts to demythologize Confederate heroes and the removal of historical symbols. Despite the efforts of some whites to address their own racism, how much has changed? 

9: The Racial and Cultural Divide in Contemporary America

While Blacks fear physical assault and experience systemic racism, whites, fueled by far-right disinformation, fear replacement and an honest exploration of their history. These challenges are illustrated by the inequities and mistreatment in the prison systems, controversies about what can be taught in schools, the banning of books, and the inability of MAGA supporters to accept reality. To what extent are these divisions present in Canada.

10: The Potential of the Arts to Challenge White Supremacy and Systemic Racism

Whether the arts – film, television, fiction, poetry, the visual arts, music – can challenge assumptions about White Supremacy depends on the courage of the artist to avoid sentimentality and sanitizing historical and contemporary realities by offering honest, uncomfortable truths.

 

 

 

 

A Potentially World-Destroying Virus: World on Fire

Zofia Wichlacz in World on Fire.

This review contains spoilers.

Watching the sprawling, emotionally gripping seven-part drama World on Fire on PBS Masterpiece Theatre has increased my frustration with those (mostly) policy-makers who draw analogies between the COVID-19 virus and World War Two. Boris Johnson has fantasized that he is the second coming of Churchill and Trump absurdly sees himself as a wartime president in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, a position that pundit Max Boot hilariously debunks in an acerbic column. In a more serious vein, an historian who has written a book about the politics of mourning wonders why Trump would urge the citizenry to see themselves as “warriors” and return to work even if it means sacrificing themselves, when there has not been even a hint about top-down national (as opposed to personal) mourning, given that, as of this writing, over one-hundred-thousand Americans have succumbed to this virus.

What World on Fire does is to put in perspective how our current crisis, even with an invisible enemy, pales in comparison (provided robust testing, contact tracing and isolation, social distancing and personal hygiene protocols remain in place) with a more lethal form of pestilence, World War Two. I say this with the caveat that the first season takes us only to the fall of France and the epic rescue of British troops from Dunkirk during the spring of 1940. Whereas most war dramas focus on leadership (Darkest Hour about Churchill), a specific episode (Dunkirk) or the Holocaust (Schindler’s List), Fire offers a larger canvas including Manchester, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw. Writer Peter Bowker, reflecting a modern sensibility, explores subjects that are usually passed over or given short shrift through the interlocking stories of ordinary people, their fears, the decisions they make and how the war changes them. What is noticeably missing are the usual nationalistic tropes – the flag waving, the inspirational speeches, the spotlight on masculine prowess – as the characters are primarily driven by personal motives.

In the table-setting first episode, we are first introduced to several storylines that provide a broad canvas. We begin with Harry (Jonah Hauer-King) and Lois (Julia Brown), two young lovers from vastly different backgrounds boldly attempting to disrupt a rally of British fascists. After they are arrested, we are introduced to Lois’s father Douglas (Sean Bean) and Harry’s mother Robina (Lesley Manville). Months later we meet Harry again working as a translator at the British Embassy in Warsaw, living with a Polish family, including Kasia (Zofia Wichłacz), with whom he has become romantically involved, and her brothers. Harry is a friend of Nancy (Helen Hunt), an American radio journalist who warns him to evacuate Poland with his new girl friend before the German army arrives. She is primarily stationed in Berlin, where her neighbours are a German family burdened with a secret. Nancy warns her nephew, Webster (Brian J. Smith), working as a doctor in Paris, to leave before the Germans arrive but he is in a cross-racial gay relationship with Albert (Parker Sawyer), a French-African jazz performer, and disregards her warning.

From this summary of the first episode, it might appear that the content is a lot to absorb and the guns of war have not even started. Some viewers may even wonder whether Fire has too many coincidences or wanders too frequently into melodrama territory. I do not deny that viewers can find evidence for their criticisms but I think there are solid reasons for watching this engaging miniseries. Without sentimentality, Bowker’s writing skillfully weaves the storylines together and, with one exception, they are compelling; he allows for character development, and the ensemble cast delivers nuance in their roles with strong performances against panoramic war scenes and more intimate, searing moments.

Helen Hunt in World on Fire.

Bowker fashions psychological portraits that allow him to start with the individual experience before fanning outward toward the war. His decision to explore character is especially evident in how he etches Douglas and Robina, who do not experience this war directly, but in their different ways still bear scars from the Great War. Douglas is a conscientious objector whose worldview was shaped after he returned from the Somme in 1916, suffering from shell shock. That trauma still flares up during panic attacks when he experiences disabling flashbacks that he believes have prevented him from being a good parent to Lois and his ne’er-do-well son, Tom (Ewan Mitchell). Robina is emotionally distant, a snobbish, embittered person whose defenses gradually break down as circumstances in her life change and as we learn more about the reasons for her anger. Her rightwing politics is leavened by her acerbic sense of humour. Bean and Manville are standouts, bringing depth and complexity to their roles.

In the Polish storyline, the most intense of the series, after a brief, almost idyllic prelude in which Harry experiences life with a Polish family, the Germans invade, wreaking indiscriminate destruction in their wake. Given the change in his personal life, he can’t take the decisive step to write Lois and end that relationship. He persuades Kasia to marry him so that she can return to England with him. She decides to stay instead, sending her younger brother, then enlists in the Polish Resistance. The subsequent scenes featuring her are among the most harrowing in the series. Survival depends more on luck than taking careful precautions; anyone could be arbitrarily chosen in a roundup for execution to avenge the death of a S.S. officer. Kasia undertakes actions that take a psychic toll, which would have been inconceivable to her before the war. The Polish actress, Zofia Wichłacz, is compellingly persuasive as Kasia.

Harry arrives home with Jan (Eryk Biedunkiewicz), whom he introduces to his mother as a rescued Polish refugee who will live with them. In England Jan is lost and withdrawn until he begins a friendship with Douglas and manages to feel less intimidated by a thawing Robina; there is a wonderful scene in which she confronts the boys who have bullied Jan at school.

Harry enlists in the army, acquiring an officer’s commission, but freezes at a crucial moment during a firefight and does not reveal leadership skills until his company reach the beaches of Dunkirk. He insists, over the objections of his own men, that he remain with shell-shocked soldiers not under his command until they are allowed to take seats in the rescue ships, a gesture of courage and compassion providing evidence of his own development as well as an insight into his damaged father.

But it is the women who most impress with their steadiness and resilience. Lois, whose character according to Bowker was based on his own grandmother, demonstrates a resolute quality of independence as she sings jazz tunes for the troops and is determined to raise her child, if need be on her own. The often brassy Nancy, whose character is based on the journalist Clare Hollingworth, serves as a Greek chorus, providing the wider context of the war with her broadcasts and refusing to be intimidated by her German minder. Moreover, in another gripping storyline, Nancy provides valuable support to the German couple desperate to protect their young epileptic daughter from the eugenics policies of the medical authorities who are euthanizing children judged as physically or mentally impaired. At great risk, she attempts to smuggle out of the country an investigative report on the subject. The award-winning Helen Hunt is excellent in this role, exhibiting both strength of character and her vulnerability.

Sean Bean in World on Fire.

When the Germans occupy France after a six-week Blitzkrieg, the fear that the democratic countries could succumb to the efficient Nazi war machine deepens, prompting Robina back in Manchester to declare that England must negotiate with Hitler, a common sentiment at a time when few could conceive of the evil magnitude inherent in the Nazi system. In Paris the virus of anti-Semitism has contaminated the streets. The biracial gay relationship storyline becomes more fraught with danger as Germans occupy Parisian dwellings. Not even aware that he is gay, the Nazis arrest Albert for the crime of being black. At this point it is premature to assess the effectiveness of this subplot. Season one is more about setting up the tension. I think everything depends on how Bowker decides to play it out in the second season.

The same suspension of judgment cannot be made for the episodes featuring Tom, Douglas’s troubled son, who eventually enlists in the navy over the wishes of his pacifist father. The sequences featuring Tom do not contribute to the overall strength of the series in part because his character feels flatlined. A naval battle in the South Atlantic is well choreographed, director Thomas Napper staging scenes of carnage and death, but there is little indication that Tom, who is primarily interested in gambling, has viewed his experience as a test of character except to be sobered by the casualties and show some generosity toward a wounded comrade. When we encounter him next in a war scene, he is on a Dunkirk rescue boat; we now recognize how Bowker has decided to integrate his story but it feels forced. Instead of assisting evacuees, he panics and flees to escape the Nazi strafing and runs along the beach until he is hit; we wonder whether that is the end of his story. Yet he shows up much later as a wounded soldier in a French hospital, attended by Webster. Now the interrelation borders on the risible. Most of the connections and coincidences associated with the intertwining stories, some of which I have not mentioned, make sense and can often be moving but Bowker will need to either drop this storyline or radically rethink Tom’s involvement for season two.

Season one ends with Harry being dropped into Poland as an undercover agent to provide intelligence about the Polish Resistance. He is told by his superior in London that he might not survive, a comment that does not even faze him. This sequence provides a solid bookend for the series. First the character of Harry has evolved; he has grown and has shed the naive illusions and indecisiveness he displayed earlier. He has been chosen for this assignment because of his Eastern European experience and his linguistic skills. The actor Jonah Hauer-King is particularly well-suited for this role because his grandparents were Polish-Jewish refugees before 1939. He is therefore able to deliver the subtitled Polish lines with fluency. As one might expect this sequence is packed with nail-biting tension that culminates with a cliff-hanging conclusion whetting viewers’ appetite for the second season.

In one very real sense, the fear in 1940 that ordinary people did not know how the war would end is similar to our anxiety that we do not know when the virulence of the Coronavirus will dissipate and when we can return to a more normal life. We can take comfort now that we know how things did turn out five years after Dunkirk and it was obviously a huge relief to the people who survived a war in which seventy-five million died. But the world was never the same again. I expect that our life will be irrevocably altered even if an effective treatment is found or a vaccine created that ends this virus. We may be better for it.

World on Fire can be streamed on PBS.org.