Surviving a Lynching | Ashes to Ashes | The New Yorker Documentary

[Music] hmm here's my favorite of all the whole jedi obi-wan kenobi he's my favorite he's just so fantastic with his nine feel how light that is it's light as a feather oh look at my yoda he loves these things now that's a boy there you know what he if you take him out of the box he'll run around all over the floor and talk and you can ask him certain things and he'll answer you i got two of them i sense your fear you are right to be afraid he got killed i tell you the reason i like it because i never had toys when i was growing up the little boy in me just loved the movie and the characters are just so fantastic you know i'm gonna give them to my kids when i'm gone [Music] art is a story i don't know no other way you can say what audience decides it tells a story [Music] i'm telling a story about my life and it's gonna take 50 pictures to do it i got eight done it's gonna take 50. i'm putting these pictures on here and they'll never fade away never never dreamed that i had the talent to become an artist but my wife kept telling me oh you can do it you got talent wilfred you can do this and you can but you know wives can say them kind of things you know but is it true wilfred has a true account of how we live how we survive in the south when a patient walks into my room they expect to have a seat and for me to talk with them about their history about their journey i take that information and i use it to help them heal i need to look at history and sometimes patients come in and tell you horror stories but i can't discard it because i needed all to help that patient to live i'm a physician but i'm also an artist i see myself a little bit of both winford is our artist who both from the south and i had the opportunity to go to one of his art shows and there he was he's had a lot of health problems hypertension diabetes prolonged over 40 years of stress and i think that stress interferes with your ability to sleep so how many hours of sleep you get a night three four three or four hours and that's with the medicine without the medicine what you get the vapor medicine i get nothing and this been going on for how long about four years whenever you do one of those pictures he gets sick he have to go to the doctor and she has to talk to him and he has to double up on that medicine in order to get some rest for you is post traumatic stress disorder yeah so it traumatizes you again and make you relive what you had gone through exactly and the thing is that sometimes acknowledging the history does help some people to heal it may help other people not me though i don't think it does it's a different kind of art than feeling my kind is not healing through his cat do his face put it on his ear do i put hope in my heart not not much since everything is done from the past there's not much hope in it i can sit down and start thinking in my mind i go back when i was five and six years old i can remember god gave me a good memory we lived on a plantation and that was the early 60s it don't take long for you to realize that something's wrong with picking cotton every day all day you start out on your rows you can't see the end you spend all day and you never get to the end of your row at the time i was 14 i ran away from not home but i ran away from the cotton field so i was doing everything i thought possible i could live a different type of life that's her signal that she know i'm i'm working she hear this man i go through the night three or four five o'clock in the morning and when she don't hear that she's down the stairs like a bullet the trauma that he's seen and the trouble he has that to go to sleep and the rest i've seen that increase as you get older the dramatic stuff that's when you have a problem but those are the ones you really need to get done sometimes he wakes up completely up calling whoever it is that's running let me call him by name and he'll be saying stop if i don't take my medicine then i can't sleep with passion because i'm going through if i'm dreaming i made i'm a punch passing let me go back to the scar that i'm carrying i joined the civil rights movement at 14 years old when you are part of the movement you make a name for yourself and all the white people know you and they are waiting to get their hands on you i stayed in jail over a year with no charges nothing so uh i took a roll of toilet paper stuck it in the jar flooded the jail and when the sheriff came back he came back and he was going through the thing with me he kicked me two or three times and about the third time he kicked me i decided i wouldn't let him kick me anymore grabbed his legs and i threw him to the ground and he uh went for his gun i took it away from him and he's begging me not to shoot him so i said well i'm not going to shoot you but i'm going to lock you up so i locked him in the ceiling and i fled went to this house of civil rights workers i thought the woman answered the door i told her what would happen she went to the next room and called the police the next thing i know every white man in custody george is standing out there in the yard threw me in the trunk of the car about a 30-minute ride and then they opened up his trunk i saw these ropes hanging from the tree nooses a place designed looked like the hang people but they put the rope up around my feet pulling me up in the tree here come the deputy shaft that i lock in the sail and he's got a knife and he come up and he grabbed my private parts and he took his knife and he stuck me they was going to castrate me and then hang me and burn me i was 19 years old and there i am bleeding like a pig hanging up in the tree ready to be slaughtered like a hog and then another white man grabbed his arm and told him don't do that so we got better things we can do with this i took my shirt rolled it up between my legs like that when i was in the trunk of the car and squeezed my legs together i saved myself [Music] my mother just told me she said you cannot internalize the pain if you internalize that pain it just chips away at you this country no one really genuinely talked about the people who were lynched sometimes they would lynch people they put them in the water with weights so the family would never see them again sometimes they would take the bodies and cut them up and sell the pieces sometimes they would take the body after lynch it and burn it up so the families would not have anything those are ones that were recorded what about the ones that were not recorded it was close to three to four thousand people who were lynched and a lot of these people never got a funeral it was often too dangerous for the families to retrieve those bodies and sometimes there was no bodies to retrieve it's not just black history this is american history [Music] you don't survive unless you use it when you lynch you did i just happen to be one man that was saved uh he had hurt me i had to have kept me from being maybe what i could have been yes it has it held me back because it's brutal and no one wants to talk about it first time i saw you i was trying to medically speaking i was trying to figure out why does he have these on his hand no the chain gang marks but one more than the other why this one more than this one because that's my punching hand i didn't learn the box i learned to survive working on the highways and byways and wearing you hear them moaning alive away then you hear somebody say well don't you know that's the sound of the men [Music] that's beautiful y'all gonna make me cry it's a beautiful morning you got your long johns on okay good then i can walk you to georgia what you think you can lean against me i'm sorry lean on you that way i got it don't you see how much i'm a strong georgia girl i see that that's right i'm kidding i'm giving up well it's a pretty day to do that honey you pick cotton people you know it we used to pour water in there but they they got hip to that oh really yeah on the thing way more put a brick in it you did you do that yeah you put a brick in it yeah oh god i didn't know about that [Music] getting ready for tomorrow the 29th trying to pull it all together hey nathaniel you know that painting i did with the with the kkk could you bring it to me in springfield i decided to have a funeral for the over 4 000 african americans who would lynched in the united states to close that chapter and move forward america has to do the same thing to help heal this country you'll get some pushback from people why you want to stir that up it hasn't been stirred enough people are saying ah that's so depressing i said well if you think this depression try hanging from a tree [Music] what can i do i can't bring them back but i can give them a prayer [Music] [Music] [Music] good evening good evening i'm dr shirley jackson whitaker and the question we asked tonight is why do we need to be here we need to be here because our country needs to heal and some bad things happen in this country where americans tortured other americans due to the color of their skin that went on so long in america what are you going to do about it because i remember as a little girl when we went to a funeral and lowered that cask in the ground the minister would say ashes to ashes a lot of people never got that so we're looking back in history so this patient can live we're looking back in history so this patient can thrive we're looking back in history so this patient can become very strong but this patient can only live and get stronger if we're willing to look back so tonight we start there's an african proverb that says you speak my name and i will live forever so tonight we will speak some names [Music] my name is nasir and i'm wrecked [Music] my name is mary turner i was the 19 year old pregnant wife of the wonderful haze turner my name is loner thomas and i am representing an unnamed negro but when i confronted his murderers they lynched me and burn my body my name's kaya bellamy and i represent representing eugene azar they ripped my unborn baby out of my belly ensuring his death along with mine i am james howard and they told me i had a choice either i could die with my son or i could watch him die and live to tell the story i had no choice i had my wife and other children to look after to live for and as my son cried and begged and pleaded for his life they bound his hands and feet and forced him into the river and as i stood trembling with tears running down my face watching my son sink to the bottom of the river never to rise again never to rise again so in unison whoever you're representing speak that name [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] [Music] so that legend it's on my back and it's dragging me down even today that been 47 years ago and even today now it's dragging me down can't wrestle it i can't rest i lay in my bed and i can't rest i'm running for my life every night somebody's after me and i don't know what to do i'm mad about what happened [Music] and it didn't seem like it was nobody there to say hey this is wrong don't do it like that it hurts me to see him in that kind of pain that pain is there they need to be erased we commit to the ground these bodies and these souls and let us forever remember and reflect upon the lines that have been nameless and unknown for many years anxious to ashes dust to dust [Music] a funeral is a healing for those that are alive giving respect to those that have departed i think they wanted to be remembered and to have their right of passage the right to move on [Music] i i can't be healed i don't think i can be healed i think i'll go to the grave with what i got holding me down and holding me back even though those things were done to me years ago they're still holding me back can i send the message can i change this i can't change this world i know i'm not a big enough man to do that but i can put a dent in it but you just keep going and going and going and going i love you i wish you could see me now i wish you could see the work that i'm doing now mama i wish you could be with me now i hope you up there looking down looking down at your child doing this leather work i guess mama you one of the reasons that i keep doing yes you are you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 254,902

Rating: 4.9287696 out of 5

Keywords: jim crow, star wars, leatherwork, craft, the new yorker, new yorker, the new yorker documentary, new yorker documentary, new yorker doc, the new yorker doc, surviving a lynching, ashes to ashes, ashes to ashes documentary, ashes to ashes doc, ashes to ashes new yorker, ashes to ashes the new yorker, lynching ashes to ashes, surviving a lynching ashes to ashes, star wars fan, winfred rembert star wars, shirley jackson whitaker, shirley jackson whitaker film

Id: -2Q97pXZE2g

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021