TEDxPhilly - Tanya Hamilton - Night Catches Us
I know it was hard for you when I left but it wasn't my fault I had to go you understand that and now whose fault is it now yeah this is my home I have Roots here you're living in the past Patricia things didn't change snitch I'm in charge now I'm only here for a week then I'll be gone you think that changes things nobody's forgotten what you did to Neil ma H Marcus what see a panther yeah it's Patricia if you don't have plans you should come by I can talk to them if you want me to they listen to me I can take care of myself I know they pumped 16 bullets into my best friend on his information it wasn't Marcus I'm not the enemy you still got a friend they have lost their way he's putting guns in the hands of children I don't give a damn who you used to be got my own PL you ain't got to answer no questions you hear that pig you don't got to tell show them nothing some cats drove by shot out their back window kid is walking around talking about the Vanguard that's not who we were that's not what we did don't come back here if you want to have a say about how things go around here you have to stay the dark brown shade of my skin only add color to my tears this is not the life you want to live I want more for both of us Anthony Mackey and Carrie Washington with music by The Roots Night Catches Us sometimes you can't go on until you go back it's a I should make sure oh my mic does work that's good um yeah so um it's very exciting to be here um uh I um this obviously is my film it took us a very long time to make this movie um and it was this great collaborative effort uh with a lot of people some here in Philly and uh some elsewhere um and you know when I when I was asked to come here I thought I would kind of come and talk about the film and and you know um you know characters in the world but I think instead I would like to um kind of talk about what inspired me to make the film um and you know the film takes place obviously in 76 and um it was the year that I came to this country from Jamaica where I was born and um we I came with my mom and um and then a year later my brother came and we lived in this house in Maryland with my mom's really good friend who she had actually been her nanny for a bunch of years earlier and she has a daughter maybe we're five years apart or something and um and um we kind of all lived in this house on New Hampshire Avenue and um my mom's friend's name was Carol Lawson and she passed away just at the beginning of our prep last summer when we were shooting this film and in many ways she is the great inspiration for this movie um she's not an extraordinary person at all I'd like to think that this film is actually about sort of of really you know sort of unextraordinary people who are you know kind of struggling in their regular kind of day-to-day lives and in many ways Carol was the same except that um she had this sort of brief moment in her life that I think in many ways uh I would say kind of shifted the way that she thought about um the government the way she thought about the country she was deeply nationalistic um and yet this moment I I think really sort of shifted her belief and and um so I wanted to tell that story and and I'll I'll kind of preface a little bit by saying that I think that the the thing that sort of led me Beyond Carol's story to kind of uh write this film um was that I'm really interested in the progression in a way from the Civil Rights Movement into the black power movement I think that there's something extremely uh romantic about it it's obviously steeped in in great adversaries and and tragedy and and but there's a certain kind of romantic sort of uh uh sense I think um that I just always found really interesting it's not my history in many ways I think I learned what it means to be an African-American through Carol um and through kind of absorbing her story and and all the people in in her life um but um so so I I'll just I'll just tell the story um so in in 1965 five um Carol Lawson and six other students um from Howard University from University of Maryland I think maybe one from American University they walked into the White House um and uh back then you could just kind of go in on a tour and there was no security you didn't you know you didn't need a pass you just kind of got on the line and went in and that's what they did and then they sat down inside and refused to leave and I think in a way it had never happened before it was a um you know I think that the White House staff didn't really know how to deal with it and so they they kind of kept them there for a bunch of hours and then eventually after a press conference where they tried to figure out how many Negroes there were and whether or not they were armed they carded them out the back door and Carol's mother is a woman named Arlene Lawson who uh is middle class teacher from the Bronx in New York and the two you really never saw eye to eye on pretty much anything but this event I think really uh changed their relationship a lot and this uh this slide actually behind me is a is sort of a summary of the events that arleene started putting together uh if you can imagine in 1965 they get carded out they back then you could get a $50 fine that was the minimum for doing something like that or you could be sent to jail for 6 months and they got the maximum and they were sent to jail and all these kids were like 20 21 um and um Arlene started this letter writing campaign with a a lot of the other mothers and fathers of the kids who were going to jail and it took about two years from 65 to 67 in' 67 they were finally sentenced to the six months but during that time she inspired all of these other people to come together um and to write letters this is a a really I loved her personal stationary it's extremely beautiful and um this is just her scribblings just you know I think that um you know the awful fate of the seven unselfish patriotic citizens of the USA who protested um I think that the next slide is an editorial that one of the parents wrote to the New York Daily Post um um and you know these these parents got together and they wrote all of these letters they wrote letters to Jacob javitz they wrote letters to I think it's the um it was the parole um or sorry uh the yes I think it was the parole board and um the Department of Justice they wrote all these letters and they got back I think the next couple of slides are you know they got back sort of very Curt responses we can't help you you know good luck um but then finally um they I think got the attention of RFK and um there was was one guy who was one of the seven students who I think actually wasn't a student maybe he worked for um the government somehow and he was going to be fired from his job and RFK was able to come in save his job and eventually um he helped the parents get their students their uh children out on work release and I think it was about four or five months into their sentence um and I think that the next couple of slides are um there's a really you know I think a very lovely letter from JFK or from RFK that's there that um that just essentially says I've saved this one guy's job and I your student your children are going to be okay we've been able to get them out of um jail um so you know I think the thing is that um I will look here at my little cheat sheet um um I think that the reason why I found this story so interesting is that the Carol Lawson that I knew when I was growing up was such a different person um I think that in a way that small kind of time that she had in jail I think she was probably already kind of uh making this sort of jump in a way from her belief in nonviolence to a much more aggressive stance on how to sort of politically change the world and she left a lot of letters behind uh that she had written to her mother and um and the early ones are kind of very uh optimistic and but the later ones are really kind of I think sort of speak in a way to the Carol that I knew as a child and I wanted to read just a very small passage from one um that she wrote to her mother um she writes I read where sidan in the mayor of Milwaukee's office destroyed and uh vandalized his place there were over 100 of them only five were arrested they were protesting housing segregation laws or lack of fair ones I laughed when I saw pictures of his office my feelings about passive nonviolence are almost non-existent when asked how I feel about nonviolence or if people should support it I say quote support nonviolence or I'll kill you smile perhaps if we had gone about past battles in that manner so many good lives would not have been lost in vain I think that um I found the and it sort of goes on pretty much in the in a similar vein and you know I think that I I I took some shots of I I inherited a lot of her library and um I took some shots of the books that you know again I thought really defined the woman I knew as a child versus I think the 20-year-old who went into the White House and eventually went to jail for the small period of time and um and you know and I think the next maybe three or four slides are just sort of kind of covers of those books um that really remind me a lot of her um you know I think that um I tell the story because when I started um trying to kind of piece together the characters for this film especially the character that's played by Carrie Washington which I think is very inspired by um by Carol um and but I think in many ways all the world in a way is sort of really inspired by her I think I was I I really wanted to tell a story about ordinary people um and but who were kind of shaped in a way by sort of these small blips of of extraordinariness and I and I think that um Carol and and in some ways her mother I think were very interesting to me because I think that there's a in that romantic thing that I sort of spoke about I think there's something interesting about this generational shift that happens that I think you don't often see especially when it comes to sort of uh you know kind of African-American Cinema to be able to kind of realize that there were these very sort of different uh perspectives um during civil rights during black power and you know I I'm often reminded of a story that Carol um told me actually I think her sister told me uh later she admitted to it that when she was 16 she and her mother had a really nasty argument and that uh her mother slapped her across the face and Carol In the Heat of the Moment slapped her back and they lived in the same house for two years and did not speak to each other um and I thought that that was really interesting in a way that if you think that um that then they are thrown together in this moment and that her mother spent two years tirelessly working just to keep her kid out of jail for the six-month period that these two people who had such a volatile relationship that they were able to sort of you know come together in this moment I really I loved that I found it very inspiring and when I was putting together my characters I used a piece of that as my back story um and you know I think that um Night Catches Us is a film I hope that can show the um the great complexity in a way of what people might have gone through during that time and and during the waning days um of those movements and I I think that I really um I wanted to be able to make a movie that looked at simple small moments that kind of fall through the cracks in a way they're not extraordinary six months is not a long time um you know she was 21 she went on she became a lawyer she worked at the House of Ruth she dedicated her life to her community but I loved in a way that this thing shifted the way she looked at the world and that you know there was a great complexity to this woman even though you know she kind of lived this very kind of simple ordinary life life and I think that that is very much the essence of this film so um thank you very much