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🎬So awed by dear friend Shirley Jackson Whitaker. Last weekend an independent film by director Taylor Rees about her work commemorating victims of lynching was screened at Mountain Film in Telluride, Colorado.
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mountainfilm.org/media/ashes-to…
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mountainfilm.org/media/ashes-to…
"America has yet to heal from the trauma of its darkest era, and Winfred Rembert is living proof of that. Rembert, who lived on a plantation, joined the civil rights movement as a teen and was put to work on a chain gang, is a rare survivor of a lynching attempt."
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"Decades later, he still carries the scars. 'That lynching is on my back, and it’s dragging me down, even today,' he says. "
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"As he etches the history, bloodsoaked and cruel, into leatherwork, fellow artist Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker organizes a different kind of ceremony to search for healing. 'It’s not just black history,” she says. 'This is American history.'”
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This film covered the “Ashes to Ashes” event she organized in 2016 in Springfield, Massachusetts with an anniversary ceremony in 2017.
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The purpose of the event as her website explains was to “provide for a real memorial (funeral) service for the over 2 million lost during the Middle Passages, and the 3,999 documented lynchings that took place in America from 1877 – 1950.”
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She created an artist book that is a gorgeous compilation of six portraits and testimonies of African American victims of lynching. This book is now in collections nationwide including at the Library of Congress rare book and special collections division.
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