African American Perspectives

AFRICAN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES photo: Alex Rivera CALIFORNIA NEWSREEL Forty Films on 40th Anniversary Year 1968-2008 Race in America ZORA NEALE HURSTON: JUMP AT THE SUN Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and first Producer/Writer: Kristy Andersen Director: Sam Pollard black woman to enter the American literary canon, established the African American 84 minutes, 2008, A co-production of Bay Bottom News and vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. American Masters Major funding provided by the National This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public her complexity – gifted, flamboyant, controversial but always fiercely original. Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation, the Southern Humanities Media Fund, the Maryland Humanities Council, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the National Black Programming Consortium. photo: Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun “niggerati,” a term Zora coined. She became Her ethnographic research lay the Richard Wright’s seminal novel Native Son. A turning point in Zora’s life came when she “(Finally)a high-quality documentary to intersperses insights from leading scholars a close friend and collaborator of Langston groundwork for the books and plays which But Zora’s work is notably absent of white was falsely accused of molesting two pre- demonstrate the complex and important life and rare footage of the rural South (some of Hughes, a Mid-westerner who found in Zora secured her place as an essential voice in characters; she refused to write “protest adolescent African American boys. Although of Zora Neale Hurston. I can’t tell you how it shot by Zora herself) with re-enactments a link to the Southern black experience. American letters. Zora was not ashamed to novels” portraying blacks as victims. In the charges were thrown out of court, she was eye-opening your documentary will of a revealing 1943 radio interview. Hurston show everyday African American life, the life the film, biographer Valerie Boyd suggests pilloried in the black press. Devastated, even be to students.” biographer, Cheryl Wall, traces Zora’s Zora next entered Barnard, becoming its of rail yards, “juke” joints and the front porch that while Wright represents the angry, suicidal, feeling her reputation ruined, she ––Lee Baker, Duke University, Author unique artistic vision back to her childhood first black graduate and a protégé of Franz of the Eatonville general store. Her work sometimes self-destructive, side of the claimed, “My own race has sought to destroy From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black Boas, the father of modern anthropology. He unabashedly embraced “incorrect” black African American character, Zora expresses me.” She lived out her life in relative obscurity the Construction of Race incorporated town in the U.S. There Zora obtained a fellowship for her to document English and celebrated the eloquence of its the exuberant resilience of black culture. and poverty in Florida. She died in 1960 at was surrounded by proud, self-sufficient, self- the disappearing folklore of the rural South. rhythms and rhetoric. Harvard scholar, Henry age 69 and was buried in an unmarked grave, “Jump at the Sun does a fine job governing black people, deeply immersed in She returned to Eatonville with “a camera Louis Gates Jr, names her most famous As the Civil Rights struggle gained leaving behind numerous unpublished works out-lining Hurston’s life and her near- African American folk traditions. Her father, a and pearl-handled revolver,” launching her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a momentum after World War II, Zora found and seven out of print books. miraculous achievements, drawing on an Baptist preacher, carpenter and three times career as one of the leading ethnologists of classic because its use of black vernacular herself increasingly out of step with her unusually impressive and interesting mayor, reminded Zora every Sunday morning African American culture. She recorded over immerses readers in the consciousness of an people. A boot-strap Republican and As the reassessment of America’s literary group of talking heads.” that ordinary black people could be powerful 200 blues and folk songs with legendary oppressed people, exuberantly expressing fervent anti-communist, she denounced the canon has expanded to include the works ––The New York Times poets. Her mother encouraged her to “jump ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax for the Library their freedom, creativity and individual worth landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of women and people of color, Zora Neale at de’ sun,” never to let being black and a of Congress and filmed “religious ecstasy” through everyday speech. integration decision as “insulting to black Hurston has been rediscovered. Alice Walker “An exhilarating portrait of an exhilarating woman stand in the way of her dreams. in the “sanctified” churches of Beaufort, people.” No court needed to order white and Maya Angelou both recall how her work woman, and a cut above the usual South Carolina with anthropologist Margaret While Zora’s writing was by and large people to associate with her; bigots were inspired their own while a younger generation American Masters portrait. Zora’s mother died when she was thirteen Mead. Zora combined her skill as a trained well received by the white press, it roused simply denying themselves the “pleasure of writers follow Zora’s lead to speak in their ––Newsday and for the next fifteen years she hustled, anthropologist with an inherent respect for the discomfort, if not outright hostility, from of my company” and the riches of African own voices without shame. moving from place to place, taking odd syncretic culture formerly enslaved people the emerging black intelligentsia. Her American culture. “Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun… jobs as a maid or waitress. Finally, at 28, had created in the Americas. Where some uncensored pictures of black life and speech, continues the revival of interest in this she achieved her goal of entering Howard saw superstition and ignorance, she saw embarrassed some. Black writers were free-thinker who in death has gained University where she began to write. In 1925, people creating meaning and joy in the few expected to confront their white readers stature as a leading literary figure.” at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, she spaces left open to them by white society. with the injustice of racism as exemplified in ––Orlando Sentinel arrived in New York “with $1.50 in my pocket and a lot of hope.” Novelist Dorothy West, doyenne of that generation, remembers her as the self-anointed “queen” of the 2 3 TRACES OF THE TRADE: A STORY FROM THE DEEP NORTH In Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, one family’s painful but persistent confrontation with the continuing legacy of the slave trade becomes America’s. Filmmaker Katrina Browne uncovers her New England family’s deep involvement in the Triangle Trade and, in so doing, reveals the pivotal role slavery played in the growth of the whole American economy. In this bicentennial year of the federal abolition of the slave trade, this courageous documentary asks every American what we can and should do to repair the unacknowledged damage of our troubled past. photo: Amishidai Sackitey Katrina Browne was shocked to discover immigrants. It was no secret; John Quincy why black and white Americans have two “A far-reaching personal documentary “Powerful is an inadequate word to describe For another film on restorative justice please that her Rhode Island forebears had been Adams, sixth president, noted dryly that versions of their common history. They join examination of the slave trade. The the impact of Katrina Browne’s Traces of the see Banished (page 14). For additional films the largest slave-trading dynasty in American independence had been built on the sugar the growing discussion around restorative implications of the film are devastating.” Trade. [Her] clear-headed film represents on slavery and resistance please see A Son history. For two hundred years, the DeWolfs and molasses produced with slave labor. justice and racial reconciliation. Harvard ––Stephen Holden an intense and searing call for national of Africa and Nat Turner: A Troublesome were distinguished public servants, respected Traces of the Trade decisively refutes the law professor, Charles Ogletree, co-chair of The New York Times dialogue.” Property (page 22). merchants and prominent Episcopal clerics, widely-accepted myth that only the South the Reparations Coordinating Committee, ––Kirk Honeycutt yet their privilege was founded on a sordid profited from America’s “peculiar institution.” argues for a fund to benefit the descendants “This film presents important scholarship, The Hollywood Reporter Producer/Director: Katrina Browne secret. Once she started digging, Browne of slaves still excluded from American reminds us where we come from, and then Co-Directors: Alla Kovgan, Jude Ray Browne invited two hundred descendants of found the evidence everywhere, in ledgers, prosperity. Brown economist, Glenn Loury, invites us to step into new relationships, as “…A valuable and penetrating teaching Co-Producers: Elizabeth Delude-Dix, the DeWolfs to join her on a journey to explore Juanita Brown ships logs, letters, even a family nursery counters that reparations might alienate more individuals and as societies.” tool that goes right to the core of the most 86 and 54 minute , versions plus DVD rhyme. Between 1769 and 1820, DeWolf their family’s past; only nine came, ranging ––Maxwell Amoh difficult - and too seldom discussed - issues Americans than it would attract. But Harold extras, including discussion guide (on one from a 71 year old Episcopal priest to a ships carried rum from Bristol, Rhode Island Fields, facilitator of a ten year long multi- Council of African Studies concerning racial conflict and reconciliation.

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