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Dare Not Walk Alone
Millions of visitors come every year to the nation's oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. They wander down the narrow streets and marvel at the balconies and horse carriages and coquina stone fort, but they leave entirely ignorant of the most important modern event in the Ancient City's history: the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
St. Augustine was a great battlefield of that movement, like Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma and Memphis--but it is the only one of those cities that does not yet have a museum dedicated to telling the civil rights story.
That is not because it lacks significance: it was the demonstrations in St. Augustine organized by Dr. Robert B. Hayling and Dr. Martin Luther King that led directly to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed racial segregation in motels and restaurants, and also job discrimination (not just against blacks, but also against women, so it has really changed the face of the American job force). It was one of the two great legislative accomplishments of the movement, and should be considered the Ancient City's greatest gift to modern America.
Until St. Augustine gets its act together and starts fully embracing its civil rights heritage, we are fortunate to have Jeremy Dean's excellent movie "Dare Not Walk Alone," which graphically and movingly tells what that story is all about. Anyone who lived through those times should view it as a refresher course, and the generations that have come along since will find it as history NOT presented in a dull, dry or boring way. It crackles with excitement.
Those who are inspired by the film to learn more may want to look up books like Dan Warren's "If It Takes All Summer"; Deric Gilliard's "Living in the Shadows of a Legend"; Taylor Branch's "Pillar of Fire"; and David Colburn's "Racial Change and Community Crisis."
[Saturday, October 18, 2008]
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A Different Kind of Civil Rights Film
I think many kids today see civil rights marches as sedate affairs with much banner waiving and hymn singing; they don't get why the non-violence movement was so brave, so heroic. This movie shows the kickings and beatings that marchers endured without retaliation, creating scenes that decent Americans found intolerable, thus exerting enormous pressure on politicians, like LBJ, whose White House tapes are hear on the soundtrack.
As the great struggles in our nation's history recede further into the past they are packaged into familiar textbook images and well-worn phrases, becoming comfortably distant and increasingly irrelevant to the present. Watching this film I felt that the young director, Jeremy Dean, was determined to prevent that happening to the civil rights movement. Apparently, according to the interview that appears on this DVD, Dean found himself living in a battle ground of the sixties, hearing war stories from those who were on the front lines, people who were jailed and beaten because they stood up for equality. He set out to make a film that conveys all of the tension, the fear, and the outrage of that period.
The result is a powerful movie that reminds us what really went on back in the sixties, the white hatred and violence towards blacks, the heroism of those Americans--of all colors and faiths--who vowed to take to the streets in the name of justice for all and take the blows and taunts of white racists without fighting back, thus executing Dr. King's masterful strategy of non-violence that forced the enactment of laws guaranteeing civil rights.
But Dean does not stop there. Unlike filmmakers who have played it safe and stuck with the history of civil rights being won, Dean dares to explore what has since been lost. He confronts the challenges of the present by asking a very uncomfortable question: If the laws were changed back then, why aren't things more equal now? Dean takes us through parts of a community that stood up for equality in 1964 yet finds itself in deep trouble today. A world of poverty that has apparently been left behind is seen through the eyes and words and music of its inhabitants, people who live in a place that epitomizes what Senator Barack Obama called "the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."
Overall, this is a great lesson in American history and links it directly to the present.
[Saturday, October 11, 2008]
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