Review Jesse / Shadows of the Lynching Tree | poetslandscape

Fr. Dennis (4 stars)

Official Website

Shadows of the Lynching Tree, a documentary written and directed by Carvin Eison played recently at the African Diaspora International Film Festival at Chicago’s Facet’s Multimedia.  According to Eisen, it is still not a “completed” work, though IMHO (and to the others present at the screening) it is largely complete.  Eison hopes to have it ready for general release by 2012.

He says that during its final form, the documentary may be renamed as Jesse, to highlight the 2 Jesses within the vital incident offered within the documentary ? Jesse Washington, a 17 yr vintage kids who became lynched (tortured, set-afire and hung) in Waco Texas on May 16, 1915 and Jesse, a ten yr vintage infant taken through his father to the lynching in James Stanley 1st earl baldwin of bewdley?S quick story Going to Meet the Man inside the anthology by way of the identical name to be had at Amazon.Com.

As awful as lynchings (the summary executions of mostly black men by mobs of white people throughout the United States during the 100 years between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and the collapse of the Jim Crow Laws of the still Segregationist South in the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement) were, the special horror of these “events” was their often “carnival nature.”  WHITES TOOK THEIR KIDS TO THESE EVENTS.  THEY SMILED, ATE ICE CREAM (as documented by pictures of that era) WHILE BLACKS WERE TORTURED SET AFIRE AND KILLED.  Often the crime for which the blacks were tortured and murdered in this way was “sexual” in nature – a black man having sex with a white woman.  Often this was presented as rape.  But whether this was actually the case, and today it is generally understood that these cases generally _didn’t_ involve rape (but simply intermingling of black men and white women), the black men were tortured and strung-up just the same.  And often enough, there was no “intermingling” at all, but a black person, male or female, simply became perceived as “uppity” in the local community and had to be “shown a lesson.”

Eisen notes inside the documentary that during extra modern times, the striking noose can also have genuinely been changed via bullets, just like the ones which cut down Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968 and, sure, like President Barrack Obama has been threatened with ever seeing that maintaining his goal to run for President and due to the fact that triumphing his administrative center.

Yes, Jesse / In the Shadows of the Lynching Tree is a dark, deeply disturbing documentary that makes one wince everytime one sees a white kid captured in photographs of that time playing, smiling, and yes, eating ice cream on “lynchin’ day.”  But I do deeply agree with the movie's director, Eisen that we’re not going to be able to talk honestly about America’s past (or _present_) without asking ourselves what drove this or drives hatred toward people like Barrack Obama today.  Is it simply that many of us continue to believe in one way or another that “black people ought to stay in their place?”

<< NOTE - Do you like what you've been reading here?  If you do then consider giving a small donation to this Blog (sugg. $6 _non-recurring_) _every so often_ to continue/further its operation.  To donate just CLICK HERE.  Thank you! :-) >>