Sundance Review: 'Tell Them We Are Rising' Underscores The Legacy & Importance Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities

To this day, education is not an inherent right. The effects of segregation are still deeply steeped in the Black community, and unless there is careful nurturing within the family home or by some particularly devoted educators, many Black people in this country have found themselves severely under and uneducated. Despite the lack of resources that are devoted to many public schools particularly in impoverished communities; Black people have always desired the opportunity to learn more about not only themselves but also the world around them. After all, is that not education’s purpose?

In his documentary feature, “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Stanley Nelson tells the virtually untold story of the institutions that helped to redefine what it means to be Black in America. Beginning in the days of slavery when even teaching a slave to read could cost you your life no matter the color of your skin, Nelson opens his film by outlining what historian Marybeth Gasman labels as, the “brutality of ignorance.” White supremacists and plantation owners deeply feared uprisings should enslaved people become truly aware of the circumstances in which they were forced to live. Therefore, when Emancipation did come, the desire to read and learn spread like wildfire. It was as if, “the entire race awoke.”

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Image: Firelight Films

Interview: Filmmaker Raoul Peck On His Oscar-Nominated 'I Am Not Your Negro,' Encountering James Baldwin & Confronting America

In his spellbinding and heartbreaking Academy Award nominated film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck examines the story that James Baldwin never finished writing. “Remember This House” was to be a sweeping narrative exploring the lives, journeys, and deaths of three pivotal men in our history; Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. An intricate and fascinating narrative, “I Am Not Your Negro,” gives us a view of both Baldwin and Peck’s journeys as Black men in America, encountering racism and violence.

Recently, Mr. Peck and I sat down to chat about the highly acclaimed film, the thirty pages from Baldwin’s unfinished text that sparked the idea and Peck’s own confrontation with America and Hollywood in our current political climate which as Baldwin stated, is one full of “apathy and ignorance.”

Raoul Peck: Hi Aramide

Aramide Tinubu: Hello, Mr. Peck how are you?

RP: I’m fine, thank you.

AT: Wonderful. I wanted to say first and foremost that I thought, “I Am Not Your Negro” was stunning. I saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, and I watched it again last night. It is so riveting, especially considering the political climate that we find ourselves in.

RP: Thank you.

AT: I wanted to ask you first about how you got a hold of the notes from James Baldwin’s “Remember This House.” How were you able to get his estate to agree to hand them over, and what prompted you to do this film after receiving them?

RP: First of all, I decided a little more than ten years ago to tackle Baldwin; to go back to Baldwin. I’ve lived with Baldwin all of my life. I read him very early on as a young man, and he never left me. Baldwin is not somebody who if you read a book or two you cast him aside. He’s not that kind of writer. He’s a philosopher; he’s a poet, he’s a visionary. He has almost a scientific approach to this country, to the world and to human beings. So, he’s almost like a private philosopher that you can come back to and help understand whatever issue that you have or political question that you have. It’s all in Baldwin already. So you can read different books at different stages and come back to that thinking. So it’s very coherent. When I decided to go back, it was more or less to share that thinking with other people because I felt the time was right, and I felt that we really needed a voice like this. Because there were some victories with the Civil Right’s Movement; we have Martin Luther King Day, we have Black History Month, most people think everything is good now, we’ve solved all of the problems. We have monuments; we have museums. But, that’s not the case.

AT: Not at all.

RP: It was necessary politically to bring that back to the forefront and to bring these words in the forefront. When I went to inquire about the rights, everybody told me, “The estate will never even answer your letter, they are known to be very reluctant.” But, I just wrote a letter, and they responded within three days.

AT: Wow!

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Image: Raoul Peck

Ava DuVernay Meets Raoul Peck: How Black Narratives Collide In Two New Documentaries — NYFF

We exist in a world of cycles. Perhaps nowhere else in society are these cycles as prevalent as they are in the entertainment industry. When I grew up in the ‘90s, there were a plethora of black faces on the big and small screens. From Will Smith’s “Fresh Prince” to  “Living Single” (aka the original “Sex and the City”), I could turn to any network television station to see myself, or the people closest to me, represented in some way on screen.

Though diverse programming was rich and plentiful in that first decade of my life, the second decade ushered in a near complete erasure of brown faces. While megastars like Will Smith and Denzel Washington were able to garner leads in films, other black actors were relegated to sidekick positions or “magical negro” roles. This new age of entertainment extended to the small screen as well. As shows like “Moesha” and “Girlfriends” aired their final episodes, black actors were pushed into the background, appearing only as guest stars or rarely seen at all. In the past few years, the regulation of black bodies to particular spaces has shifted once again. It appears that we have returned to a moment where black lives are more interesting than ever; and from the perspective of an insider looking out, this “sudden shift” comes as no surprise at all.

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Interview: Filmmaker Dawn Porter on Her New Film ‘TRAPPED,’ Abortion Rights & Shame in the Black Community

There is one abortion clinic left in the state of Mississippi, and there are three in the state of Alabama. Since 2010, in a flurry of backlash aimed at the Obama Administration, state governments particularly in the South, have passed a series of restrictive laws attacking women’s health rights and access to abortions. These TRAP laws, or Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, are spreading rapidly across the United States, primarily affecting impoverished women and women of color.

Filmmaker Dawn Porter’s “TRAPPED” focuses on the three remaining clinics in the state of Alabama.  The film follows Dr. Willie Parker, a Black abortion doctor who left Chicago to return to his hometown of Alabama and practice, and Marva Sadler, an administrator at Whole Women’s Health. Sadler works tirelessly to make sure that women in Alabama continue to have access to abortions. The film also chronicles the lives of everyday women, who are grappling with very difficult decisions in the midst of unfathomable circumstances.

“TRAPPED” will be premiering on PBS Independent Lens today, Monday, June 20th. Leading up to its TV premiere, I sat down with Dawn Porter to chat about the film, TRAP laws, our current political climate, the shamming of women, and how these laws are significantly affecting Black women.

Aramide Tinubu: First of all, I would like to say that “Trapped” is incredible. I was just outdone as a Black woman who perceives herself to well-versed in women’s rights issues and Planned Parenthood and so forth, that, I knew nothing about these TRAP laws. I also had no idea what was happening with abortion clinics in the South. What is it about the South that festers and fosters this type of legislation?

Dawn Porter: I felt exactly the way you felt. I felt outdone. I was in Mississippi working on my film, “Spies of Mississippi” and I was filming an interview with a reporter from the Jackson-Clarion Ledger, Jerry Mitchell.  I was reading the paper and I read that there was one abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi, and my jaw dropped. I thought, “How could this be?” So I called them up and asked if I could come over, and this Black man comes out. I think he was curious about me. There had been some news coverage about it being the last clinic, but the Black press was not there. However, when you look at who is accessing abortions, the first overriding number is that forty-nine percent of people getting abortions are living below the poverty level. So what that means is that even though most of the women who are getting abortions are white women, the second largest group is Black women; something like twenty-nine percent.  However, we over-represent in terms of poverty, and I think there is an overlay with poverty.

AT: Oh without question.

DP: So, I think this is a Black health and economic community crisis. That is why I felt like Dr. [Willie] Parker was such a gift. Being a Black man who is sensitive to those issues, he had no problem going there. He understood every issue that intertwines in the Black community; religion, poverty, women’s rights, women’s positions and how women are treated. So, I was as stunned as you were, and I just wanted to understand how this happened. But, the second piece to this is that this is not just a Southern phenomenon. I think there are twenty-seven states with very similar TRAP laws. This is all tied back to politics and to racial politics. None of us could have predicted the Trump political era, and I hope that we are going to stay it for a long time; the forces that came to create this. Hopefully he will not become President, because I don’t think he is qualified to be President.

AT: Not at all!

DP: Most importantly, I hope that people do learn something from his appeal. What I learned is that in 2008, President Obama is elected. In 2010 there is an enormous backlash in conservative states who cannot believe that this man has been elected. The state governments go completely red. So, at the state and local level you have this, and then you have Tea Party folks in, and that’s when you start to see these laws targeting women. From 2013 until today, abortion becomes social issue number one. In Alabama, the citizens are at the bottom in terms of education, their Medicaid system is bankrupt and they have no budget…

AT: Widespread unemployment.

DP: …unemployment. Abortion is taking up the time of the legislature, and that is a political crisis. I think that it is no accident that these laws came into place in response to the Obama Administration, and a backlash against a feeling of more liberal and progressive policies taking root. All of that disproportionately impacts women of color.

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Image: TRAPPED

ESPN’s ’30 For 30′ Alum Ezra Edelman’s ‘O.J.: Made In America’ Is a Sweeping Work on the Seduction of Simpson’s Celebrity Juxtaposed Against a Devastated Black L.A. Community

The year Orenthal James Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, I was entering Kindergarten. I vaguely remember the hoopla surrounding the trial, sitting on my father’s knee while he discussed it with his friends, or hovering around my mother and my aunts; my ears listening intently to “grown folks business”. The things that I heard at that time, I didn’t really grasp. As I grew older, especially as Simpson’s behavior became more publicly erratic leading up to his 2007 arrest and conviction, I formed my own opinions about the fallen man who in my eyes, was so obviously guilty of the heinous crimes. And yet for one moment in our country’s history, Simpson’s privilege without regard to his skin color let him slip through the system.

Though my generation has come to learn more about the egotistic football star and actor with projects like FX’s “The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”, it’s the moments leading up to the sensational trial that are absent from our imaginations. How did this affluent Black symbol living in this country during the ’90s get to this point?

Directed by ESPN’s “30 For 30” alum Ezra Edelman, “O.J.: Made In America” reaches back in time to find a stunningly handsome young running back from the San Francisco projects who would become The Man on USC’s lily white campus during the late 1960’s. During a time when the country was rife with racial tension and animosity, O.J. Simpson began seducing the public with his easy charm and football abilities, while simultaneously working to shed his blackness. Edelman takes a microscope to Simpson’s career and personal life, and then pans out, giving the viewer a sweeping scope of the racial climate of the United States and more specifically the migration of Black Americans to Los Angeles, California.

At the Museum of Moving Image last Thursday, I screened Parts 1&2 of “OJ: Made In America”, the first three hours of Edelman’s masterful five-part documentary saga. I found myself seduced and charmed by the magic of “The Juice”, while concurrently enraptured by the history of Black people living in L.A. from the mid-1960’s to the 1990’s. If you are ever going to watch anything on O.J. Simpson’s “O.J.: Made in America” is the project to see. The film looks well beyond the wholly ambitious athlete into the Watts riots, the killings of Eula Love and Latasha Harlins, the destruction of the apartments at 39th and Dalton and the beating of Rodney King. As much as this is a documentary on O.J., it’s one of the Black people living in Los Angeles during this time period, and a country that was able to create and sustain these polarizing worlds. It is perhaps one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen.

After the screening ended, Edelman sat down to chat about his two-year journey to complete the project, his narrative structure, and the things he left unsaid.

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Image: ESPN