RACE: a Documentary Series on America’S Racial Divide

RACE: A documentary series on America’s racial divide

For the last half century, black Americans have held the same lawful rights as whites. But events of the past year demonstrate that equality cannot be legislated and that prejudices going back hundreds of years remain with us. Although the protests in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Baltimore and elsewhere were ignited by police actions, they were fueled by the realization that in today’s ostensibly equal, post-racial society, black lives don’t matter.

America’s racial divide is not just a story of prejudice; it is a story of economic hardship. An AARP study of effects of the recession demonstrates that black families are suffering significantly more than whites in every aspect of life: making mortgage payments, borrowing money, cutting back on medication, having utilities cut off, helping a child pay bills. The severe and growing wealth gap between white and black families, currently a 16 to 1 disparity, shows how economics reinforce and determine racial inequality.

Enter RACE, six documentaries about people caught in the vortex of America’s racial divide: absorbing characters whose stories have the emotional power to jump start change.

In Baltimore, we are introduced to six black and white citizens in whose family histories and hardships lay the roots of present day conflict, explaining why the protests and riots were all but inevitable.

In New Orleans, we enter the world of public defenders and their black clients, who must navigate a criminal justice system that is skewed against them.

In Detroit, we focus on three black citizens who lie in the morgue forgotten by society, until we investigate what brought them there and reconstruct their lives.

In Chicago, we meet two African Americans who escaped its mean streets to lead distinguished lives, and some of their neighborhood friends whose lives took another path.

In Memphis, we spend a school year with black children who are getting a third rate education because of race and poverty, and we meet white families who are playing a part in it.

In New York, we go inside the NYPD, following some black and white recruits during their first year on the force and understanding the police culture through their different experiences.

Because we want these documentaries to make an impact on society beyond movie theaters, television and streaming video, Partnerships for Change is raising money to produce the series, to promote it, and to place it in every institution that can reach an audience: schools, libraries, churches, museums and heavily trafficked retail outlets like Walmart and Starbucks.

For the racial divide to be bridged, white America needs to see it through a different lens. This series is a start.

Fuller descriptions of each documentary follow.

BALTIMORE: BACK STORY Produced by Shawn Efran

We all know the rote narrative of a race riot: Police arrest and abuse an African American man. Young men respond with a protest, which devolves into looting. Masked police answer with batons, assault rifles, and bomb-proof trucks. All hell breaks loose and pictures of burning buildings and cars are broadcast around the world.

We all know the narrative because in the last 12 months we’ve seen versions of this story in Ferguson, Cleveland, Chicago, New York, North Charleston, Tulsa, and Baltimore.

But, this narrative – repeated so often it’s now a tragic cliché – misses the point. It fails to dig any deeper than a tick-tock of police misconduct and a crowd’s criminal response.

The narrative even doesn’t attempt to answer the essential question: Seven years after an African American was elected President of the United States, what is so wrong with this nation that there are more race riots now than there have been in decades?

Our documentary will seek the answer in Baltimore, which with a population that is 63 percent black and a past that goes back hundreds of years, is an ideal place to explore today’s racial divide.

The documentary’s goal is to reveal the underlying histories of Baltimore’s black and white residents as a means of understanding the prejudices that continue to polarize them and the nation. We will, of course, ask about the riots, but more importantly we want to identify the simmering forces that led to them. And we want to find answers to these puzzling questions:

 Why does Baltimore have a higher percentage of its citizens in jail than any other U.S. city?  Why are poor children in Baltimore less likely to be upwardly mobile than children in any other U.S. city?  Why is life expectancy in eight Baltimore neighborhoods shorter than in Syria?

To get beyond the statistics, we will seek out half a dozen black and white residents, including some police officers, to be the main characters in the documentary. We will go inside their lives and trace their family histories in a style that is personal and cinematically driven, illustrating the troubled and complicated state of race relations in Baltimore and, by extension, America.

NEW ORLEANS: THE HOLDING TANK Produced byAllan Maraynes

What’s it like to be black and under arrest?

We’ll spend several months with the New Orleans Public Defenders and their clients, witnessing in highly cinematic verite style, the perfect storm, a whole other kind of Katrina that batters both defendants and their defenders. It’s a scathing racial divide that questions whether “equal justice” in America is in fact, a cruel myth.

In 1963, the Supreme Court promised that no one would be forced to face a loss of liberty without a skilled advocate at his side. For poor African-Americans, the reality is that loss of liberty is a foregone conclusion…even BEFORE conviction.

Consider these statistics.

80 percent of individuals who end up in the court system are indigent and black and must rely on court appointed counsel. Of those individuals, 90 percent end up pleading guilty. Despite making up only 13 percent of the population, the incarceration rate of African Americans compared to their white counterparts is six to one.

According to the advocacy group “Gideon’s Promise,” nowhere is the problem of inadequate representation more broken than in the south. And they point to a dedicated Public Defender, Derwyn Bunton of New Orleans, to help us tell the story. But the battle Bunton and

3 his defenders fight each day is staggering - both in defending major cases, and also minor ones. Take a 19 year-old, locked up for 29 days for a misdemeanor charge; possession of a marijuana “roach.” He’s been behind bars only because he didn’t have the $50 necessary to make bond. (He can be held up to 45 days while the District Attorney’s office decides whether or not to formally charge him).

Meanwhile, his lawyer has another 134 clients to deal with.

Bunton says it’s not just about the numbers, not just about the case overload, or the fact that the budget for the District Attorney’s office is many times more than his. He says sometimes it’s just about cruelty and disrespect.

Bunton recalls a black mother watching her son as he’s sentenced to hard time. She’ll likely be dead when he gets out of jail. She begins to cry and the judge orders her from the courtroom. As she leaves, the judge admonishes her by saying if she’d done her job as a mother, her son wouldn’t be in this fix. Really?

Our film will try to understand just who is to blame for such a tragedy.

DETROIT: THE FORGOTTEN Produced by June Cross They say the dead tell no stories, but this film will argue that indeed, they do.

In the refrigerated morgue of the Wayne County Coroner’s office lie nearly two hundred bodies. The coroner knows them well: knows their names, their dates of birth and the day they died. He even knows their addresses. But to society, they’re the forgotten. Forgotten even before they died, alone, on a street corner, or in a dilapidated house, or baby’s crib. They’re unclaimed. Some have been there since 2010. Shot or bludgeoned, strangled or stabbed – some simply died in their sleep. Some could have been saved if only the city’s decrepit ambulance system had been more responsive. Together, their stories form a silent testament to societal apathy and indifference that are a telling part of the racial divide.

During the early fifties Detroit led the nation in median income and home ownership. Two million people – 83 per cent of them white – lived in the Motor City. But by the end of the decade, as the automobile industry began to move overseas, one-fifth of its citizens were jobless. By the sixties, as school integration drove whites out and federal housing projects kept blacks in,

4 the city had “flipped,” and now illiteracy, child poverty, and unemployment all hover around fifty per cent. And 45 per cent of the houses are abandoned.

But those statistics alone don’t tell the story.

We will visit the Detroit morgue, which just two years ago outsourced its autopsies to the University of Michigan because of budget cuts, to tell a story about a city which was once America’s greatest but is now one of America’s poorest. We will carefully reconstruct the lives of three of its unclaimed black citizens, to understand the circumstances that resulted in their being left there. Through the artifacts – social and institutional - of the lives they left behind, as well as the words from their friends and families, we will shed light on that individual's life. It’s a story about a place so divided by race that ambulances triage patients by zip code and newspapers don’t even bother covering the city whose name appears on their mastheads.

CHICAGO: UNTAPPED TALENT, WASTED LIVES Produced by Amani Martin In the early ‘80s, I was an eighth-grader at IS 181 in the Bronx. One day, my principal called me to his office to notify me of my selection for a program called A Better Chance, or ABC. The program identified high-performing African-American students and placed them in elite boarding schools. Months after filling out the application, a thick manila envelope appeared in my mailbox at home. The sender: The Taft School, a highly selective Connecticut prep school. That letter would alter the trajectory of my life. It’s unlikely I would’ve ended up an Emmy Award winning filmmaker without the fateful intervention of ABC.

On my first day at Taft, I met my roommate Derek Mitchell, another ABC kid, and a former gang member from Chicago’s rough south side. Derek had grown up in far bleaker circumstances than I, and seemed a long shot to make it through Taft. But Derek survived, and ultimately thrived. Now based in San Francisco, Derek Mitchell is the CEO of Partners in School Innovation, a successful non-profit that supports education in some of the lowest performing schools nationwide.

I’ll take Derek Mitchell back to his old neighborhood, talking to old friends, neighbors and teachers, and illustrating the challenging the circumstances he left. I’ll also follow Deval Patrick, the first African-American Managing Director at Bain Capital and two-term governor of 5

Massachusetts. It’s hard to imagine the polished and erudite Deval Patrick coming from an indigent background, but he and Derek Mitchell share near identical childhood profiles. They’re both natives of Chicago’s south side raised by single mothers on welfare. ABC took them both out of Chicago to prep schools that were initially massive culture shocks. Patrick’s said of his 1970 arrival at Milton Academy: “I thought I’d landed on a different planet.” But that different planet provided Patrick and Mitchell with boundless opportunity, and socialization with the children of the nation’s elite. And their successes are impossible to imagine without ABC. That’ll raise the stakes for another key character in the film, a south side Chicago eighth-grader applying to ABC.

By digging into the stories of some of Patrick and Mitchell’s old friends and family who never left their south side neighborhoods, the film will depict the stark contrast in life outcomes. By illustrating the difference ABC can make for the select few, I’ll tell a tale documenting the abundant untapped talent and wasted lives of young, black children who never got a ticket out of the neighborhood.

MEMPHIS: EDUCATION BLUES Produced by Susan Giacomini Allan and Mark Allan

The casualties of American’s racial divide continue to be African Americans – especially children. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Memphis, Tennessee, where an effort to improve the quality of education for black schoolchildren has been stymied by institutionalized racism. Four years ago, the schools in Memphis (85% black) were so bad that the Memphis Board of Education rescinded their charter, and along with city voters, decided they should be absorbed into the mostly white, suburban county school district, where the quality of education was markedly better. Almost immediately, several suburban towns (85% white) “de-merged” from the district. They wanted to assure that tax dollars paid for their local schools would be kept in their neighborhood and that inner city children from Memphis wanting to transfer would be kept out.

Two years into the merger, inner city Memphis schools remain a mess. Five different types of schools are now vying for the same tax dollars. Several schools have been shut down.

Veteran teachers are frustrated with new standards and expectations and their students continue to be pawns in a system that is still delivering a poor education.

This documentary delves into the turmoil of public schools in Memphis today: The educational experiments designed to turn around the lowest-performing schools, the challenge of teaching children of families locked into the cycle of poverty, political machinations, funding battles. But the story is more than an examination of a system of institutional racism. Education is a personal experience: It happens child-by-child, so this story will be told through individual lives. We have preliminary approval to follow student-teacher pairs in several Memphis and suburban schools as they navigate an academic year. The documentary will predominantly feature black students and families, but will also include some white families, with parents who grasp the importance of a good education for all, but are unwilling to sacrifice their own children's education to achieve a greater good.

The story of the Memphis school merger is painful, ambitious, dramatic and fraught with issues of race and class. It is a measure of how the U.S. values its African American children, and what we are willing - or unwilling - to provide for their future.

NEW YORK: INSIDE THE NYPD Produced by Harry Moses

What is today’s police culture like?

How large a role did it play in the killings in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in New York, in Baltimore and other cities during the past year?

Have the values and beliefs of police departments become so entrenched over the years that they are incapable of change?

We will find out by going inside the NYPD and following a small group of rookie police officers, both black and white, through their training cycle and onto the streets of New York City. We’ll see what they’re taught, how they respond, and what they tell their friends and family, wives and kids, when they’re off duty.

Most importantly, we’ll contrast the attitudes, behavior and experiences of black officers with their white counterparts as both go through their first year on the force.

Helping us is Detective Yuseff Hamm, a former elementary school teacher who joined the NYPD 14 years ago and is now president of the Guardian’s Association, the fraternal order that represents black police officers in New York City. One of Hamm’s primary duties is to speak to black communities and persuade African-Americans to join the force, not so easy after Eric Garner, Michael Brown, et al. But he is determined to change the face of the police department by adding more officers of color. “Change the image and you change the outcome,” he says. This documentary will find out if he’s right.

Bios of the production team follow.

HARRY MOSES (Series executive producer; producer, “Inside the NYPD”)

Harry Moses has spent his career in television and film production, most of it for his company The Mosaic Group, Inc. Recently, he produced, wrote and directed the two hour NBC News special Where Were You? for the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, with Tom Brokaw as correspondent.

He produced, wrote and directed the feature-length documentary, Who the %$#& is Jackson Pollock? which was released in movie theaters by New Line Cinema. The film centered on a painting that was bought in a thrift shop for five dollars by a female truck driver and was subsequently revealed through forensic evidence to be a possible Jackson Pollock.

Moses’ documentaries have included numerous prime time specials for all major networks and cable channels. Among them are Dangerous Assignments for PBS, which focused on journalists in peril overseas and marked the only time all the network news anchors appeared together on a single broadcast; the PBS award-winning series Children’s Express News Magazine; and a trio of films that were made for 60 Minutes, HBO and The History Channel on MIT professor and scientist Robert Rines, whose life’s hobby was exploring the enigma of the Loch Ness monster. Movies for television have included the PBS courtroom drama, The Trial of Bernhard Goetz, (producer/writer/director), which The New York Times called “the year’s best docudrama,” and Assault at West Point, (producer/writer/director), starring Samuel L. Jackson and Sam Waterston, about the court-martial of black cadet Johnson Whitaker at the U.S. Military Academy in 1881. President Clinton cited the Showtime film in a White House ceremony, when he granted a posthumous officer’s commission to Whitaker’s granddaughter.

Moses spent the early part of his career with CBS News. In addition to producing, writing and directing almost 100 stories for 60 Minutes, he was the executive producer of series featuring Mike Wallace and Bill Moyers. He also headed an investigative unit for The CBS Evening News.

Harry Moses is the recipient of Emmy and Peabody Awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his work on 60 Minutes. He also won a Directors Guild of America award for outstanding direction of the documentary “Willy Loman Comes to China,” in which playwright Arthur Miller traveled to Beijing to direct the first Chinese production of “Death of a Salesman.”

SHAWN EFRAN (Producer, “Baltimore: Back Story”)

Shawn Efran is a director, writer, producer and media entrepreneur. He launched his company Efran Films in 2012 with a mission to tell cinematic, emotional, first-person stories that matter. Shawn and his company believe in the power of video to make otherwise obtuse social issues personal, captivating and entertaining. Efran Films clients include The New York Times, NBC, ABC, The Weather Channel, Vimeo, AOL, The Huffington Post, Intel, Verizon, Schwab, Shell Oil, Thompson Reuters, Al Jazeera America, and many more. Shawn and Efran Films have won nearly every top award in television and digital media. In the last 12 months, Efran Films has been honored with a Polk, an IRE gold medal, two Society of Professional Journalists awards, three Editor and Publisher awards, two New York press club awards, an OMMA and a Digiday award for branded content, and four Webby honoree citations. Over the years, Shawn has won a George Foster Peabody, two Emmys, an Overseas Press Club award, two more Society of Professional Journalists awards, a non-fiction Producer of the Year award, three Eppys, 10 Tellys, six Communicators, two Accolades, and two Cynopsis awards. From 1998 to 2010, Shawn was a producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He reported and produced stories from Iraq, Afghanistan, Antarctica, Africa and the White House.

ALLAN MARAYNES (Producer, “New Orleans: The Holding Tank”)

Maraynes began his career in 1974 at CBS News where he soon landed at 60 Minutes, spending the better part of a decade working as a producer alongside famed correspondents, Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley. He generated major investigations, including a report into fuel tank hazards of the Ford Pinto, and produced nearly thirty segments, spanning everything from practices of the (then) little known Church of Scientology, to profiles of notable cultural figures

9 like Robin Williams and George Steinbrenner. Maraynes then spent several years at ABC’s 20/20, where he served as both producer and senior investigative producer, generating investigations into many pressing social issues, such as hotel security, the state of the mentally ill in prisons, and crime in nursing homes.

In 1996 he joined Dateline NBC as a Senior Investigative Producer. Among the stories he originated and/or supervised are investigations into airport security lapses (five years before the attacks of September 11, 2001), a hidden camera investigation into official corruption in the ranks of Louisiana police officers, a report on dangerous, sudden acceleration in Ford automobiles, and investigations into child labor in American agriculture and the Indian silk business. Maraynes also played a major role in the creation, design, writing, and success of several internal Dateline franchises, including the long-running series, “To Catch a Predator”. Most recently, he originated and supervised a Peabody award -winning hour (as part of NBC News' In Plain Sight initiative): “Breathless”, which exposed the national epidemic of childhood asthma and its link to poverty. He is the winner of two additional Peabodys, three DuPonts and 16 Emmys.

JUNE CROSS (Producer, “Detroit: The Forgotten”) June Cross is a tenured professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and specializes in covering stories at the intersection of race and public policy. She is a former Senior Producer at PBS’ Frontline, and a former producer for CBS News’ West 57th and The CBS Evening News. She also worked as a Producer/Correspondent for PBS’ News Hour, covering the Pentagon, the Middle East, and National Security. She is a two-time Emmy winner. She has also won two DuPont-Columbia Journalism Awards. In 2006, she published a memoir, Secret Daughter: the Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away, which was based on the documentary of the same name she produced in 1996 for Frontline.

June Cross started The Faith Project in 2002. It is a non-profit production company that makes films about how community impacts American life. Its first documentary series, This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys, a history of the Afro-American religious experience in America, was a co-production with the storied Blackside Films, creator of the acclaimed Eyes on the Prize. Since then, it has produced video installations for the Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore, for PBS’ Frontline, and for PBS’ Independent Lens.

AMANI MARTIN (Producer, “Chicago: Untapped Talent, Wasted Lives”) Amani Martin is a multiple Emmy-Award-winning executive producer and director, and founder of Peaceful Warrior Productions, a boutique television and digital development and production company. Peaceful Warrior specializes in non-fiction programming for all platforms, and branded content for major corporations and non-profits. Peaceful Warrior has been widely acclaimed for sports-related storytelling, but produces award-winning programming in multiple genres.

Martin is the creator and co-executive producer of The Agent, a docu-series about NFL agents premiering on The Esquire Network in July, 2015. Martin has also produced and directed numerous films for ESPN’s Peabody and Emmy-winning 30 for 30 series. For ESPN and Spike Lee (as Executive Producer) he directed and produced The Icebreaker, the story of Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first black player. Martin produced and directed ESPN’s Ali: The Mission, which explored Muhammad Ali’s little-known 1990 mission to Baghdad to secure the release of US hostages held by Saddam Hussein. In 2012, Martin was producer and writer for Benji, a critically-acclaimed 30 for 30 documentary. An official selection of the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, Benji explored the tragic 1984 shooting of Ben Wilson, an iconic Chicago high school basketball star.

In 2014, Martin was tapped by Xbox Entertainment Studios to direct the gaming platform’s first-ever original documentary series, Every Street United. Hosted by global soccer icon, Thierry Henry, the international street soccer series was launched to coincide with the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. He directed episodes set in four nations (England, Spain, Holland and Ghana).

Peaceful Warrior has also created branded content for a broad array of clients including Ducati Motorcycles, Tumi, The US Soccer Foundation and NASDAQ. He was also creator and executive producer of What Matters? an award-winning 12-spot campaign for ESPN’s 2011 Black History Month commemoration.

Prior to founding Peaceful Warrior, Martin was a Director of Production at HBO where he won multiple Emmys as a producer and director, including a 2008 Emmy for Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush. He was also a senior producer for HBO’s Emmy-winning magazine show, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

SUSAN GIACOMINI ALLAN & MARK ALLAN (Producers, “Memphis: Education Blues”)

The Allans operate Essanay Films in San Francisco. Susan Giacomini Allan has produced documentaries on pesticide residues in food, water issues and bad drugs. She has co-produced segments for 60 Minutes on the effect of stress on ageing with Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn, the sale of private information for marketing by banks, and several others.

As director of photography, Mark Allan has shot hundreds of documentaries and magazine segments for CBS (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes Sports), ABC (20/20, Prime Time Live, Turning Point and Day One), NBC and PBS. He filmed several sports documentaries, including The Shot Heard Round the World and Oakland in the Sixties for the HBO Documentary Unit. He traveled the world shooting programs on environmental issues: A nature and art education camp in Botswana, river dolphins on the Amazon and the tiger trade in India and Taiwan. Essanay and the Allans have delivered films for broadcast and educational use on community college education, early fracking in California’s San Joaquin Valley and programs for the U.N., Stanford and the University of California.

Essanay Films and the Allans have a wide range of awards, including a national Emmy for Sports Cinematography, First Place in the National Wildlife Film Festival, a UN Environmental Award, a US International Film and Video Festival award, and are part of a team honored by a Peabody Award for Fists of Freedom, on 1968 Olympian Harry Edwards.