Over the years, Black History Month seems to have diminished into a reflexive ritual. America’s cultural institutions roll out their usual stuff about the great contributions made by Dr. Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Gen. Benjamin Davis, et al. Then, having done their bit for political correctness, they roll it all back into the storeroom again as we get on with the rest of the year.
I’m suggesting a refresher course in the essential fact of black history — something many whites have chosen to forget and of which many blacks would like not to be reminded. It’s called slavery, the “peculiar institution” long enshrined by law and ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which held human beings to be beasts of burden lacking the right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness simply by virtue of their race.
I’m not suggesting that people actually drag themselves all the way to the Chicago Historical Society or take up the writings of Frederick Douglass or books by Professor Ira Berlin. All I ask is that they rent one or more of three movies that are recent additions to video store shelves.
“The Journey of August King” stars Jason Patric, Thandie Newton and Sam Waterston, whose inspiration and intelligence in bringing illuminating films on this subject to the American screen have no peer. Set in the Carolinas in the early 19th Century, the movie is about the personal liberation experienced by afarmer in the act of helping a slave girl escape — at a risk to him of losing all his possessions and at a time in America when the penalties facing runaways included being axed in twain.
“Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble” is a collaboration by Jane Seymour and James Keach. It’s the true story of the famous English actress (our first real star, actually), who came to the United States in the 1830s, was wooed and won by a wealthy Philadelphia swain named Pierce Butler and then, after marriage, discovered he was in actuality a Georgia slaver who owned 600 human beings.
The film erroneously and stupidly depicts then former President John Quincy Adams as a racist (he who successfully defended the Amistad slaves before the U.S. Supreme Court and fought for 15 years against the congressional “gag rule” that forbade debate on slavery). It also bends the chronology to accommodate Miss Seymour’s, er, certain age.
But it’s depiction of the horrors of slave life on a sea island plantation is every bit as compelling as those contained in the journal Kemble kept and later published in England during the Civil War — a book that helped turn British public opinion against recognition of the South.
Another Waterston effort, “A House Divided,” is also a true story, set in the South in the years immediately following the Civil War. Waterston plays a rich planter who, in his youth, raped a slave girl (Lisa Gay Hamilton). As both matured, he came to admire and respect her, and placed her in charge of the running of the plantation.
More to the point, he came to adore the beautiful daughter their liaison produced, played with remarkable grace and sensitivity by Chicago’s own Jennifer Beals.
The girl was brought up as white. But, when Waterston’s character dies, leaving her everything, she must struggle in the courts to retain her inheritance (and her black mother’s security) with the truth of her own birth and mixed race revealed.
We are in a time when ordinary Americans have become interested in the Civil War as never before, but when the cause of that horrible struggle has been romanticized as one for over “states’ rights.”
As Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and numerous historians spent much of last year trying to remind us, the South was willing to go to war over only one state right, the right to treat human beings as you’ll find them treated in these memorable films.
