The Struggle Goes to Hollywood

By HRW

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, p. 39

In the eyes of a South African filmmaker who has seen Cry Freedom while visiting the United States recently, Richard Attenborough’s epic film about Donald Woods and Stephen Biko is a technical success but flawed in its judgment.

From her perspective, the film, which is currently drawing large audiences in major U.S. cities, has the welcome potential of showing millions the crushing reality of apartheid, but it obscures the basis of Biko’s life and, ultimately, the reasons he died.

“I’m very positive about the actual film. It is beautifully made and Denzel Washington is extremely good as Biko. Kevin Kline also gives a good performance as Woods. But Cry Freedom is about the education of a white liberal, not about Steve Biko and his role in South Africa.”

She believes that Woods, by structuring his book Asking For Trouble as he did, and Attenborough, by using woods’s book as the basis for Cry Freedom, have done “the antithesis of what Steve stood for. The story of Woods may be heroic, but not compared to that of Biko and other blacks who seldom have the opportunities to express their own stories.”

Shaun Johnson, reviewing the film in the Nov. 20-26 issue of the Weekly Mail, a dissident newspaper published in Johannesburg, arrives at essentially the same point but is less critical of Attenborough. “Cry Freedom is surely the biggest-budget, widest-angled, most-marketed anti-apartheid statement the world has ever seen, and is likely to see for quite some time. It is beautifully crafted. It is Donald Wood’s story, played under the shadow of Steve Biko.”

Johnson observes that Attenborough has produced a “story for foreigners and the reaction of someone in the midlands or midwest is what will decide its fate…in Cry Freedom, the struggle goes to Hollywood, or, more correctly, Hollywood goes to Harare.”

The South African filmmaker said the American audience she was with appeared to react powerfully to Cry Freedom. “It’s terrific that the film is going to be shown. Audiences will know a great deal more about Biko and about prison, torture and the absolute ruthlessness of apartheid. The security police in the film are marvelously authentic in that sense. But in terms of how Attenborough has structured the film, it may upset many black South Africans who have grown tired of their lives being portrayed through the experiences of whites.”

On that basis, the film can be criticized as a reflection of the evil it attempts to illuminate. The question is whether it was proper for Attenborough to use a white character to tell a black story. The director has responded to such criticism by saying he couldn’t raise $22 million to tell Biko’s story, which merely feeds the argument.

Weekly Mail reviewer Johnson liked the film for what it is, saying “Biko’s full story, will (and must) be recorded elsewhere. Let this slice stand.”

The South African filmmaker wishes Attenborough had been more courageous. “I think the error lies in misreading the responses of the world’s audiences. It is the role of the filmmaker to advance new insights. Biko’s personality, his youth, his humor, his image, would have carried a film. The western world would have accepted him as a hero, though ironically neither he nor the black consciousness movement wanted heroes at all. They were quite an extraordinary group of people. Biko was an outstanding figure, but others had equally good contributions.”

Despite her reservations, she applauds Attenborough’s skill in making a superb movie, which arrives at a time when it is much needed.

“At the moment we have a state of emergency in South Africa and Americans are getting no news. It is against the law to film any police or security action without official permission. The fact is, there are still thousands in prison and the security police can still pick up anybody they like anytime they please. One needs to remind people that it is happening still and Cry Freedom is a timely replacement for the sort of news that ought to be coming out of South Africa.”

Among the most powerful of the film’s images are the names scrolling across the screen at the end, listing eighty other activists besides Biko who have died over the past decade from “suicide” or “falling down stairs” while in the hands of security police.

In late November, South African censors made the surprising and welcome announcement that Cry Freedom could be shown uncut in South Africa. Some apartheid watchers interpret the move as a gamble on the part of the Botha government to win points abroad by trying to show that the film will have minimal adverse effect in South Africa.

Cameras on the Prize: Hollywood Finds the Movement

By HRW

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, p. 20

Maybe Philadelphia, Miss., wasn’t quite ready to host a movie fictionalizing its painful history, but elsewhere in the South, cameras have been rolling recently as the civil rights movement begins to join the peace movement and the Vietnam war on the silver screen.

The little town of LaFayett, Ala., rolled out the red dirt this summer for the filming of “Mississippi Burning,” in which Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe portray FBI agents investigating the murders of three unnamed civil rights activists, obviously based on the 1964 Philadelphia murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

LaFayette allowed its streets to be covered with dirt and its storefronts, some of which had not changed anyway, to be returned to a 1960s look. Many of its citizens, black and white, lined up for roles as extras in the film. If they were uncomfortable with the subject matter, it was usually not obvious.

“Heart of Dixie,” based on a novel by Anne Rivers Siddon, is about conflicts over integration of Southern colleges and is being filmed at the University of Mississippi, where federal troops had to be called in to quell riots in 1962. “Everybody’s All-American” is being produced in Louisiana and depicts the adventures of a black man who becomes a civil rights activist in the 1950s, battles through the ’60s, and by 1980 has entered mainstream politics. Still another film, “Mississippi Summer,” directly depicts Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, though if focuses on the friendship between Schwerner and Chaney whereas “Mississippi Burning” tells the story through the eyes of the FBI agents. And Jessica Lange is set to portray-in “The Stick Wife,” based on a play by Darrah Cloud-the wife of a KKK member who took part in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

All of these Hollywood productions follow the success of the extraordinary documentary, “Eyes on the Prize,” which has been seen by millions on public television and on videocassettes. Producers say enough time has passed that people now want to re-examine the events of the 1950s and 1960s. Others say they sense a revival of the spirit of protest and rebellion.

A Southern Exposure for Spring Planting

By HRW

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, pp. 5-6

As soil is being worked and gardens laid this Spring, it may be useful to remember that all seeds are not created equal, and that there are alternatives to agribusiness and hybridization.

Southern Exposure, a seed exchange and gardening center in North Garden, Va., is one such alternative. (No relation to the Institute for Southern Studies’ journal of the same name.)

Begun in 1982 by Jeff McCormack, a botanist who previously ran the greenhouses at the University of Virginia, Southern Exposure is a leader among the growing movement to preserve genetic variation in agricultural crops. McCormack has been called a vegetable historian, and he and his wife, Patty Wallens, began their seed exchange from their kitchen table as a means of protecting some traditional varieties of garden crops from extinction.

They soon began receiving unsolicited donations of seeds from like-minded individuals who were enamored of particular plants that had been grown in their families for, sometimes, several generations. Today Southern Exposure has expanded to include hundreds of vegetable varieties, flowers, and fruit trees, many of which are not commercially available and some of which were feared to be extinct.

The Southern Exposure operation now includes a twelve-acre organic testing and demonstration garden; a lab and environmentally controlled seed storage; a customer list that is doubling every year; and a catalog full of seeds, gardening and seed-saving supplies, and general tips and advice. The business also has an unlisted telephone; to get their catalog, send $3 to P.O. Box 158, North Garden, VA

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22959. Those who place orders automatically receive future catalogs.

McCommack writes in his 1989 catalog, “Non-hybrid [seed] varieties introduced prior to 1940 are defined as heirloom varieties. After 1940, hybrids began to displace traditional varieties, and many became scarce or lost. We define a special class of heirlooms as ‘family heirloom varieties.’ These have been handed down within families for generations.”

These heirlooms are described and sometimes illustrated in the Southern Exposure catalog.

For example, the Large Early Greasy variety of pole bean is “from the mountain area of Mars Hill, N.C. Pods have medium strings, are flattened when young…grow 4 to 6″ long, and contain 6 white seeds per pod. Though not suitable for green shell out, it makes a high quality green bean when picked small. As is typical of many home saved seed of mountain people, there is some variation in this variety as to pod and seed size, shape, and maturity. The name ‘greasy’ refers to the lack of ‘fuzziness’ (plant hairs) on the pods. Has been grown for generations as a drought hardy, cornfield bean.”

McCormack says he is “concerned about the erosion of genetic resources and the trend toward replacement of standard or open-pollinated varieties by hybrids. Unless we have genetic diversity in our food crops, our whole food supply is vulnerable to epidemics…For this reason, we offer a diverse selection of open-pollinated varieties to help ensure a genetic reservoir of resistance to disease, regional adaptability, cultural and flavor qualities, and to ensure that the traditional varieties remain available to gardeners and farmers.

“What a shame it would be if we lost varieties such as ‘Stowell’s Evergreen’ corn or ‘Tappy’s Finest’ tomato. We would lose not only unique taste and quality, but also part of our agricultural and cultural heritage.”

Finally, there’s the Old Time Tennessee cantaloupe, which one gardener told McCormack is so fragrant he can find the melons in his garden in the dark-obviously healthier and even more entertaining than a trip to the refrigerator for a beer.

Cartoonist Jumps Ship in Atlanta

By HRW

Vol. 11, No. 2, 1989, p. 6

Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist lured from the Charlotte Observer when Bill Kovach became editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has become the latest big name to leave the papers in the wake of Kovach’s resignation [see Southern Changes, December 1988].

Marlette, who joined Newsday in New York, said that under Kovach’s leadership the Atlanta papers had enjoyed “shimmering integrity and quality” and “rose to finally claim their rightful place.”

In his resignation letter, Marlette thanked the Constitution for “giving me such a great opportunity” and said he had tried “to find a way to stay here.” Instead, he wrote, “Like many Southerners before me, I head north with a sense of sadness and longing for what might have been.”

Elaborating on his leavetaking in an essay he published in Newsday and in the Charlotte Observer, Marlette said he wasn’t sure how the move “will affect my work and the way I see things, but I’m sure they will be affected. Artists are emotional teabags. We have a semi-permeable membrane for skin. Everything gets under our skin and eventually finds its way into our work.”

On the bright side, Marlette said he expected to find~ plenty of familiar themes in New York:

“I have long suspected that Malcolm X was right: The South is south of the Canadian border. The problems of my native region–the racism depicted by the jarring ‘white’ and ‘colored’ signs on the water fountains of my youth, the poverty and ignorance that crippled the spirit of the region–were just vivid symptoms of a disease that afflicts the nation as a whole. It’s not very far, it turns out, from Forsyth County, Georgia, to Howard Beach.

“Growing up in the South in the Sixties, we were the nation’s scapegoat and whipping boy–we wore our private demons and public neuroses on our sleeves–and the world had something to point at. However, I have noticed over the last few years that the South, as it homogenizes itself into the Sunbelt, has slowly relinquished its title, giving up its role as America’s designated punching bag.

“New York City, Bonfire of the Vanities, has claimed that position in the demonology of America’s collective unconscious. New York-bashing is a national sport now. New York is the new Mississippi–New York Burning.

“For all its glitz and glamour, and opportunity, the problems of modern life in the city have grown to such a scale and magnitude–drugs, homelessness, greed, corruption–that New York has become what Mississippi was in the Sixties–America’s problem child, the scapegoat, a mess.

“The issues loom large in this urban crucible. The problems are clear and easy to see. Like the setting of my Southern childhood, the contradictions and ironies and hypocrisies are vivid. It’s all a caricature–a cartoon, really. New York City is Toontown. This Southerner should feel right at home.”