ABOUT
Click here to read the revised treatment for AMERICAN
LYNCHING.
The
Shocking History | Style
of the Film
For
most Americans, lynching brings to mind a bygone era of villains
and vigilantes and rough justice on the frontier. There's a certain
distance created by a different time, different values, different
kinds of people even, and there's a certain complacency. Yet
only a few decades ago when poet Lewis Allan created the startling
image of "strange and bitter fruit" hanging from trees
in the American South, words immortalized in a haunting 1939
Billie Holiday song, lynchings were less than rare and still
condoned in parts of these United States. Now, at the dawn of
the twenty-first century, lynchings still take place occasionally
in America - like grim echoes.
We
are making an important and revealing documentary about lynching
in America, the first full length feature to focus on the phenomenon.
The film encompasses a broad sweep of history, tracing lynching's
origins in the colonial practice of public punishment, through
the era of frontier justice, to its emergence as a tool of intimidation
of all who were different from the norm, and then to its ghastly
climax in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and
extending into the twentieth, as a weapon of terror wielded against
black and Hispanic people. Lynchings occurred in almost
every state of the Union, and for a long time were virtually
taken for granted by American society -- sometimes even referred
to as a necessary evil in circumstances where a black man
or boy was perceived as rapist and defiler of white womanhood.
The victims of lynching are literally countless, but must surely
number in the tens of thousands. We as a people retain only hazy
notions of this appalling thread running through American history.
The
Shocking History
Lynching
has been with America since its inception -- perhaps even before.
Early targets included eccentrics in New England and suspected
Tories on Virginia's western frontier. Some victims were outlaws
and desperados accused of cattle rustling or horse stealing,
murder or train robbery, but others, like union activists threatening
monied interests, or just odd folk deemed somehow different,
also became targets. Horrific violence erupted repeatedly against
America's immigrant populations -- Chinese, Italian, Mexican,
Australian, Native American, Jewish -- and later devolved into
wanton barbarities chiefly racial, with the lynchings of large
numbers of African-Americans.
Against African-Americans (and their advocates) lynchings grew
into a homegrown holocaust, spun out of the contrived social
order of segregation, notably in the American South but by no
means exclusively. Between 1880 and 1930, over 5,000 African-American
men, women, and children were lynched to death by hanging, beating,
shooting, drowning, or burning.
Some lynchings were festive affairs -- public mass gatherings
requiring the booking of extra excursion cars on passenger trains
and attended by thousands. Entire families brought picnic lunches
and ate roasted beef or pork supplied by food concessions, even
as a human being was being roasted alive in their presence. Vendors
sold gruesome souvenirs as law enforcement and community leaders
turned a blind eye, or even participated.
American voices were raised in protest. Mark Twain's famous 1901
essay, "The United States of Lyncherdom," was the writer's
outraged response to a double lynching of elderly African-Americans
in his home state of Missouri. Strident and consistent anti-lynching
voices included: George Washington Cable (a nationally-known
writer and novelist during the 1880s); Ida B. Wells-Barnett (a
Memphis newspaper publisher who became perhaps the most outspoken
anti-lynching crusader of all); W.E.B. Du Bois (the leading African-American
thinker of his day); Jesse Daniel Ames (founder of the only national
anti-lynching organization comprised of white women); H.L. Mencken
(the editor-journalist from Baltimore, who became the ultimate
iconoclast when he railed against lynching); and Walter White
of the NAACP, who spearheaded a prolonged, although ultimately
unsuccessful battle (1909-1950) for a federal anti-lynching law,
that laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the
1960s.
Why tell this story, "American Lynching", at the dawning of a new millennium? Because despite
a century's gains, lynching's terrible vestiges still remain.
When names like James Byrd Jr. and Matthew Shepard - hate-crime-victims
-- hit the headlines, thousands of their American predecessors
cry out to us all. Even more sinister, today in isolated small
towns in America, communities will still turn a blind eye as
a mob attacks a victim. It happens sometimes, and it usually
does not hit the headlines.
To quote lynching survivor James Cameron, "This is a story
that needs to be told -- about the lynchings in this country.
It should be told in all its truthfulness, in all its clarity,
in all its reasons."
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Style
of the Film
Our
film not only recounts the historical story, but also attempts
to get behind the stark facts to show, through eyewitnesses,
what it was like to attend, to watch, even to participate in
what amounts to a barbaric ritual. Countless extraordinary accounts
exist in many forms - journalism, essays, photographs, and above
all the experiences of many people living today who have been
involved in a lynching.
The narrative is driven and informed by such "stories within
the story" -- original subject matter, personal accounts
-- provided by eyewitnesses, first-person memoirs, participants,
victims' families, and survivors.
Commentary, perspectives, insights, and overview concerning historical
context, places, times, people, and events will be provided by
a multi-disciplinary cadre of scholars.
There is a rich archive of materials to draw upon. Lynching and
lynch mob-related artifacts including postcards, advertisements,
preserved body parts of victims, an actual sound recording of
a 1900-era lynching, and historical still photographs will merge
with paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, pen-and-ink
illustrations, editorial cartoons, journalistic accounts culled
from period newspapers and magazines, newsreel footage, and excerpts
from radio shows.
Footage today of actual places where lynchings occurred will
be matched to historic accounts. Period voices ('both pro and
anti-lynching') will be represented by dramatized readings. Music,
such as the Nina Simone or Billie Holiday versions of "Strange
Fruit" heard briefly in our already created sample tape,
will add texture.
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