(midtempo upbeat string music)
Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
What have I seen? A whole lot.
It's been 110 years.
There have been two World Wars, the atomic bomb,
the Depression, it almost starved us to death.
I lived through 20 Presidents.
I thought Hoover was the worst in my time,
but that man with the funny hair takes the cake.
God blessed me with a good husband for 35 years,
three months and 16 days.
I have seen a lot of beautiful things.
I mean, beautiful things.
(crowd chanting)
Now we are grappling with basic class.
I have seen a lot ugly things too.
The race riots, people being burned to death, Lord help us.
And people being lynched, and some of it has never changed.
It has not stopped.
(crowd yelling)
Hands up don't shoot, hands up don't shoot.
As lives go, you have to take it.
I am grateful for all of it.
After all of that, I thank my God for my life.
It's a lot to go through, it's a lot to tell.
(Mamie laughing)
Okay, one, two three, Mamie.
Mamie.
Thumbs up.
(crowd cheering)
I wanna thank everybody for coming
to spend some time with the young lady.
Young stuff, tenderoni.
(crowd laughing)
And then to the second, I want this to go to everybody.
Don't rush your life away.
Live it away, for life.
(crowd cheering)
September of this year. September.
Yeah, yeah, September third.
I will be 110, isn't that wonderful?
That's amazing. It's a blessing.
That's a blessing. It's amazing.
♪ When I wake up ♪
♪ In the morning ♪
♪ Drinking coffee on my balcony ♪
♪ Trees are dancing ♪
♪ Through the whistle of the wind ♪
♪ Lord I'm thankful for everything ♪
♪ When it's dark light my way ♪
♪ Bless my heart Lord bless my day ♪
♪ I'm here Lord I'm thankful for everything ♪
♪ Lord I'm thankful ♪
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me
in honoring Ms. Mamie Lang Kirkland.
(audience cheering)
♪ For everything ♪
(soft pensive music)
When my mother was born
in Ellisville, Mississippi in 1908,
it had only been 43 years
since slavery had been abolished.
She was part of the first migration of six million
African Americans who fled the deep South.
(water rushing)
Mamie lived in Buffalo, New York, for 95 years, since 1924.
But the winters became harder on her with age,
so about 20 years ago my mother became a snow bird
when my wife Nobuko and I started bringing her out
to California to spend the winters with us
until Buffalo began to thaw.
Come on now, you gotta finish your walk.
I'm your personal trainer.
I got to wish you in shape.
(laughing) I better stay in shape if I keep going.
After this we're gonna do 50 pushups.
Over the years, we've heard a century's worth
of her stories over bowls of ice cream,
and cups of coffee.
But when we decided to make this film,
everything changed for both of us.
Suddenly those private, intimate conversations
became available to everyone.
(both laughing)
I'm watching you do your Avon order, go ahead.
Get going so we can get it finished.
So you started selling Avon in 1963?
Yeah, that was my first job.
(doorbell ringing)
Avon calling.
I walked everywhere, I mean long walks.
But I had so many good customers.
A lot of my people didn't want me to leave.
And I'd talk to them, you know, I'd comfort them.
She's getting ready to break up,
or things like that, you know.
And I'd tell them, I'd say, "Just hold on, don't give up. "
So how are you managing now,
that everything's on the computer?
I write them on a piece of paper and send them in.
You ever think you'd wanna learn
a computer so you... No, no.
I went this long without a computer,
let me do it the old-fashioned way.
Never wanted a microwave until Greg brought it in the house,
and I didn't know whether it was raining.
And now do you like it?
I love it.
(both laughing)
I'm just old-fashioned, I'll always be like that.
I'll be just still writing orders.
Well you know some places, they don't allow
horses on the street anymore.
I know they don't, but I'm the horse. (laughing)
I was born in Ellisville, Mississippi,
September 3rd, 1908.
My father was a minister, and my mother was a housewife.
My grandfather was a Choctaw Indian.
My grandmother was a doctor/midwife.
They were all born in Mississippi.
But the house was a cute little house
with a peach tree in the back.
And my mother she had it, oh, she was very clean and neat.
I can remember the house that was across the street.
Dirt row of them, looking at a mile.
I had four sisters and one brother.
My grandmother delivered all of us.
We used to play a whole lot of jacks, I was good.
I beat them all. (laughing)
They used to pick fights, my sister and them.
And then my father would find out, and I,
I couldn't tell a lie.
It was a small life in Mississippi.
So you got sick when you were
four or five years old?
Five years old when I went to heaven.
I was so sick, I had the typhoid malaria fever,
and they couldn't bring the fever down.
So the doctor came and he said, "Reverend Lang,
"there's nothing I can do. "
He give me up, I died, now this is true.
I mean, I went to heaven.
It was so beautiful up there.
The sky looked so pretty, all colors, shaped like rainbows.
And my grandmother being a midwife/doctor she said,
"Wait, give me a chance. "
She had one of these big aprons.
She got some herbs, she came back, she made some kinda tea.
I woke up, and when I woke up, I couldn't believe it,
and they were all praying, my grandmother,
and everyone by the bed just praying and thanking God.
She was a midwife/doctor and a good one,
and I can see her now getting on that horse late at night
with a big cape on, riding to go get the babies.
And she through God's help,
the cause of me being here today.
And then after they started calling me gold baby.
See, cause I was a miracle child. (laughing)
(gentle soothing music)
"So since I'm still here living,
"I guess I will live on.
"I coulda died for love, but for living I was born.
"Though you may hear me holler, and you may see me cry,
"I'll be dogged sweet baby, if you gonna see me die. "
Well the thing about Miss Kirkland's story is that
it's so extraordinary to meet a survivor
of the kind of threat and menace that she
and her family faced, who kept that story close.
When I learned about her story, of course
was just desperate to meet her, but it doesn't prepare you
for the strength of her spirit and the depth
of her conviction to bear witness to this history.
We've been trying to challenge racial bias
in the criminal justice system for 30 years.
Our building is the site of a former slave warehouse,
and these enslaved people would be held there,
and then taken 100 yards up the street
where they would be sold at the auction site.
I mean, as people who have represented folks
on death row, having fought against the death penalty,
and seen people executed not because of their crime,
but because of their race and their poverty,
there is this relationship between our contemporary work
on the death penalty and lynching.
(slow somber music)
(bomb bursting)
"I cannot conceive of a Negro
"native to this country, who has not by the age of puberty
"been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life.
"The wonder is not that so many are ruined,
"but that so many survive. "
(fire crackling)
I was seven years old, we had to leave Mississippi
because they was going to lynch my father.
(slow somber music)
My dad went to work that night, he came home.
He said, "Rochelle," he said, "I have to leave now.
"So you get ready, and get the children ready,
"and you leave in the morning. "
They were going to lynch my father.
We were frightened, but I was too young to know
what they was talking about.
My dad, no he didn't take nothing.
So I don't know what happened, whether he got in trouble,
you know, with some of the bosses, I don't know.
But as far as I know, we had to leave,
and he had to leave.
And then there was a friend of his, John Hartfield,
that was his name.
They accuse him for molesting a White lady,
and they were going to kill him then, but he got away.
So when my dad left, he came with my dad.
No one really knows why my grandfather,
Edward Lang, came home from the lumberyard
in fear of his life that night, or what if anything
he was accused of, but the reality is,
is it was 1915 in Mississippi, and any look the wrong way
or perceived slight by a Black person
towards a White person could cost you your life.
My mother got all five of us ready,
got on a train and went to East St. Louis, Illinois.
We were running for our lives.
(soft somber music)
The conductor was harassing my grandmother.
He refused to believe she was telling him
the correct ages of her children
and insisted that she pay more money for their fares.
They could have thrown us all off the train then.
Murder us and nobody would've, they wouldn't have cared.
No, no, let's talk about something else.
What most people in this country fail to appreciate
is that the demographic geography of America
was shaped by lynching and racial terrorism.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were millions,
most African-Americans lived in the American South.
but by World War II, millions had fled
and the Black people who fled Mississippi
and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana,
and went to New York and Cleveland, and Detroit
and Rochester and Los Angeles and Oakland.
The Black people who went to those communities,
didn't go to those communities as immigrants
looking for new economic opportunities.
They came to these communities as refugees and exiles
from terrorism in the American South.
In September, it'll be 100 years.
That's right. Since you left Mississippi.
So I've asked you several times,
if you wanted to go back there.
Who me? Oh, indeed not.
I think Mamie's resistance to Mississippi
is something like what my folks went through
coming back from concentration camps.
They didn't wanna talk about it.
They buried their trauma.
We have this saying, (speaking in foreign language),
don't cry over spilled milk, just go on with your life.
But meanwhile, my father didn't believe
in the system any more.
He never voted for the rest of his life.
But in some ways when these issues are referenced,
you can see how it's still sort of buried in her,
you know, cellular memory, and it's deep.
That's why to me it's, it's so compelling
when I think about being gone from Mississippi
over a hundred years, yet still
the effects of that moment linger.
(slow somber music)
"This was the culture from which I sprang.
"This was a terror from which I fled. "
(slow somber music)
We got to East St. Louis and were there
for a couple of years, then the race riots started.
People wanted to get away from the violence
that was taking place as a result of Jim Crow,
and going north was a way to build a new life.
We had African American workers going up to get jobs
and White workers heavily resented it,
and then that led to rioting,
and that's what happened in East St. Louis.
(slow somber music)
The race riot was so bad
they had to bring in the National Guard.
We couldn't go out.
My dad was working, he wanted to come home.
They wouldn't let him come home.
And my uncle, he was with us and he was saying,
"Don't worry, you'll be okay. "
And the prayer he sent up that night,
oh my uncle prayed and prayed and prayed.
Well my dad couldn't come home in a week.
It was a horrible sight.
Fighting, shooting, killing our people.
That I remember clearly.
This particular man was walking down the street,
they told him, "Halt," told him one time, told him twice.
And the third time, they stuck a bullet though him.
He was deaf.
That was a horrible tragedy.
We had moved in a neighborhood
where there were only two Blacks.
If they came and Blacks lived there,
they would burn your house down.
So it was two neighbors lived together,
Mrs. Sanders, I won't forget her, and my father.
And so they came that night with the torches.
The landlord, he liked my dad so much.
And they told them when they got to our house,
they said White lived there,
and that was the only thing that saved us.
And that went on for oh my, it was so long.
Thousands of people streamed over into St. Louis
to get away from being killed.
Certainly the African American community felt that
they had been abandoned by local government,
state government, and the federal government
after East St. Louis.
If you look at the history of America,
every decade there was a race riot,
and the vast majority of those riots were White mobs
attacking individuals or Black communities.
(slow solemn music)
What happened between your mother and your father?
Why, why did they eventually separate?
I couldn't tell you, but my mother wasn't a pastor's wife.
She wasn't a pastor's wife? Mm-mm.
(both laughing)
Pretty and cute, cute as a button.
So that's all I got to say. (laughing)
(children chattering)
I was very shy when I was coming up.
Never talked much, never around a lot of people.
I was to myself most of the time.
I really liked to read.
I'd be up 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning reading.
And they didn't have no electricity, we just had lamps.
When he'd come into work at 12:00, I'd stay up,
and my dad and I would be up sometimes, 3:00 in the morning
writing his sermon to preach the next day,
and that's when he taught me so much about the Bible.
What life was all about. and my mother would get up
in the morning, she'd say, "Gold baby.
"Do you know what time it is? You go to bed. "
And I love to write, and I love to read.
(all laughing)
So did you, did you ever have any anger
towards White people? Never.
Well, I was frightened by, but I never had,
but you know what I never had?
That issue about color.
There's bad people and good people, you know?
The way you come in the world,
that's the way the master wants you here.
Why am I gonna get mad with James with his color?
What good would that do me?
With all I went through it, mm-mm.
You're a person and I'm a person.
(slow solemn music)
"The lazy laughing South,
"with blood on its mouth.
"Passionate, cruel, honey-lipped, syphilitic,
"and I who am Black, would love her.
"But she spits in my face, so now I seek the North.
"The cold-faced North, where she, they say,
"is a kind of mistress. "
When did you leave East St. Louis?
Do you, do you remember?
I know it was after the race riots.
My dad was working for Aluminum Ore Company then.
After the riot there
they opened up the plant in Alliance, Ohio.
My dad was the type he would go where he could get
a better job, you know, and more money
with all the children he had.
This was the all-White section,
no Blacks supposed to be there.
The school that where we were,
walked right to the school, right on the corner.
The all Black school? No, it was a White school.
It was a White school? Yeah.
Well that's interesting.
You went to school in Alliance, Ohio,
in an integrated school, and you didn't
have any problems whatsoever?
No problems.
There were other Blacks going to school there, you know.
But they didn't want us on that street.
They didn't want no Blacks on that street.
(crowd shouting)
The Ku Klux Klan didn't want us there.
They were going to burn our house down.
So the German living next door knowed my Daddy.
He said, "Reverend Lang, don't you worry,
"because we're right here next door to you,
"with the Lugers, the guns.
"And if anything happens, we will be with you. "
We're just shaking, frightened to death.
They came, each one of them had torches.
They burnt a cross, but they didn't get the house.
But the Lord didn't let that happen.
But that was a horrible experience,
to see those men with the big tall hats on,
with those torches in front of your house,
and we children are just shaking.
And my dad kept saying, "Don't worry,
"everything's gonna be okay," and so it was.
(slow solemn music)
"And so the root becomes a trunk,
" and then a tree, and seeds of trees
"and springtime sap, and summer shade, and autumn leaves
"and shape of poems and dreams, and more than tree. "
(march drum music)
After World War I we were
the economic powerhouse of the world.
A lot of really good things were happening
for African Americans at that time.
They're expanding their economic power and their,
and even their political power.
African American soldiers had fought in World War I.
There were certainly a lot of people at that time
who were espousing this idea that White civilization
was under threat.
This new wave of anti-Black violence was spreading
throughout the American South.
And at a moment when we should have been reflecting soberly
about what a democratic society requires,
what being committed to the rule of law requires,
we were doing the opposite
when it came to African Americans.
So the Red Summer was named by James Weldon Johnson,
the famous writer, and NAACP activist
who called it the Red Summer because it was so bloody.
If, if people had learned from East St. Louis,
the Red Summer may not have ever happened, but they didn't.
This issue of race just runs like lightning
through American history, and the Red Summer
is the worst explosion of that anti-Black violence.
Echoes of that are echoing today.
Beginning around April, 1919,
and running through till October, November,
thousands of people lost their homes,
hundreds of people were killed, governments were shut down.
It was a real disastrous, chaotic period.
But for you personally, what effect
do you think it had on you, having to go through
all those experiences so young?
Well, I guess it made me a little bit stronger,
to know how to take things.
Whatever happened, it happened, but you'll never forget it.
(slow somber music)
♪ Remember if you can ♪
♪ When cotton was picked by hand ♪
♪ Down in Dixie under Southern skies ♪
♪ Working from sun to sun ♪
♪ I can hear the Delta calling ♪
♪ From the light of a distant star ♪
♪ I can see the future I can feel my past ♪
♪ When Henry play the steel guitar ♪
♪ Remember remember remember ♪
I received an email from a friend
in the beginning of 2015, and there was a link
to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative,
titled Lynching in America.
And as I was thumbing through the report,
there before my eyes was a front page article
from a June 26th, 1919 edition of the Jackson Daily News,
Mississippi's largest newspaper at the time,
and this was during the height of the Red Summer.
And the title of the article read,
"John Hartfield will be lynched by Ellisville mob
at five o'clock this afternoon. "
and I just stood in my tracks.
I had heard John Hartfield's name hundreds of times
as a man who fled with Mamie's father in 1915,
fearing they both would be lynched.
But this was the first time
I'd ever seen anything documented.
My mother was here in California at the time,
and I said, "Is this the man you've been talking about
"all of these years?"
And literally, before I could finish
the sentence out of my mouth,
she pointed to the laptop and said, "That's him. "
I could just feel the hair stand up on my back,
it was that riveting to be met
with this digital confirmation.
How many people were actually lynched during the Red Summer?
Well, we're never gonna know the full number,
and part of that is because certain areas
never wanted to fully investigate it.
We know some of them.
Ellisville was the worst, being the most flagrantly public.
As long as I can remember,
the backstory about John Hartfield as my mother recalls it,
has always been that he had a consensual
romantic relationship with Ruth Meeks,
the White woman he allegedly assaulted.
He had already evaded capture once several years earlier,
but decided to return in 1919, and met a tragic end.
And my father tried, told him not to go back.
But he didn't listen.
John Hartfield was pursued by a posse
and a pack of bloodhounds for over a week,
through the backwoods of Mississippi.
When he was finally captured, he was clubbed
and mortally shot, but kept alive in a doctor's office
overnight so he could be lynched.
It's announced to the public and to the press
that they're gonna lynch this person the next day.
The NAACP tries to get involved and appeals to the governor,
and he basically says, "Well, what can I do
"when someone commits rape?"
The fact being that he was never charged,
he was never went to court, he was never,
we don't know what happened.
One reporter by the name of Hilton Butler
who witnessed the lynching, gave this account.
I saw and reported the lynching
of John Hartfield in Ellisville, Mississippi,
but there were at least 10,000 people in that pasture.
I had to drop from a tree behind Hartfield
to escape bullets fired at his swinging body.
(gunshots blasting)
Every time a bullet hit it an arm,
out it flopped like a semaphore.
My newspaper account of it said not less than 2000 bullets
were fired into his body.
One of them finally clipped the rope.
John's body fell to the ground.
A fire was built around it, and John was cremated.
(fire roaring)
That night a grinning man in Laurel
exhibited a quart jar with alcohol,
in which a finger cut jaggedly from the Negro's hand
bobbed up and down.
"I got a finger by God and I got
"some photographs of him hanging, too.
"These photos or 20 cents each,
"but ain't, nobody can buy this finger.
"I cut it off from him myself.
"That nigger was tougher than the withers of a bull.
"He screamed like a woman when I done it. "
He sold out of the photos quickly.
I bought some myself, as many as I could,
and tore them up when I got out of sight.
It was a sad feeling.
It was deep.
Coulda happened to my father.
He coulda not never got home to let my mother know
what was happening, you know?
Many families had to vacate from the South,
and many was lynched there.
The Red Summer was a horrific spate of violence,
but something amazing happened that year with the NAACP,
and I would argue it's the beginning
of the long Civil Rights Movement.
Blacks as a collective body started to fight back.
(slow solemn music)
"I was leaving the South
"to fling myself into the unknown.
"I was taking a part of the South
"to transplant in alien soil,
"to see if you could grow differently.
"If it could drink of new and cool rains,
"bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth
"of other suns, and perhaps to bloom. "
My dad had this big house and they wanted anybody.
They had room for roomers, to take them in,
and that's where I met my husband at.
My husband and his friend, they was working
on the railroad, and they were coming to work in the plant.
So my dad took them in and my dad thought a lot of him.
He loved your father.
So how did your husband come on to you?
I, I couldn't tell you. (laughing)
How did he he romance you?
Well, I guess he, (laughing),
you know how romance is, I don't have to tell you that.
Your dad was a good-looking man.
Sharp, you know, the clothes. (laughing)
So when he did ask my dad from, to marry me,
he said my father told him,
"As long as you treat Gold baby right. "
My Daddy married us, and I'm only 15.
And when they asked us for the ring, no ring.
It was funny. (laughing)
So your husband didn't have a ring for you?
No we didn't have no, what kind of ring?
I didn't know nothing about no ring.
If you see those shoes your Daddy got on,
those shoes were six dollars,
then he didn't wear nothing cheap.
That's pretty expensive shoes back then.
Yes indeed, and he got nothing, he got no cheap shoes.
And he would get angry with me,
because I'd buy cheap shoes. (laughing)
Did you know that you loved him?
Oh yes I did, and he loved me.
We went to Buffalo that late,
because my husband's parents were,
you know his family was there.
So he left and got a job, at Pratt and Letchworth,
then he sent for me.
I hated Buffalo, I cried for many days,
wanting to go back home.
Sit on the Corner of Clinton and Jefferson
when the kids from school,
crying, wanted go back to school.
If all that had happened,
I would have been an English teacher like I wanted to be.
That's what I always wanted to be, an English teacher.
They know how to cook, (laughing)
my husband had to learn how to cook.
My mother had nine children
and one miscarriage, which she always counts.
I'm the last child, the baby boy.
She had her first child at age 16,
and by the time she was 26,
she had already had six children,
but lost three of them to early childhood illnesses.
What were the things that you tried
to impart to your children?
To be good children.
I was a child myself and teaching them.
And then that says now, "Well you taught us.
"You were the English teacher that we,
"that you wanted to be, you taught us English. "
Your father prayed for you, he said,
"I pray for God to send me a son. "
So I put my hands on my hip, I remember, "Are you crazy?
"I've had eight children and I'm not having anymore. "
And 12 years later, you, a God-sent boy.
You wanna know what the numbers are today?
Yeah.
How long have you been playing the numbers?
Ever since the Depression.
So everybody was playing?
Oh yeah, that's how we lived.
Through the numbers? Yeah.
Why?
Because you could take a penny and get five dollars.
You could get as much food for five dollars
as you do now for 25.
Maybe more. It's a lot.
555
and 839. Nothing I have.
(soft somber music)
The Depression was coming out
and it was hard on my husband, who wanted to work.
The plant had closed down.
I guess it'd be, what? One or two days,
but that wasn't enough to feed a family.
But we had it so bad my mother came to live with me.
My stepfather, my cousin, my husband's cousin,
my three children and I, eight people in one house
and guess how much they gave us?
Six dollars and 75 cents a week.
Then my stepfather started working on the boat
and my dad and my mother would go fishing
and they would get this big tub of fish
and we'd feed the neighborhood, and they were so happy.
It was harder, but we made it.
My mother had a favorite line that she often used
when the topic of Mississippi came up which was,
"I don't even want to see it on a map. "
She said after her father fled Mississippi
fearing that he would be lynched, he never spoke
about it again for the rest of his life.
Why don't you wanna go back?
I just, I don't know, I just don't wanna go back.
You always tell me you, you would never go back there,
but then you said right now that you're,
you're not afraid of anything.
Well I'm not afraid to go back but I don't,
I don't want no parts of Mississippi.
Just...
Mississippi is not on my mind.
Can you understand
why to Tarabu wants to go?
Yes I, I understand exactly what he's talking about.
Mom is not exactly your normal 111 year old.
She, she's interested in the world today, still.
We would be sitting at the breakfast table
and I'd be reading the newspaper and she's asking me,
"Well, what's going on?"
At that time, there were a lot of killings
of Black men by police, and demonstrations
of Black Lives Matter, and I'd talk to her about it.
Then the killings in Charleston, and she looked at me
and she said, "The same thing that happened to my family
"in Mississippi is going on today. "
That's when I can see the wheels in her head turning.
I tried every angle I could think of
to get her to reconsider going back to Mississippi.
Her response went from, "What part of no
"don't you understand," to,
"I don't know, and don't ask me again,"
to, "Let me pray about it. "
I knew it would be a challenging journey for her
physically and emotional, so I didn't push it,
but I knew I had to go back, but I also knew
it would only be meaningful if she went with me.
She was 107 at the time with a long legacy
of almost 160 grandchildren and nothing to prove.
Still, I think there was one stone that was left unturned.
This was our story and we had to tell it,
and she felt the momentum building around it,
and eventually she claimed it.
Many people of color are forced
to not talk about their burden.
The idea that your mom would come back to Mississippi
and go to this place she had not returned to,
that had been such a place of anguish and stress
at the moment of her exodus,
and make it sacred with her heart and with her prayers
and with her family, it makes me believe that we can change
what this legacy represents.
When you said you, you was going down there,
I said to myself, now I can't let you
go down there without me.
And you said, "Would you be afraid to go back?"
No, I'm not afraid as long as God's with me.
And I never thought I'd think that way again.
But when God tells me to do something, I have to do it.
And now that I could go back and wouldn't be
chased out anymore, I can make it.
(soft thoughtful music)
Tarabu was thinking of going to Mississippi,
and we're leaving, I thought,
"Wow, this is just a great story. "
So I called the Equal Justice Initiative,
and I called Tarabu and said, "Oh, they're gonna,
"they're gonna call you. "
It was so nice meeting you, thank you.
It was a real thrill to meet her and,
and to see her in action.
She can articulate every aspect of what it means
to be a human being who has survived terrorism
and segregation and bigotry and bias.
And yet have this hope, this joy, this love, this life.
You know, if they're always going down there,
and because of the kind of work I do,
I have different affiliations with different reporters
around the United States.
And I called this reporter from the New York Times.
and I said to him, "This is a really good story,"
and he couldn't believe the story.
And when I first started talking to him, he said,
"No the woman is, you're talking about a hundred years ago. "
I, I think that the experiences that you went through,
might've broken other people
but you seem very resilient and strong.
You find strength in your family and your faith, right?
Absolutely. I've always had that faith,
from a little girl up.
You're glad you came back? Yeah.
She was here in Ellisville for the first time
since 1915, and we weren't sure what to expect.
We drove past the Jones County Courthouse
that was built in 1908, the same year she was born.
The marble Confederate soldier was standing
in defiance out front, erected when she was four,
and two identical drinking fountains with plaques
covering up the inscriptions, White and Colored.
The main square looked like photos we had seen
taken 100 years ago, but despite the passage of time,
we knew there was a dark secret buried
underneath these slabs of concrete
that had never been acknowledged or reconciled.
Our very small family pilgrimage
transformed once we connected with
the Truth and Reconciliation Movement spearheaded
by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Now her story became part of the narrative
confronting history and talking about racial terrorism,
and rewriting that legacy, because telling our stories
is what keeps us alive.
So when we were contacted by EJI,
one of the things that came apparent to us
was that we had to do a search for the site
where John Hartfield lost his life.
So you can see there's like all these people.
Oh gosh. Yeah.
But they have...
But it's hard to tell quite where they are,
there aren't like a lot of buildings around.
I think the train tracks might've been over here.
There's this here that I hadn't seen before.
That's the hotel. Right, that's the hotel.
Is it the Alice Hotel? Yeah.
The Alice Hotel. Wow.
Yeah, and that's people kinda standing on it but,
and it seems like that might be the place
that they pulled him from, because in the newspaper articles
it says that they had taken him to a doctor's office,
and asked the doctor to help him survive
until they could prepare for the lynching.
And so it's possible that the doctor's office
was close to the hotel?
They interpreted it to be on Pine
near the railroad tracks and she said
there's a concrete platform there
where they used to hoist victims up for lynching.
Should we go look at it? We should.
(soft somber music)
I think a nigger has rights in this country.
He should have equal rights, but separate rights.
It worked for 100 years in the South,
and I think it will work now.
I read in my history books the nigger race
was an inferior race.
They always have been, they always will be.
(people screaming)
So we're gonna get out of the car here.
This is the place that it happened.
Oh no. Yes.
Never thought in my life. Yeah.
So we just wanted to, just memorialize this moment
for all of us, and not just come and be here as a,
a viewer and a spectator, because this is part of
our living history, so I wanna pour
a little libation here for John Hartfield.
(water splashing)
And this is for all those others
who suffered a similar fate,
(water splashing)
and this is to water the spirit of all those
who were still standing tall and strong
against this violence.
(water splashing)
Ase.
(soft solemn music)
We've had this project where we invite people
to go to lynching sites and to collect soil
and put it in jars to honor these victims of lynching.
And that's what's been really, really powerful
in having Mrs. Kirkland come back to Mississippi
to kind of engage in that remembrance.
For us it has been really, really meaningful,
'cause I think soil is a powerful medium
for telling this story.
The sweat of enslaved people is in the soil.
The blood of lynching victims is in the soil,
but there's also life in the soil.
We can actually plant something that imagines
a different future and it will grow.
(soft gentle music)
I thought I would never go back to Mississippi.
But see how things can change.
I had no fear, treated royally,
didn't get nervous or nothing.
And I'm so glad I went back to see where I was born.
So it was meant for me to go back.
(soft profound music)
Were are you surprised
how many people responded to your story?
I was, I didn't know nothing like that was happening.
And still it didn't dawn on me, you know,
exactly what it was meaning that day, it didn't,
'cause I had no idea.
But everybody kept telling me, they'd say,
"Oh, what a beautiful write-up that was. "
I kept thinking to myself, "What have I done
"To make all this conversation with people?"
That things was happening, put under the ground,
which is true.
Course a lot of people don't know nothing about this.
The young people don't know what was happening,
which they don't teach them that in school, you know?
And I know what happened, I'll never forget.
(soft poignant music)
(voices swirling)
(Mamie gasping)
The strength of this country.
But today as the world seems almost to unravel around us,
there is much, there is much to defend from.
Oh look at that, 1917.
You were there. I was right there.
This is something to see.
We do a lot of things great in America.
We do success great, we do pride great,
we do victory great, but we don't do shame great.
We don't own up to the things about which
we should be shameful, and I think that leaves us
vulnerable to replicating those things.
I think if we had made the right response to lynching
in the 1930s and '40s, it wouldn't have taken
another 50 years to accomplish the Civil Rights Act.
If we'd made the right response to that violence,
we could've created a culture that began to appreciate
and respect the victimization of all people,
not just people who are White and affluent.
[Museum Display Narrator] Pack up everything
you can fit into two or three little. "
So these are the markers up here on the top of the hill.
Oh, there.
Markers with the names of all of the lynching victims.
(soft solemn music)
All those hanging names
are the people that was lynched.
You know, it took us all day to go through that museum.
It had a big impression on you.
Oh yes, but then when I got to 1917
with the race riot and everything, that got me.
The children, families lynched, and I was right in it.
I was right in it, you couldn't see it that night.
But I'm getting back the normal now, you know.
And I'm so glad that God abled me to live long enough
to see what happened during the years of my life,
and that's a blessing. That's a blessing.
Walk over.
Let me see that beautiful hat you got on, look at that.
All ready for tonight? Uh-huh.
(soft expectant music)
Ms. Kirkland, we wanna say to you
how much you've inspired us.
You have done something so courageous,
and what you represent, are our mothers,
who had to endure segregation, and all of the humiliation
that people tried to expose you to,
but you endured it, and you loved us,
you nurtured us, and you taught us to keep fighting.
(crowd cheering)
You know I'm so grateful to God
that he wanted me to live to be able to tell the story.
I left Mississippi 100 years ago,
because they were going to lynch my father.
I left there a frightened little girl
at seven years old, but you know what?
I'm not frightened any more.
(crowd cheering)
(midtempo inspiring music)
(soft gentle music)
"I must confess that I still breathe,
"though you are not yet free.
"What could justify my crying start?
"Forgive my coward's heart,
"but blame me not, the sheepish me,
"for I have just awakened from a deep, deep sleep.
"Black mother, I curse your drudging years,
"the rapes and heartbreaks, sweat and tears.
"But I swear on siege night, dark and gloom,
"a rose I'll wear to honor you.
"And when I fall, the rose in hand,
"you'll be free, and I a man. "
(midtempo majestic music)
♪ It's a cloudy day no sunshine ♪
♪ It's cold gloomy and gray ♪
♪ Oh I have felt much better ♪
♪ And I've had my ups and downs along the way ♪
♪ But when I look back I just laugh ♪
♪ And all my troubles just melt into the sea ♪
♪ My vision is clear in the aftermath ♪
♪ And the picture looks marvelous to me ♪
♪ It's a crazy world a crazy time ♪
♪ Maybe this is just the way it was meant to be ♪
♪ I gotta hopeful heart got my head up high ♪
♪ And the future looks marvelous to me ♪
♪ There's a deeper conversation ♪
♪ Going on in every nation ♪
♪ Joy and jubilation ♪
♪ And a way to change the world ♪
♪ For a better situation ♪
♪ It will rest on education ♪
♪ There's a greater world a-waiting ♪
♪ Way beyond your expectations ♪
♪ And freedom for all ♪
♪ It's a cloudy day no sunshine ♪
♪ It's cold gloomy and gray ♪
♪ Oh I have felt much better ♪
♪ And I've had my ups and downs ♪
♪ I've been knocked down to the ground ♪
♪ But I'm still standing ♪
♪ If Martin Luther was here today ♪
♪ Tell me what would he have to say ♪
♪ I still have a dream ♪
♪ And the future looks marvelous to me ♪
♪ Oh yeah, and the future looks marvelous to me ♪