This month we give you two movies about Racial Injustice. FL NOW is covering two elements of American history on Sunday, August 17th that are appalling and not taught today in any real fashion: “An Outrage” and “Banished” when thousands of African Americans were driven from their homes and communities by violent racist mobs. We need to know more about the real American history to understand the deep wounds which still fester. We hope you’ll make it a point of attending the showing and partake in the discussion of these two documentaries. We have allowed about 2.5 hours which is a bit long but is so important to our education of the real America. The Zoom link is:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83733296430?pwd=jsEERhRqnjJp2OtcT5oyFPtKelR4A3.1
Meeting ID: 837 3329 6430. Passcode: 719725. See you there!
An Outrage: A Documentary Film About the Lynching in the American South—34 minutes
IT’S TIME TO RECOVER OUR HISTORY
AN OUTRAGE is a documentary film about lynching in the American South. Filmed on-location at lynching sites in six states and bolstered by the memories and perspectives of descendants, community activists, and scholars, this unusual historical documentary seeks to educate even as it serves as a hub for action to remember and reflect upon a long-hidden past.
Thousands of African Americans confronted, resisted, endured, and perished during the era of lynching in the American South. Beginning with the end of the Civil War and continuing well into the middle of the twentieth century, this extralegal, socially-sanctioned practice of torture and murder claimed the lives of more than 4,000 African American men, women, and children. This past is little-discussed today, even as its wounds fester.
Banished vividly recovers the too-quickly forgotten history of racial cleansing in America when thousands of African Americans were driven from their homes and communities by violent, racist mobs. The film places these events in the context of present day race relations by following three concrete cases where black and white citizens warily explore if there is common ground for reconciliation over these expulsions. Banished raises this larger question: will the United States ever make meaningful reparations for the human rights abuses suffered, then and now, against its African American citizens? Can reconciliation between the races be possible without them?
Between 1860 and 1920 hundreds of U.S. counties expelled their black residents. The pattern was depressingly similar in almost all cases. The counties tended to have small, defenseless black populations. A black man was rumored to have assaulted a white woman, was lynched and then white rioters attacked black neighborhoods with guns and firebombs. Few black property owners had time to sell their properties nor dared return to repossess them. Whites could then illegally assume ownership of them. African Americans not only lost their hard-won homes, farms and businesses, but saw their communities and families dispersed and their very right to exist violated.