Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 68
American Reckoning: A Conversation w/ Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen
Happy Wednesday!
Every few years, usually after the brutal killing of a Black person goes viral online, the word reckoning gains prominence within the media.
As the Google Trends chart below shows, we saw spikes in the word reckoning around the time of the Charlottesville car attack in August 2017 and again in May 2020, around the time George Floyd was murdered.
What does it truly mean to reckon? Today’s interview comes at an interesting time as the House just passed the Emmet Till Anti-lynching Act which makes lynching a federal hate crime.
In 2008, Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which authorized the Department and Justice to investigate unsolved murder cases before 1979.
One of those cases, the murder of Wharlest Jackson Sr., is the focus of a new Frontline documentary, ‘American Reckoning.
I spoke with the filmmakers, Yoruba Richen and Brad Lichtenstein, for today’s Hot Takes section.
Some news you may want to check out today include:
My newest article in Prism where I what it means to reckon with the history of the Confederacy and its memorials.
The New York Times also did a great visual piece around Confederate monuments.
As reported by The Westerly Sun, the mayor in Providence, RI announced a city commission on reparations yesterday.
This piece from NPR commemorates the movement that Trayvon Martin’s murder sparked.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
MSNBC: 'Frontline' film 'American Reckoning' gives a broader view of the civil rights fight
PBS Newshour: 10 years after killing of Trayvon Martin, nation continues its reckoning on racial justice
New York Times: How a National Movement Toppled Hundreds of Confederate Symbols
LA Times:  Deep racial inequality persists in the U.S. — but many Americans don’t want to believe it
Miami Herald: Republicans have a white-supremacy problem. But they don’t seem to think they do
NPR: Mementos preserve Trayvon Martin's legacy, 10 years after his killing’
The Hill: Joy Behar: Trump's support for Russia is 'about white supremacy'
NBC 12: Business owner who removed Confederate monuments speaks publicly for first time
The Root: House Dems Say They Can Finally Get a Reparations Commission Passed
CLASP: Cities Experiment With Restitutive Housing Programs. Do They Advance Reparations?
Forbes: The Racial Wealth Gap: Are You Mistaking Being Rich For Being Wealthy?
NPR: A historic week for racial justice efforts; Rent hikes in Southern Florida
Forbes: Why Won’t White Conservatives Admit That Their Issue Isn’t Critical Race Theory?
New York Times: What Americans Really Think About ‘Critical Race Theory’
CNBC: Faces of Change: Local leaders on a mission to create diverse generational wealth
Bloomberg: Federal Legislation Could Tackle the Racial Gap in Home Appraisals
Regional News
The Providence Journal: Elorza forms commission to plan for reparations, possibly direct payments
KPBS: How the founder of California's first Black church fought its last known slavery case
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: St. Louis aldermanic panel advances reparations fund bill
University of Oregon: Speakers to discuss reparations for the descendants of slaves
The Sun: Providence mayor forms reparations commission
WPRI: Providence creates reparations committee as it seeks to address history of racial injustice
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: As battle wages over critical race theory, schools fail at teaching Reconstruction
Montclair State University: ‘Black Wall Street’ Art Makes Case for Reparations
Detroit News: Should Detroit's reparations task force be limited to longtime Detroit residents?
Montclair Local: MONTCLAIR COUNCIL ENDORSES NJ REPARATIONS TASK FORCE
The Observer: Community activists hold panel on discrimination, reparations in South Bend
Evanston Roundtable: First United Methodist sets example for reparations with major gift
SF Gate: Will California Pay Reparations To Descendants Of Enslaved People?
Mlive: A ‘look back’ and a ‘look forward’: Washtenaw County committee studying reparations
KOSU: 'Focus: Black Oklahoma': the state of teaching, critical race theory, white supremacist gangs
Mississippi Today: House committee advances anti critical race theory bill along racial lines
El Paso Inc: Mississippi House panel OKs limits on teaching about race
The Diamondback: College Park Mayor Patrick Wojahn to head racial equity group for local officials
Hamodia: NYS Bill Would Encourage Banks to Waive fees on Holocaust Reparation Payments
Evanston Round Table: At This Time
Baylor Lariat: Baylor hosts ‘Reconciliation Symposium’ on criminal justice issues
International News
Washington Post: The Ottawa trucker convoy is rooted in Canada’s settler colonial history
New York Times: Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces, a research group says.
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: Thank you all for joining me. I obviously got a chance to check out the documentary, and I’d like to start by talking about the title. Why did you choose the title American Reckoning and what does reckoning mean to you?
Brad: This project started in 2014, and I chose that title back then, and I was thinking about Michael Brown and Ferguson. I had this thought that if we don’t do something now about the racially motivated killings that were surfacing, then we would be in a situation where we are seeing killings like the one in the documentary in the 1960s. That was the first iteration of its meaning, and once we started to dig into the material, the idea of reckoning was surfaced in the movie. One of the first things that happen in the film is the memorial for Wharlest Jackson, and the theme is ‘wake up white people before it’s too late,’ which is undoubtedly a reckoning theme.
Yoruba: I started working with Brad on this project in 2016, and every year it became increasingly clear that it should be the name of the film. Then we saw the events that happened in 2020, and the title was spot on.
Trevor: So obviously, the world has changed a lot since 2014. Can you talk about how the way our world changed over the past eight years impacted the film?
Brad: First off, we’re making a film about history, but it was important to connect the history to the present, and one way that extends off of the screen and into the present day is the debate we are having about how we teach history. This film is part of that fight in putting the truth into history and adjacent to critical race theory in that way. I hope an argument that you shouldn’t change the facts to suit the comfort of whoever thinks it’s a problem to teach our children history and make white people uncomfortable.
Yoruba: This film is a part of countering this assault on history. These are the kinds of stories about America, not just Black America, that need to be told.
Trevor: I’ve also been thinking about the need to capture the stories of those who lived through the civil rights era through a federal truth and reconciliation process. Can you also touch on what it meant to capture John Lewis in this film and on this topic?
Brad: Yoruba is looking at me because I have to go first on this one. The origin story of this film is John Lewis and hits on all of the points that you just named. John Lewis made my life meaningful. When I was 15 years old, my high school counselor suggested I might want to get involved in one of the political campaigns. It was Julian Bond versus John Lewis, and I walked into Bond’s office, and it was over a hundred people there, and then I walked into John Lewis, and there were like six people, so I signed up. Little did I know that my life would be changed forever.
We became friends, and I interned for him in Washington D.C and stayed in touch. A few years before we began filming, Mr. Lewis said he would forgive a Klansman who came forward and asked for forgiveness. I was thinking about a film about that, and through conversations with him, I learned that it is impossible to have forgiveness without accountability. His office pointed me to the Emmett Till Act, and the unsolved cases, and what became so meaningful was the opportunity to tell a story that was going to involve John Lewis, who wanted a truth and reconciliation process.
Yoruba: That was one of the biggest a-ha moments for me. So the Emmett Till bill was a compromise because politically, a truth and reconciliation process wasn’t possible at the time. Some may say that it’s more partisan now, but we have to remember that reparations, for example, were a fringe idea. Now, it is more mainstream and getting talked about, and we can think about truth and reconciliation as part of that future.
Trevor: Yeah, I’m astonished that there is even enough news out there for me to have a newsletter on reparations. Since we’ve started to go down the reparations route, can you talk about what you think some of the failures were from the American government in this case?
Yoruba: I think that going back to the investigation of 1967, which was an extensive investigation, they knew who was responsible and yet did not indict anyone was the first failure. They had an informant who could point to Red Glover as the person who planted the bomb, but they said the informant was unreliable. But, how many unreliable informants do prosecutors use to send people to jail and die?
Brad: I don’t know if failure is the right word but a shortcoming. The cold case initiative and the Emmett Till Act feel like a stillbirth. Folks in the FBI have said that cold cases are this old are difficult, particularly when the perpetrators are colluding with the police to hide evidence. Is it fair to raise the hopes of families and know from the outset that you will not be able to deliver justice in the criminal legal sense? John Lewis would argue that if we can bring one case forward, maybe it’s worth it, but it has a cost.
Trevor: I’m glad you brought that up because 0 of the 140 cold cases they looked at through the Emmett Till Act have been solved. So, do you think that the Till act furthered racial harm and reopening wound that folks had started to work through personally?
Yoruba: No, not at all. I think that these wounds were always there. They continue to be there. The Till Act doesn’t have much effect on them. I also believe that if the bill didn’t pass, there would be nothing—no acknowledgment from the government at all. Even with its flaws, it was important that it was passed.
Trevor: A couple of quotes stood out to me in the film, but the one that hit the hardest was when Cheryl Glover said that ‘white denial is as strong as anything we got out there.’ To me, that is what is standing in the way of true reckoning. What did you learn about white denial in this documentary, and how does it impact the world today?
Brad: I don’t have to go further than my own family to learn about white denial. White people are steeped in denial and push a false narrative of history to preserve white denial. This allegiance to St. Augustine’s misplaced notion of exceptionalism, and we are trying to dig out of that. As filmmakers, we try to insert truth into our culture’s narratives.
Yoruba: It was essential to tell the stories from the perspective of the white perpetrators because that is part of the denial. If you don’t hear from the perpetrators and how those stories were told through their families, then, of course, there is going to be denial. So from the beginning, we wanted to work as hard as possible to get those voices in, and we were able to interview two of the children of Klanspeople.
Trevor: Right, so can you talk about what that process of finding the descendants of the KKK members was like and, I assume, convincing them to speak to you for this documentary.
Yoruba: We knew it would make sense for Brad to contact them and not me as an African American woman.
Brad: We are also fortunate to have worked with an investigative journalist who has spent his entire career out there, Stanley Nelson, who was already in touch with these families. One of them wanted to participate, and it was a question of how traumatizing it was for her to participate, and the other was a little hesitant because of the camera.
Trevor: What would you say is the main narrative of the documentary? What do you hope audiences learn from it?
Yoruba: Besides telling the story of Wharlest and his work fighting for freedom in his community, we wanted to tell a story of The Deacons for Defense and Justice. They were an armed self-defense group left out of the Black freedom struggle. So we are very proud to tell that story and uplift how they were involved in pushing for Black freedom in their community.
Brad: We also wanted to lift up the family's story and how they are still living, and it’s not ancient history. Wharlest Sr.’s mother was upstairs when we interviewed his niece. So debunking the lie that all of this was so long ago.
Trevor: What do you feel is owed to this family, and from who? What do you think is owed to the families of racial violence?
Yoruba: First thing is to find out what they want and need. Some folks may want financial payments, debt forgiveness, or mental health resources. We have to find out what that particular family needs, and it needs to come from the government — either federal, state, or local.
Trevor: What comes next for you all? Any other documentaries or podcasts?
Yoruba: I’m starting to shoot a film on reparations, so hopefully, we will be talking again.
Brad: Yoruba and I will be doing a film on Wilmington in 1898 and the race massacre there. We follow groups of descendants of local people in Wilmington who are working toward reparations.