When Counties Go All White
Garcia, Maria
By Maria Garcia When Counties Go All White In many parts of the South or the Southwest, you can drive for hundreds of miles, through dozens of towns, and never see one black person. It is an...
...This is especially true when he appears on-camera with Dorothy Pemberton...
...He's black, solidly built, and wears his salt and pepper hair long...
...A descendant of the Strickland family of Forsyth County, Pemberton is talking about the sacredness of land...
...In Banished, he takes his camera to three of the dozen places Jaspin writes about— Harrison, Arkansas...
...Williams, who is best known for Two Towns of Jasper (2002), is an unflappable, deeply reflective guy...
...and Forsyth County, Georgia...
...You can't have one side feeling shame and the other group feeling anger...
...You have to be able to feel like you were part of this complex of emotions...
...It made him the story, he says, compromising his role as a reporter...
...Williams interviews descendants of banished families from Pierce City and Forsyth County...
...It also inspired Banished, a new documentary by Marco Williams...
...The camera pulls back to find Williams sharing the same emotional space as his subject...
...When you looked at the land transfers," he tells me by telephone, "you just knew right away that this on the face of it could not have been right...
...Then a white mob would descend on the other blacks in the area and force them out...
...Jaspin calls the purges "racial cleansings...
...I like that moment," Williams says...
...The documentary often feels intensely personal, as though Williams is represented in every black descendant he interviews...
...Soon afterward, those same whites would seize the black-owned land, which, in some cases, amounted to thousands of acres in a single county...
...At times, the documentary's crosscutting of stories seems unnecessary and confusing, but in the end Banished is a thoughtful portrait of forced displacement...
...As he recounts in Buried in the Bitter Waters, the woman replied: "Oh, no, the Klan keeps them out...
...He has spent his entire career considering the various aspects of America's racial divide, both on film and in the classroom...
...In a starkly different but equally incisive scene, Jaspin questions Phil Bettis, a lawyer in Forsyth County who handled a recent sale of the land that once belonged to the Stricklands...
...Banished begins with Jaspin describing the dramatic drop in the black population during the early 1900s in counties that are now all white...
...The worst of them took place in Forsyth County...
...Pierce City, Missouri...
...Williams teaches at New York University...
...Blacks were driven Maria Garcia, a New York City-based writer and film critic, reviewed "Black Gold" in the December issue...
...For black history, this is an ever-present reality...
...The interview is an object lesson in how racist practices get institutionalized...
...Bettis didn't break any law, but Jaspin's interrogation of him reveals the deeper moral obligation the lawyer and other whites in the film disavow...
...Jaspin, who works for Cox Newspapers, is deeply conflicted about his role in Banished...
...It is an unsettling experience, one that Elliot Jaspin, who is white, encountered nine years ago while researching a story in northwestern Arkansas...
...Jaspin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, had been traveling for four days when he asked a woman he was interviewing if there were any blacks living nearby...
...You can't have one group feeling guilty and another group feeling defensive...
...He concedes, though, that his conversation with Bettis explains a central dilemma in the case for reconciliation and reparations...
...That, he explains, takes many forms, as it does in the film when well-meaning white townspeople ponder the placement of a monument at the site of a racial cleansing, or establish a scholarship in honor of the last black resident...
...It reflects the peculiar mosaic of race relations in America...
...Floundering, well-meaning whites share screen time with heroic ones, such as the Missouri newspaper editor who ran a series on his county's racial cleansings...
...A black man would be accused of a crime, real or fabricated, and lynched...
...If we are going to find reconciliation, it can't be based on one group blaming the other," Williams declares...
...It is important in a film about race to have the occasion where whites interrogate whites because if a black person is there asking that question, it highlights the difference, and it allows one party or the other to become defensive...
...In Harrison, he couldn't find any descendants and settled for interviewing the local Klan leader, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and a retiree who says he relocated to Harrison because there were no blacks living there...
...Just as her eyes begin to fill with tears, she falls silent...
...He spars with the Klan leader, and remains stoic during his conversation with the retiree...
...I have come to believe that the documentary is about reconciliation," Williams says during a conversation in New York City...
...According to white history," Jaspin says, "this never happened...
...Jaspin's book, an investigation into all-white counties in Arkansas and eight other states, uncovers a loathsome vestige of America's racist past...
...Williams goes on to interview journalists, activists, and civil rights lawyers...
...from their homes in a pattern that was hauntingly similar from state to state...
...He knew that and I knew that...
...Williams eases the audience into the subject of racial cleansing through Jaspin's deadpan delivery, but just as the horror of the journalist's findings begins to set in, the filmmaker leads the audience to the descendants...
Vol. 71 • September 2007 • No. 9
