Bending the Arc
I am in the midst of writing my memories of growing up in the segregated South. For an index of what I have written so far in Southern Apartheid, go here. I will be taking a brief hiatus in these postings, but I will return in the near future with more recollections.
The reason I began my Southern Apartheid series is that while my
upbringing in the South was full of idyllic moments, I had a very limited understanding at
the time of the world that Black people lived in. They cooked and cleaned
for white people –even raised white folk's children, but they were kept under
control by tactics of terror. There were enough beatings and lynchings that
were ignored by the legal system, and enough incidents of black people being
"accidentally hit" by cars as they walked down the road to act as a
warning to anyone who dared to challenge the system.
As fate would have it, I just learned that two
of my friends from the Birmingham Unitarian Universalist Church in Birmingham
have a film project addressing the dystopian environment of terror and
suppression that existed here in the South for Black people at the same time that I was spending
my carefree childhood years. Pam Powell and David Brower have produced a film, Bending the Arc: The Vote “about the
hard-fought battle to expand voting rights to all people in Alabama in the
1960s. Sacrifices made, lives lost, obstacles overcome, and the need to
continue the fight.”
To learn more about the Bending the Arc Project
and upcoming films in the mini-series, please visit the Bending the Arc website
bendingthearctojustice.com
Check out the trailer below:
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