I wrote the folowing originally as a comment to Ebony, but it's long enough to deserve its own entry. Edited a little to stand alone.
I was thinking about time and immediacy earlier today - about history and experience. The radio had a bit on about MLK Jr, and it occurred to me that even in the 1960s, slavery was still close enough to be family memory for a lot of people rather than history.
I can very nearly do it myself - my grandmother, born in 1912, had stories about Prohibition and the Depression. I can remember my great-grandmother, who died when I was 9; she was born in 1892. My grandmother had a story or two about her grandfather, and he would have been born in the 1860s or 1870s. Beyond that there would be barriers of different countries and languages. And we're not a story-telling sort of family, particularly. If you were, and if you had something as life-altering as slavery or the end of it to talk about, I can imagine that the experience would have still felt vivid to the civil rights fighters in the 1960s.
Now it's forty years further on and as we lose a sense of history, past victories and defeats, righted wrongs and wrongs still unrighted don't matter as much to too many people. Movies may help some, when they do it right, to make history come alive. Maybe they should make one of the Delany sisters' books. I knew a lot less about the aftermath of slavery and about the Jim Crow days before I read their books. And maybe we should tell more stories, in general.
Off to rowing camp!
Posted by dichroic at January 13, 2006 01:34 PM