Pierce City, MO... Forsyth, GA... expulsion of blacks and the theft of their land... Investigative Reporting... Archive searches... confrontational interviews... director narration... exhumed bodies... demonstrations in the '80s... compelling stories... breathtaking.
I still can't believe that "Banished" exists... that it's a film... that I had just about the same amount of info as dir. Marco Williams and never made the connections. I felt intricately linked to every minute detail in the film. For you see, just last semester I had been doing my own investigative reporting and newspaper archive searches. Seeing the same microfilms up on the big screen made me jump. "I did that! Oh my goodness, I read about the same type of events! I never knew it was such a trend." I never knew about Pierce City though; the only towns I looked at were Springfield, Moberly, and Columbia. I strongly suggest that every single person take a look at the history of his or her own communities. Maybe it's my age or my naivety that allows me to be ignorant to the fact that entire communities can have segregationist mindsets... I know that there is still racism in America, that there is hate and discrimination and inhumanity. But I always thought that we as a society had advanced beyond that. I was convinced that racism had been effectively rooted out of government, that aside from individuals and small factions of people, on a whole our community at least had some tolerance. Except for the few rogue individuals, the building blocks were in place for a colorless society. Seems I was very, very wrong.
I'll throw this link in here. Missouri Lynchings I came across it in my own research, and it does a good job of listing the lynchings that occurred in Missouri over the past hundred or so years. One in Columbia in 1923...Three in Springfield in 1906, both followed by what can only be described as extreme tension down the "white/black" border. In Springfield, a large majority of families moved out after the lynchings. I never thought about how they would be leaving their land and possessions behind. But the director, Marco Williams, was able to connect the dots and confront the issue of "what happened to the land". The story is nothing short of amazing. 7 acres worth of the Strickland homestead stolen in Forsyth... an unmarked grave and tense community of Pierce City, MO...
While I was watching the film, I couldn't help but think about the fact that all this land once belonged to the Native Americans. At some point, it was stolen, the people forced from their land, and then the law came in and made the theft legal. It happened again... but this wasn't 200 or 300 years ago. It was the 1900s... and the press covered everything. When our government dodges the prospect of reparations for slavery, a rational mind might say "Reparations on the large scale of ALL slavery need careful planning and time to implement". Ok... that argument at least says that you're willing to try. But Williams brings up a much more pertinent, easily digestible situation. 7 acres of land. One family is affected, government records show that a deed had been falsified and the land sold illegally. The man who sold the land was supposed to be the representative on a multicultural council designed to tackle the racial question. (hmm... that's interesting...) Why can't we address that which was so egregiously stolen and these obviously criminal actions? What is stopping Forsyth from mending the fences with one of its old families? Why wasn't it easier for Pierce City to exhume Cobb's body? When is our nation going to step up on a community-by-community basis and stand up for what is right? We can't all wait for the federal government to institute nation-wide changes. And really, how hard is it to take the first step? I know what my first step is: Buying this movie when it's released and showing all of my friends.
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