The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Bloomsbury, 331 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper)                                                  

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Princeton University Press, 240 pp., $26.95                                                  

The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics
by Thomas Byrne Edsall
Doubleday, 272 pp., $24.95                                                  

Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others
by James Gilligan
Polity, 229 pp., $19.95                                                  

Columbia Pictures/Photofest

Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made man, at his rich fiancée’s house with her brother Ned (Lew Ayres) and the butler (Thomas Braidon), in George Cukor’s Holiday, 1938

Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner looming over America’s economy, drawing dollars from its bottom to its upper tiers. Using US Census reports, I estimate that since 1985, the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent, including a growing tier now taking in $1 million or more each year.¹ Some of our founders foresaw this happening. “Society naturally divides itself,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, “into the very few and the many.” His coauthor, James Madison, identified the cause. “Unequal faculties of acquiring property,” he said, inhere in every human grouping. If affluence results from inner aptitudes, it might seem futile to try reining in the rich.

All four of the books under review reject Hamilton and Madison’s premises. All are informative, original, and offer unusual insights. None accepts that social divisions are inevitable or natural, and all make coherent arguments in favor of less inequality, supported by persuasive statistics.

1.

The Spirit Level is a prodigious empirical effort directed to a moral purpose. It ranks the quality of life in twenty-three countries, mainly European, but with Singapore, Israel, and the United States also on the list. To evaluate the well-being of each society, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett use indices ranging from obesity and incarceration rates to teenage births and the feelings people have about their fellow countrymen. They then relate these variables to how income is distributed in each society. Here they deploy the Gini ratio, a three-digit coefficient purporting to measure the extent of income inequality within any grouping for which figures are available. Their national Gini scores range from .230 in egalitarian Sweden to .478 in highly stratified Singapore, with the United States second highest at .450. Linking social indicators to economic disparities, the authors conclude that “reducing inequality is the best way of improving the quality of the social environment.”

As income gaps grow, they write, it’s not only the poor who suffer. Unequal societies not only bear “diseases of poverty,” but also “diseases of affluence.” The latter include cancer and cardiovascular disease as well as the afflictions of well-off people who are “anxiety-ridden,” “prone to depression,” and “seek comfort in overeating, obsessive shopping and spending.” At this point, as elsewhere, the authors tend to get carried away. I’m not sure I’m ready to rank compulsive spending or eating too much as diseases. Even so, Wilkinson and Pickett are blunt in their summary: “inequality is socially corrosive.” What’s missing in their analysis is how far, if at all, income disparities may also degrade the deprived.

The authors don’t go so far as to say that people with above-average incomes would end up better off were they to take home less money, and if greater numbers of their poor compatriots had more. But they do contend that “the benefits of greater equality seem to be shared across the vast majority of the population.” Thus one of their tables shows that those in the middle class in more egalitarian England have lower rates of cancer and diabetes than their counterparts in the United States. American children don’t perform as well academically as their peers in Finland and Belgium, where incomes are not as widely spread.

The broader argument was made by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who reputedly told one of his clerks that taxation is how we “buy civilization.” Lower Gini scores generally tell us that the business and professional classes of such countries as Norway and Denmark consent to higher tax rates because publicly provided higher education and health care and cultural amenities make for a more congenial society, in which everyone shares.

Wilkinson and Pickett teach at Britain’s University of York, and they aim for an international audience. Yet they seem to have America mainly in mind when they remark that “instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position.” Here too we’re into hyperbole. The United States has a large stratum of professionals who choose public service careers; indeed much, even most, of the middle class doesn’t set its sights on more than routine personal advancement. Still, it’s appropriate to ask how many of the rich care about creating a “better society.” Wealth brings higher-quality health care, private schooling, and personal pension plans, along with shielding from lines, crowds, and captious service.

Like many modern studies, most of the findings in The Spirit Level derive from statistical formulations. I found myself wanting to know more about the actual people represented by indicators and indices. In Belgium, taxes take 42 percent of an average worker’s earnings, compared with 23 percent in the United States; in Denmark, personal income taxes absorb 27 percent of its gross domestic product, against 8 percent in the US. How do their middle-class professionals balance the public and private in their conceptions of the good life? Do they, for example, feel that high take-home pay is needed to bring out people’s best efforts? “We see no indication,” Wilkinson and Pickett say, “that standards of intellectual, artistic or sporting achievement are lower in the more equal societies.” And as a measure of innovation, they show that such countries file more patents per capita. But they don’t consider keenly competitive enterprises—such as Apple and Facebook—from which Forbes 400 fortunes grow. We hear it claimed that innovations such as iPhones and iPads are much encouraged by hopes of inordinate wealth. Is there an egalitarian alternative?

There’s a limitation to the Gini ratio that the authors don’t mention. Because Spain (.320) and Canada (.321) are so close in Gini ratio, The Spirit Level would have us conclude they have comparable levels of income. But similar scores can conceal quite different distributions of income. Unfortunately, Wilkinson and Pickett don’t explain why. For example, the Gini ratios for New Hampshire (.425) and Iowa (.427) make them relatively egalitarian on the American spectrum. However, New Hampshire gets there by having the same number of high- and low-income households: 26 percent have annual income over $100,000 with 26 percent under $35,000. Iowa has almost the same ratio, but only 15 percent of its households make above $100,000 and 36 percent fall below $35,000. The Spirit Level‘s message is that if countries want a more equable and equitable society, they should move toward closing their income gaps. But what can we say about Iowa’s equality if it still has a substantial low-income segment? Reducing the proportion of the rich may be a pyrrhic victory if poverty persists.

2.

To say that America’s rich are getting richer, which is true, is only part of the story. Also important is that considerably more Americans are now enjoying an affluence that was once the preserve of only a very small stratum. Despite Occupy Wall Street’s focus on the wealthiest one percent, the rise of two other groups tells us more about recent redistributions. The first consists of households having annual incomes of $1 million or more, a passable definition of “rich.” (Entry to the top 1 percent now comes with $347,421, which I’d simply call comfortably off.)

As can be seen in Table A, in 1972, altogether 22,887 tax returns were filed with today’s equivalent of $1 million in income. By 1985, the number had expanded to 58,603. And in 2009, the most recent year for figures, this bracket had multiplied to 236,893. In 1972, for every $1 million household there were 3,393 earning less. Now for every $1 million household there are only 591 with less. True, the population has grown since 1972, as has the overall income pool. But not nearly enough to explain the expansion at the top.

Moreover, the $1 million (and up) in the three illustrative years was the amount these taxpayers declared as gross income; that is, before they paid taxes to the IRS. As is also shown in Table A, the share of income paid in taxes by this group has declined markedly. In 1972, households in the $1 million bracket kept 53 percent of what they declared. Today, they retain 75 percent for personal purchases and pleasures. There would still be more rich Americans if their taxes hadn’t been reduced, due to the rise in salaries and other sources of wealth at the top. But those abatements have allowed the kind of gilded lives not known for over a century.

Where did all these earners of $1 million incomes come from? Many are owners of small but prosperous businesses. But even with high-tech start-ups, we don’t have more fledgling enterprises than in the past. In fact, the greatest growth in high incomes has been in “financial services.” Here what’s bought and sold largely amounts to advice, about when people should buy and sell financial holdings, or have holdings bought and sold for them, as with public offerings and investing pension funds.

Financial services also includes devising algorithms for complex securities, like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. In either case, what’s being created often seems so arcane that clients don’t object to eight-digit fees, which are in turn bestowed as seven-figure bonuses. Or they don’t cavil at such payments because they intend to do well themselves. According to Adam Smith, we should expect competitors to emerge, offering the same services at palpably lower fees. While this sometimes happens, customers tend to feel safer with well-known names, including Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, until their days of reckoning.

The wish to focus on millionaires is understandable. But the upward movement of money has in fact benefited a second and considerably larger group, the best-paid 5 percent, which includes some four million families. As Table A shows, this group’s real earnings have more than doubled since 1972, while its share of aggregate income has grown by almost a quarter. As Table A also notes, it now takes about $200,000 a year to join this tier. In my view, this stratum warrants at least as much attention as the superrich, not just because there are more of them, but because their paychecks tell us a lot about an emerging pattern of rewards.

Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy and Thomas Edsall’s The Age of Austerity provide much-needed information and analysis to explain why so much of the nation’s money is flowing upward. Frank, an economist at Cornell, draws on social psychology to shatter many myths about competition and compensation. While he doesn’t explicitly cite the classical French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, much in his exposition echoes Say’s axiom that “supply creates demand.” This doesn’t mean that if items are put on display, people will automatically buy them. Consumers decide what or if they’ll purchase, and clearly can only do so if they have the credit or money. Even so, the items they decide they want have been created by the suppliers, who put things on the shelves.

RKO/Photofest

Lionel Barrymore, Frank Hagney, and James Stewart in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946

Frank carries this a step further. In recent years, he argues, the products and enjoyments set before us have become increasingly enticing—including houses, vacations, television programs, video games, electronic devices, and the attractions of the Internet. In many cases, the rich acquire them first; since what they have and do becomes widely known, emulation descends down the line.

Nor are these just Tiffany trinkets. Frank’s most vivid examples are newly built houses. As the very rich installed grander entrance halls and rarely used bathrooms, the professional classes felt they should have a semblance of such amenities. “By 2007,” Frank writes, “the median new single-family house built in the United States had an area of more than 2,300 square feet, some 50 percent more than its counterpart from 1970.” Indeed, it’s revealing that this expansion was happening as people were having fewer children. However, these homes—along with more elaborate wardrobes, holidays, and technical gear—are costly. If they were to be bought, salaries needed to keep pace.

Hence, I would argue, an unstated but still real compact was made between the employers and the new upper-middle class. Their pay would be raised to support their ascending status. As the samplings in Table B show, while real earnings for the overall workforce have risen only 7 percent since 1985, professions like physicians and professors have done several times better. Incomes of lawyers and executives, for their part, have soared much further than anyone would have forecast a few decades ago.²

Rationales aren’t lacking for these raises. One is that skills and talents are in short supply for such jobs as video game designers, so higher pay must be proffered to get and keep the better performers. But a more plausible reason is that money to push up pay was becoming available as profits generally increased, and lower-level jobs were increasingly performed by workers abroad. So a tacit compact came into play. Health plans gave doctors most of what they billed, with few questions asked. Colleges, knowing that parents would pay, found they could increase tuition and fees, much of which went to boost the pay of those fortunate to be full-time faculty. Corporate clients didn’t object to higher legal fees, at least for top partners, since their overall labor costs were less.

Here Thomas Edsall provides useful information. “US multinational corporations cut domestic employment by 2.9 million during the 2000s, while adding 2.4 million workers overseas,” he writes. At the same time, “recession-forced layoffs resulted in increased productivity, which in turn translated into higher profits with fewer workers.” In this setting, clubby corporate boards approved eight-figure pay packages to their CEOs, which were seen as affirming the stature of their firms. In these and other instances, accepted standards for corporate compensation went by the board. No one asked what might be a competitive rate for whatever skills were needed; or if there might be equally talented people who would do just as good a job for less.

The crucial fact is that the upward flow of money has reduced the spending power of those lower down, most notably the bottom 60 percent. This loss has had consequences. For example, in a not-so-distant past, families of modest means made enough to put something aside for their children’s college fees. That cushion is gone, which is why millions of undergraduates are now forced to take much larger loans. Adding interest and penalties, many will face decades paying off six-figure debts. By way of contrast, parents in the top 5 percent can write full tuition checks, which gives their children an edge in admissions decisions, even if colleges deny this.³

3.

James Gilligan has written a quirky book that deserves to be taken seriously. His exposition is based primarily on public statistics, and he uses the numbers responsibly, always allowing for alternative interpretations. His book isn’t explicitly about economic inequality, but something graver: death, and its two most dramatic causes, suicide and homicide. Yet even here, how the economy functions is crucial. Gilligan starts with figures on these two ways life may end, for which we have reliable records going back to 1900. The numbers start with county coroners, are forwarded to state health agencies, and are finally collated in federal reports. To be sure, not all deaths have clear-cut causes. We can’t always be sure if ingesting too many pills was accidental or intentional, just as a road fatality can be a means of suicide. Gilligan is aware of ambiguities like these and factors them into his equations.

Still, his initial step may raise some questions. For each year starting with 1900, he adds homicide and suicide rates together to yield a “violent death rate,” which becomes the principal variable in his analysis. True, a carbon monoxide suicide is in a sense a violent act; but it’s not in the same category as plunging a knife into someone else’s chest. Gilligan acknowledges the differences in the two kinds of deaths, but they also overlap. At least a few of those who choose to carry lethal weapons know they are rolling dice with their own lives.

The two modes of death involve different groups of people. In 2007, the most recent for figures, there were 34,598 suicides and 18,361 homicides. As it happens, men accounted for precisely 79 percent of both groups of victims. However, relative to their numbers, whites were almost three times as likely as blacks to take their own lives, while blacks had an eight times greater chance of being killed by someone else. Altogether, 56 percent of the men used firearms to end their lives; so did 30 percent of the women.

What makes Gilligan’s analysis interesting is his view that the two forms of death have many parallels. Suicide, he argues, may be seen as “self-punishment,” the sternest possible reproof, but inflicted on oneself. In a not wholly dissimilar vein, “aggressive behavior toward other people, which can escalate to homicide,” is often impelled by resentment over not receiving respect felt to be one’s due. (Shots have been fired over parking spaces.) Both sets of feelings are exacerbated, Gilligan argues, when social conditions swell the pool of people who are made to feel “worthless,” “shamed,” and “redundant.”

According to his calculations, “epidemics of lethal violence” are closely correlated with the party affiliation of the president. In the 107 years following 1900, Republicans held the White House for fifty-nine of them, leaving forty-eight for Democrats. He found that for all but fourteen of the 107 years, his combined homicide-suicide rate fell when Democrats were president and rose under Republican administrations. (Eisenhower and Carter accounted for twelve of the fourteen exceptional years.)

Gilligan’s most specific surmise is that these linkages result largely from unemployment, which tends to rise under Republican presidents. An inability to find a job, he says, is the foremost driver of feelings of shame and worthlessness. (If this pattern persists, unemployment and violence-related deaths will rise even further if we have a President Romney.) It’s obvious that the 52,959 suicides and homicides recorded in 2007 were a minute fraction of the seven million out of work that year. Gilligan, a professor of psychiatry at NYU, conjectures that “they are the tip of the iceberg…underneath which are many times more people who suffer grievously from these stresses but do not respond to them by killing others or themselves.”

Gilligan also shows that states usually carried by Republicans have higher homicide and suicide rates, as well as inflicting more deaths in the form of executions. But he doesn’t relate this to the job market in these states—an important omission. He considers another explanation. Republicans muster their majorities from just above the median, pitting “members of the lower middle class against the very poorest lower class.” So when they take power, they are basically telling Americans who are first to be fired that they no longer count. What I take Gilligan to be saying is that those who are subject to the humiliations of being poor at least sense that when a Democrat is in the White House someone there cares more than would be the case if there were a Republican. This is class analysis with a new twist.

Well, we now have a Democratic president, with three years of high jobless rates. We don’t yet have suicide statistics for 2009 and 2010. But figures for homicides are available from the FBI, which collects them from local police departments. In 2009, the national rate for the FBI combined “murder and manslaughter” rate was 5.0 per 100,000 in the population, and in 2010 it dropped to 4.8 per 100,000. By way of contrast, those rates during George W. Bush’s eight years averaged 5.6 per 100,000. Thus far Gilligan’s inferences are standing up. Despite disheartening levels of unemployment, having a Democratic administration correlates with a moderately declining murder rate.

While Gilligan doesn’t discuss income inequality explicitly, he argues that one of our major parties has no real concern for those below the economic median. Here his book complements the other three. If the Republicans win the presidency, it will be largely with votes from the upper half of the electorate, which provided their needed margin in the 2010 contests.⁴ Using this base, the GOP claims that the rich must be cosseted because they are “job creators.”

What isn’t said is that its business supporters seek the cheapest possible workforce—domestic, immigrant, or foreign—because bonuses and profits rise when payroll costs are low. If this strategy succeeds, the Americans who are most desperate for jobs will face a future as casual labor. (The college “adjuncts” who are poorly paid to do much of the teaching formerly done by upper-middle-class professors are one white-collar harbinger.) Like other overleveraged nations, the US may well be facing Thomas Edsall’s “age of austerity.” If so, it remains to ask who will be making most of the sacrifices. Americans have votes and voices; much of the decision will rest with them.

1 See www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household, Tables H-1 and H-17. All 1985–2010 amounts are in 2010-value dollars. ↩

2 Frank argues that Darwin's natural selection better explains the results of competition than Smith's invisible hand. To underwrite the "common good"—for which he finds scant concern in Darwin—he would impose onerous taxes on "positional" (i.e., conspicuous) consumption like lavish "weddings and coming-of-age parties." ↩

3 According to The Princeton Review , of the 15,141 students admitted by ten highly competitive colleges last year (the Ivy League plus Stanford and Duke), 48.8 percent were able to pay the full bill, which averaged $53,158. ↩

4 See my "The Next Election: The Surprising Reality," The New York Review , August 18, 2011. ↩

1. 1

   See www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household, Tables H-1 and H-17. All 1985–2010 amounts are in 2010-value dollars. ↩

2. 2

   Frank argues that Darwin's natural selection better explains the results of competition than Smith's invisible hand. To underwrite the "common good"—for which he finds scant concern in Darwin—he would impose onerous taxes on "positional" (i.e., conspicuous) consumption like lavish "weddings and coming-of-age parties." ↩

3. 3

   According to The Princeton Review , of the 15,141 students admitted by ten highly competitive colleges last year (the Ivy League plus Stanford and Duke), 48.8 percent were able to pay the full bill, which averaged $53,158. ↩

4. 4

   See my "The Next Election: The Surprising Reality," The New York Review , August 18, 2011. ↩

Documenting

the Orangeburg Massacre

Campus killings of black students received little news coverage in 1968, but a book about them keeps their memory alive.

By Jack Bass

 At 10:33 p.m. on the night of February 8, 1968, eight to 10 seconds of police gunfire left three young black men dying and 27 wounded on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. Exactly 33 years later, Governor Jim Hodges addressed an overflow crowd there in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium and referred directly to the “Orangeburg Massacre”—an identifying term for the event that itself had been controversial among South Carolinians. Governor Hodges called what happened “a great tragedy for our state” and expressed “deep regret.”

His audience that day included eight men in their fifties—including a clergyman, a college professor, and a retired Army lieutenant colonel—who had been shot that fateful night. Some of them still had lead in their bodies from gunshot wounds. For the first time, survivors were honored at this annual memorial service for the three students who died, Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith. Their deaths, which happened more than two years before gunfire by national guardsmen in Ohio killed four students at Kent State University, marked the first such tragedy on any American college campus.

Unlike Kent State, the students killed at Orangeburg were black, and the shooting occurred at night, leaving no compelling TV images. What happened barely penetrated the nation’s consciousness.

In an oral history project done during that 33rd anniversary, the eight attending survivors told their stories. Robert Lee Davis, a 260-pound football player when he was shot, was one of them. He drove from the small county seat town an hour away, where he worked with emotionally disturbed children. He told his interviewer, “One thing I can say is that I’m glad you all are letting us do the talking, the ones that were actually involved, instead of outsiders that weren’t there, to tell you exactly what happened.”

The Orangeburg Shootings

The shootings occurred two nights after an effort by students at the then almost all-black college to bowl at the city’s only bowling alley. The owner refused. Tensions rose and violence erupted. When it ended, nine students and one city policeman received hospital treatment for injuries. Other students were treated at the college infirmary. College faculty and administrators at the scene witnessed at least two instances in which a female student was held by one officer and clubbed by another.

After two days of escalating tension, a fire truck was called to douse a bonfire lit by students on a street in front of the campus. State troopers—all of them white, with little training in crowd control—moved to protect the firemen. As more than 100 students retreated inside the campus, a tossed banister rail struck one trooper in the face. He fell to the ground bleeding. Five minutes later, almost 70 law enforcement officers lined the edge of the campus. They were armed with carbines, pistols and riot guns—short-barreled shotguns that by dictionary definition are used “to disperse rioters rather than to inflict serious injury or death.” But theirs were loaded with lethal buckshot, which hunters use to kill deer. Each shell contained nine to 12 pellets the size of a .32 caliber pistol slug.

As students began returning to the front to watch their bonfire go out, a patrolman suddenly squeezed several rounds from his carbine into the air—apparently intended as warning shots. As other officers began firing, students fled in panic or dived for cover, many getting shot in their backs and sides and even the soles of their feet.

Davis recalled in his oral history interview: “The sky lit up. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! And students were hollering, yelling and running. I went into a slope near the front end of the campus, and I kneeled down. I got up to run, and I took one step; that’s all I can remember. I got hit in the back.”

Later, Davis lay on the bloody floor of the campus infirmary, head to head with Hammond, a friend and quiet freshman halfback who also got shot in the back, and watched him die. Smith, a tall, slender ROTC student who had called his mother at two a.m. to tell her about the “shameful” beating of the female students by policemen, died after arriving at the hospital with five separate wounds. Middleton, a 200-pound high school football and basketball star whose mother worked as a maid at the college, died after asking her to recite the 23rd Psalm for him and then repeating it himself while lying on a hospital table with blood oozing from a chest wound over the heart.

Of 66 troopers on the scene, eight later told FBI agents they had fired their riot guns at the students after hearing shots. Some fired more than once. A ninth patrolman said he fired his .38 caliber Colt service revolver six times as “a spontaneous reaction to the situation.” At least one city policeman—he later became police chief—fired a shotgun.

At a noon press conference the next day in Columbia, South Carolina, Governor Robert E. McNair called it “one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina” and referred to “this unfortunate incident.” He expressed concern that the state’s “reputation for racial harmony had been blemished.” Contrary to all evidence, McNair also said the shooting occurred off campus. He placed blame on “black power advocates” and added other inaccurate embellishments.

Tyrone Caldwell, a student at South Carolina State College, shook his finger at law officers after arrests were made when black students were barred from an all-white, private bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, February 6, 1968. Windows were smashed, cars overturned, and police hospitalized before the crowd dispersed. Photo courtesy of The Associated Press.

 

Reporting on the Massacre and Its Aftermath

In federal court more than a year later, a jury took less than two hours to acquit nine troopers charged with imposing summary punishment without due process of law. The trial uncovered stark facts about this armed attack on a college campus, and this evidence helped immeasurably in research that a fellow Nieman, Jack Nelson, and I did in writing “The Orangeburg Massacre,” a book first published in 1970. The book has been accepted by historians as the definitive account of what happened that night and of actions that took place in its aftermath.

In the fall of 1970, two-and-a-half years after the shooting, a jury in Orangeburg convicted Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr. of “riot” because of limited activity at the bowling alley two nights before the shooting. Sellers, who had grown up 20 miles from Orangeburg, had returned from the Deep South combat zone of the civil rights struggle as national program director for the militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The presiding judge threw out charges of conspiracy to riot and incitement to riot, but the charge of riot stood. “Nobody here has ever put the defendant into the area of rioting on Wednesday or Thursday [the night of the shooting] with the exception that he was wounded and that to my mind means very little,” the judge commented. Sellers, who is profiled in the book as “the scapegoat,” served seven months of a one-year sentence in state prison, with early release for good behavior.

In a November 1970 report on the Sellers trial in the Southern Patriot, Dave Nolan (now a historian for civil rights and other issues in St. Augustine, Florida) wrote that had the shooting happened “earlier, there might have been a public outcry. But this was 1968, not 1964, and in the intervening years civil rights demonstrations had come to be seen as ‘riots’—and most whites seemed to feel that it was justified to put them down as brutally as possible.” He suggested that the slaughter of the Vietnam War had so brutalized the public mind as to make three black lives “seem that much less important.”

The Associated Press initially misreported the shooting as “a heavy exchange of gunfire”—and didn’t correct it. In the aftermath of major urban riots, the national media’s interest in civil rights faded, and what happened on the campus at Orangeburg, where the victims were black, was out of tune with the times and not considered “news.” Few questioned Governor McNair’s misleading account.

In his report, Nolan concluded, “A new book, ‘The Orangeburg Massacre,’ … will hopefully prick the public conscience.” Our book was widely and positively reviewed, and it also received extensive news coverage, especially its disclosures about shoddy FBI practices that included false statements by FBI agents on the scene to Justice Department superiors to cover up for the state troopers. F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover sent me a three-page letter—scalding in tone but erroneous and defensive in content. Together with my rebuttal letter to him, it generated another spate of news stories.

In many cities where the book had received rave reviews, however, it was unavailable in major bookstores. Although Hoover’s wrath scared away a syndicate that had committed to purchase rights for a series of newspaper articles, the distribution problem flowed from our editor (now deceased), who had been described to me by an author who had worked with him as “brilliant—and the most vindictive person I’ve ever met.” With us, he soon became contentious. Once, when I insisted to a sales clerk at a bookstore in Philadelphia that the book actually existed, he opened the current issue of “Books in Print,” showed me there was no entry for “The Orangeburg Massacre,” and said, “You must be mistaken. There is no such book.”

Two black demonstrators killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the ground at the edge of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968. Following three days of protests, which began when blacks were barred from entering a bowling alley by the proprietor, state police and national guardsmen confronted demonstrators. Three students were killed and 27 wounded. Photo courtesy of The Associated Press.

Working to Right the Wrongs

Journalism, of course, requires that reporters remain detached from events they cover. But since becoming an academic, I have been free to do what I can to secure the Orangeburg Massacre’s place in history and to see that my native state addresses issues of truth and justice. Along the way, I have authored or coauthored six other books, including a text for a television history course on the American South since World War II—a project for which I served as director and executive editor. That project led indirectly to a 1984 reissue of “The Orangeburg Massacre” by Mercer University Press.

Subsequently, I became involved in the process that led a decade ago to the pardon of Sellers, who then received a faculty appointment at the University of South Carolina (USC). Despite a master’s degree from Harvard and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he had been unable to get a college teaching job in South Carolina. He remains at USC, directing the African American Studies program and teaching classes that consistently are oversubscribed. In June he received the 2003 Distinguished Service Award from the mainstream Greater Columbia Community Relations Council.

When I returned to South Carolina in 1999 as professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston, I became involved in efforts that led to a state historical marker about the Orangeburg Massacre being placed on the South Carolina State campus. The 2001 oral history program developed from a student project in a “Depth Reporting” class I taught, and Governor Hodges made his speech after I dropped off a copy of “The Orangeburg Massacre” at his office. He later told me he was 11 when the shooting occurred and had never really understood what happened until he read the book.

Historian Bill Hine at South Carolina State has worked closely with me on many of these issues, as well as convening a panel on Orangeburg at last year’s Southern Historical Association annual meeting, the first such presentation at a major academic conference. It attracted an overflow crowd.

This year I produced a 35-minute video about the Orangeburg story based on the oral history interviews, which I showed to the 2003 class of Nieman Fellows. On that visit I also met with producers from Northern Lights Productions in Boston, who have begun working on a major documentary about the Orangeburg Massacre. As I write, a major religious denomination in the state is developing a plan to use the video as a mean of developing dialogue around the issue of race.

On this year’s 35th anniversary, Governor Mark Sanford went a step beyond what Governor Hodges had said, issuing a statement: “I think it’s appropriate to tell the African-American community in South Carolina that we don’t just regret what happened in Orangeburg 35 years ago—we apologize for it.” Two black state senators responded by introducing legislation calling for an official state investigation (there’s never been one) and report of what happened. One of them told the Los Angeles Times that you don’t apologize for something unless you’re guilty. Now there is interest in a film.

In the concluding sentence of a 2002 postscript to a new paperback edition of our book, Nelson and I wrote, “Whether the state eventually provides restitution as the final stage of reconciliation, as Florida did more than a half-century after the destruction of the all-black town of Rosewood, remains to be seen.”

Jack Bass, a 1966 Nieman Fellow, as Columbia, South Carolina bureau chief for The Charlotte Observer covered the tragedy as it unfolded in 1968. He received the 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award grand prize for “Taming the Storm,” a biography of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. of Alabama. Bass spent 12 years as professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, received a PhD at Emory University, and is now a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston.

__________________________

DVD 
57 minutes, 2009,  closed captioned
Producers/Directors: Bestor Cram, Judy Richardson

ABOUT THE FILM Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968brings to light one of the bloodiest tragedies of the Civil Rights era after four decades of deliberate denial. The killing of four white students at Kent State University in 1970 left an indelible stain on our national consciousness. But most Americans know nothing of the three black students killed at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg two years earlier. This scrupulously researched documentary finally offers the definitive account of that tragic incident and reveals the environment that allowed it to be buried for so long. It raises disturbing questions about how our country acknowledges its tortured racial past in order to make sense of its challenging present. In 1968, Orangeburg was a typical Southern town still clinging to its Jim Crow traditions. Although home to two black colleges and a majority black population, economic and political power remained exclusively in the hands of whites. Growing black resentment and white fear provided the kindling; the spark came when a black Vietnam War veteran was denied access to a nearby bowling alley, one of the last segregated facilities in town. Three hundred protestors from South Carolina State College and Claflin University converged on the alley in a non-violent demonstration. A melee with the police ensued during which police beat two female students; the incensed students then smashed the windows of white-owned businesses along the route back to campus. With scenes of the destruction in Detroit and Newark fresh in their minds, Orangeburg’s white residents, businessmen and city officials feared urban terrorists were now in Orangeburg. The Governor sent in the state police and National Guard. By the late evening of February 8th, army tanks and over 100 heavily armed law enforcement officers had cordoned off the campus; 450 more had been stationed downtown. About 200 students milled around a bonfire on S.C. State’s campus; a fire truck with armed escort was sent in. Without warning the crackle of shotgun fire shattered the cold night air. It lasted less than ten seconds. When it was over, twenty-eight students lay on State’s campus with multiple buckshot wounds; three others had been killed. Almost all were shot in the back or side. Students and police vividly describe what they experienced that night. Journalists remember that the Governor and law enforcement officials on the scene claimed police had fired in self-defense. The Associated Press' initial account, carried in newspapers the morning after the shooting, misreported what happened as "an exchange of gunfire." The source, an AP photographer on the scene, subsequently revealed that he heard no gunfire from the campus.  In Orangeburg, police fingered Cleveland Sellers as the inevitable ‘outside agitator’ who, they claimed, had incited the students. Twenty-three years old, he had returned home, leaving his position as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) program director, to organize black consciousness groups on South Carolina campuses. Sellers had already attracted the attention of law enforcement officials as a friend of SNCC head Stokely Carmichael, who had frightened many Americans with his call for ‘Black Power.’ Carmichael’s ideas articulated the Movement’s shift from a focus on integration to one of gaining political and economic power within the black community. South Carolina officials therefore saw Sellers as a direct challenge to their power. Wounded in the Massacre, Sellers was arrested at the hospital and charged with ‘inciting to riot.’ Though students made clear he was only minimally involved with their demonstrations, Sellers was tried and sentenced to one year of hard labor. He was finally pardoned 23 years after the incident. The U.S. Justice Department charged the nine police officers who admitted shooting that night with abuse of power. However, neither of two South Carolina juries would uphold the charges. The Orangeburg Massacre has been excluded from most histories of the Civil Rights Movement. But forty years later, some remember the tragedy as if it happened only yesterday. The film interviews the most important participants on both sides of the tragedy, some of whom speak for the first time about the Massacre. The survivors are still visibly traumatized by that night, while the Governor and one of the accused policemen remain convinced they had no other choice. Two prominent Southern white journalists, Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, authors of The Orangeburg Massacre and historical consultants to the film, discuss their revealing, independent investigation. At an historic conference about South Carolina’s Civil Rights Movement, white officials try to evade discussion of the Massacre, arguing that an investigation isn’t warranted because ‘it is time to move forward.’ However, African Americans insist that true reconciliation cannot begin without an investigation and report that finally sheds light on the many unanswered questions. Cleveland Sellers, now president of Voorhees, a historically black college in South Carolina, and his son, Bakari, at 21 the youngest state legislator in South Carolina history, call on us to remember those slain in Orangeburg with the other Civil Rights martyrs. With a resonance that carries us far beyond the tragedy itself, the film is a powerful antidote to historical amnesia.  Chapter Listing 1. Orangeburg: The Community 2. The Beginnings: A Bowling Alley Demonstration 3. The Response: Lead-up to the Massacre 4. The Massacre 5. Blamed: Black Power & Cleveland Sellers 6. Questions Remain & FBI Investigation 7. The Trials: The Officers, Cleveland Sellers 8. Remembering &The Legacy Bestor Cram is a director, producer, and cinematographer who founded Northern Light Productions in 1982, a Boston-based production company which produces film projects for museums and for television on PBS, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel. His films include The Special, and Unfinished Symphony: Deomcracy and Dissent, among others.  Having been on the staff of the Civil Rights Movement's Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, Judy Richardson now writes, lectures, and holds workshops on the history and relevance of the Civil Rights Movement in addition to her work as a producer. She also worked on the award-winning PBS series Eyes On The Prize, Eyes on the Prize II, and Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Scarred Justice: The Orangerburg Massacre 1968 is a co-production of Northern Light Productions, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the National Black Programming Consortium, with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Sally Jo Fifer Executive Producer for ITVS.

Video:

Pharoahe Monch

“Still Standing” f/ Jill Scott

by Eddie "STATS" on February 6, 2012    

What you really need to know about this new video is: it’s Pharoahe Monch featuring Jill Scott. It’s also important to note that Pharoahe did not draw for Jilly’s big guns (pipes) for just any old track. No, you only call up the vocal National Guard in a real state of emergency–in this case a highly personal track that takes the viewer through not one but two near-death experiences. The video, directed by Terence Nance, likewise makes excellent use of strong camera-work and some very simple visual elements to make the out-of-body moment real for the viewer. Watch and you may know more about how the world looks from behind Pharoahe’s eyes than you ever thought possible. His LP W.A.R. (We Are Renegades) is available on iTunes now.

<br />Urban Media powered by Mixtapes.tv  

Music Break. Hamdan Al-Abri

January 30, 2012 By Dylan Valley 

I’ve been in Dubai for the past month working on an documentary on the life of late South African political activist and Mandela confidante Fatima Meer (we shot it in South Africa but the production company is based in Dubai) and I have to say, this is one interesting place. Once you get away from the bling, the giant malls and the indoor ski slopes, Dubai can actually be a city of gems that might surprise you. One of those things would be the Dubai based Soul musician Hamdan Al-Abri, of Zanzibari descent.

 

Technically, despite being born and raised in the United Arab Emirates he is a Zanzibari citizen, due to Dubai’s archaic citizenship laws. His new video “Falling” (above) contrasts the somewhat grittier side of Dubai life, the working class neighborhoods of Karama and Deira, with the ubiquitous Dubai Mall and Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The result is a soulful and reflective depiction of life in the UAE. All I can say is Dubai could do with a lot more of this.

Download Al-Abri’s free EP here.

Call for Submissions

Roots & Wings Exhibition

– Bridgetown, Barbados

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Urbanflo Creative Consultancy in collaboration with Brighton Photo Fringe, Crawley Borough Council and the Barbados Commission for Pan African Affairs are pleased to announce “Roots & Wings”, an international photography exhibition to launch the Olympic-inspired <relay> Programme – connecting artists and communities across cultural, social and geographical divides.   The exhibition celebrates the forthcoming presence of the Caribbean Olympic training camps in the UK.

Entry to the exhibition is open to all, but we are particularly seeking submissions from Caribbean-based artists with connections to the UK and UK-based photographers with connections to the Caribbean.  Other artists are welcome to submit works that explore the theme of “Roots & Wings”.  Please take a few minutes to read through the application guidelines below and if you would like your work to be considered for the exhibition then we’d love to hear from you.  Deadline for applications is 20 February 2012, and entries will be selected by a panel made up of representatives from Urbanflo and Brighton Photo Fringe.  The selected works will be digitally printed and mounted by Urbanflo.  There will be a special Launch Event and Private View held on 23 March 2012.

Guidelines for Submissions

Submission Items: To apply for selection for the “Roots & Wings” exhibition you will need to submit the following items together with an Application Form which you can request from info(at)urbanflo.com:

1) Up to 10 digital images of your work (10 is the maximum but you can submit fewer if you wish):

• Resolution: 300dpi
• Format: .jpg, .gif or .png only
• Size: each file must be NO larger than 1Mb.
• The caption/title, medium and dimensions for each image you intend to submit

2) An artist’s statement

3) Your complete contact information -  address, phone, e-mail, and website details if you have one

Submission Deadline: MONDAY 20 February 2012. Selections will be contacted by 26 February.

Eligibility: Entry is open to all regardless of photography experience

Fees: There is no submission fee for you to pay and there will be no fee payable for works selected for exhibition.

Copyright: All work must be submitted by the copyright owner.  Artists maintain the copyright of their work.

Usage Rights: All entrants agree that any image they submit to the “Roots & Wings” Exhibition may be used for marketing and promotional purposes directly related to <relay> or “Roots & Wings”. This use may include, but is not limited to, publication in any <relay> or “Roots & Wings” printed materials, advertisements, electronic media, Internet, television, catalogue, DVD, magazine and gallery shows. Any image used by the “Roots & Wings” Exhibition will be accompanied by all credit information on the artist. Copyright and all other rights remain that of the artist. To apply to take part in “Roots & Wings” please request an application form from info@urbanflo.com.

CFP:

Race, Girlhood and Social Justice

in Children's Literature, MLA 2013

(Boston, Jan 3-6)

full name / name of organization: 

Kristen Proehl/ Clemson U.

contact email: 

kproehl@clemson.edu

This proposed panel will explore the intersections of race, girlhood and social justice in children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Focusing especially upon the work of children’s authors and illustrators of color, this panel will examine how and why narratives of girlhood often function as a medium for social commentary. Through the lens of literature, we will also consider how race, gender, and sexuality shape the contours of coming-of-age for girls in the United States and beyond. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: twentieth- and twenty-first-century multi-ethnic narratives of girlhood, such as the works of Cynthia Kadohata, Jacqueline Woodson, Julia Alvarez, Louise Erdrich, and Ed Young; teaching narratives of race and girlhood, from K-12 to the college-level; transnational representations of girlhood and race; and, African American girlhood and children’s literature of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Please send a 250-word abstract and a 1-page CV to Kristen Proehl, kproehl_at_clemson.edu, and Sharon Holland, sharon.holland_at_duke.edu, by March 1, 2012.

“Why I’m No Longer

A Black Poet”

 

 by Reginald Dwayne Betts, PR Guest Blogger

Forgetting is the gift to folks who don’t mind circling the same wagon, year after year, decade after decade. It seems that is the case for black poetry in America, this circling of the wagon, a perpetual seeking of place and definition. How one manages racial identity in these fifty states has become something that can always be mined for content and controversy.

ROBERT HAYDEN

 

I’m thinking about Robert Hayden and about his position on the infamous question, “Am I a poet, or am I a black poet?”—that “to be or not to be” used to bludgeon African-American men and women who write in America.  It’s what prompted the 1966 Black Writers Conference at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee; it was an historic gathering of writers, civil rights workers, and others to discuss the image of the Negro in literature.

At the Conference, the poet Robert Hayden remarked, “Let’s quit saying we’re black writers writing to black folks—it has been given importance it should not have.” His remarks preceded those of Melvin Tolson, who famously went on to proclaim, “I’m a black poet, an African American poet, a Negro poet. I’m no accident – and I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you think.”

This contentious encounter is all recorded in the June 1966 issue of Black Digest, and if you aren’t careful, after reading the account of this encounter, you might walk away thinking that Hayden’s and Tolson’s poetics were a world apart. But read a bit of Tolson’s “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia“ and you will find Tolson doing what Hayden did time and again: write about black folks with a serious sense of wordplay, with panache. Tolson’s poetry makes this public spat over the question all the more interesting, and all the more redundant.

.

MELVIN TOLSON

.

The backstory to this is everything Robert Hayden’s writing has taught me: Nat Turner, the Amistad Mutiny, all those figures from the (Detroit) Paradise Valley series, Bessie Smith, the meticulous emotional turmoil that was the Middle Passage, Paul Robeson – all names and historical moments that are but a sample of what I found early on in his verse. I think that I benefited from having read Hayden before I had any real idea that I wanted to be a poet, because at that time I read him alongside Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Lucy Terry and countless others, including the anonymous authors of the Spirituals and Work Songs, without yet having a social or historical context.

There is no one that could walk away from the Hayden’s Collected Poems not knowing these poems were soaked in what it meant to be black in America from slavery to beyond the 1960s. Hayden was the guy with narratives, history, myth. He dropped science in a way that the other poets I read just weren’t.

At this point, it’s almost a waste to go into comparisons between Hayden and poets of the Black Arts Movement. Any such comparison would be more about personality, less about poem. And at the end of the day, Hayden maintained an exquisite balance in his poetry, work that didn’t seek to demonize or make heroic the figures that found their way into those poems.  Hayden sought less to grant historic black figures anything (be it humanity or heroism) and more to carve a truth out of words that didn’t exist, exactly that way, before they were written. When I first learned of the Fisk Conference controversy, of Hayden’s not wanting to be referred to as a “black” poet, I hadn’t thought about how naming can be akin to handcuffing.  And frankly, I left that issue alone. I wanted to be black because I already had been black as a failure and so I wanted to be black as a success.

For me, being black, wanting to be a writer, wanting to engage in the world larger than my block and my fears, have been about using color as the first filter. I was the kid who wanted to know why we read Shakespeare in high school and not Chinua Achebe, the kid who read the Stolen Legacy and waxed poetic about how Aristotelian thought was stolen from a library in Egypt. My mind was the constant playing of Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back—and I had yet to hear the album.

The thing is, you get older. And when I did, I recognized how racial solidarity addled my brain. My obsession with race became more important than the history I didn’t know.

.

*

LANGTON HUGHES

.

In “The Negro and the Racial Mountain,” (1926) published in The Nation, Langston Hughes did not argue for a singular blackness, but I read it that way, missing the part where he wrote, “If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.” No, I was stuck on his chastising Countée Cullen for his desire not to be known as a “Negro poet,” his wanting to be brave where Cullen seemed so awkwardly afraid of his blackness.

This craving worked as gift and detriment for me. And it was silly.  At the time, I viewed black poetry—all black literature—as a kind of service literature. The problem, of course, is that the best of black literature is far more than service, even when the writers are completely devoted to a kind of service. Ultimately, when I am moved to shirk racial symbolism, it’s partly because no one wanted my wearing “race” when I ran wild in the streets, and partly because there is a little dishonesty in the ordeal–as the idea of blackness too often replaces the fact of blackness. And so, a group of black writers who scrape with words to create a world gets reduced to: “X confronts his black identity (or decides to abandon it).”

What has been lost as I enter into present, public conversations about black literature is the myriad ways of conveying blackness. Conversations about “blackness” always overshadow the elements, the sounds, the nuance, the slang and vibrancy that reduce regional distinctions in African America to places where words become worlds. In having discussions about what it means to be a black poet, I forget that my moms went to work at four every morning without having to name herself “black” anything. That my folks, all of them, lived fully in their black skins, and, when need be, discussed racism and dealt with it—but they needed no obsession with adjectives. None of my friends who aren’t writers or reading the books about “post black” use these terms, or talk about them. They talk about the cost of daycare, of healthcare, of rent – and I imagine there is a poet singing his songs right now who only will be noticed for writing “black”—or being black while writing.

All of this returns me to Robert Hayden, whose “blackness” was called into question because he, like Cullen, didn’t want to be relegated to a literary ghetto (like today’s black literature section in popular bookstores). I’ve come to realize that black poets’ racial solidarity has become tantamount to another restraint: our thinking about black poetry has been reduced to how and why we represent racial issues—and our commitment to language has been allowed to fall slack. We will not call it service literature, but we do want it to serve.

I have found access within the black literary community and felt at home, but that community sometimes has looked askance at me when I’ve admitted to feeling at home at largely white institutions, too. As the saying goes, I am “the Negro of the moment.”—And yes, there is a trace of truth to this saying, but the idea behind it is corrupt and corrupting. Am I to understand the entire history of literature and black folks in America as merely a succession of chosen Negroes?

What is apparent is that the erasing of history that goes on is layered and complex. If you aren’t careful someone will dress you in a beret and an Afro pick before your first good line is written, or they will have you referring to your complexion as a mere coincidence.  It’s all from the same bag, a not-so subtle-way to erase the nuance out of you.

Sometimes the black community that raised me is a far cry from the community represented in the work I read, often the work I write. Sadly, many of the people who are my “black” peers display an overwhelming gap in information. But our poems dance. They dance before a crowd that has no sense of literary tradition. (Or does). They dance before those most concerned (if concerned at all) with what moves them, and little else.

And at a time when we black poets must demand our presence be acknowledged, must scrap and badger with decision makers and power holders of largely white institutions, we have survived, in large part, due to racial solidarity.  Yet, this same solidarity has now lead to a climate where to criticize the work of another black writer is tantamount to racial treason.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe these aren’t real issues issue at all.

.

*

I want to say I stopped being a black poet when I discovered that black poets had the audacity to question Robert Hayden’s authenticity—but the truth is that it is deeper than that. The truth is I have found myself longing to be fuller in my own skin, to dismiss the rhetoric that surrounds what it means to be a black poet and find a way to write a poetry that better reflects the sounds I hear in my sleep, the sounds I hear when I walk down the streets that are most familiar with me – and the sounds that I hear when I am in a strange place filled with black faces.

At the Fisk Conference, Robert Hayden ended his speech by saying the blackest thing ever said at an academic conference (at least to me). Speaking to those whom he expected to disagree with him, Hayden remarked, “Baby, that’s your problem, not mine.”

With that statement, he took it back to where the truth always exists: don’t listen to what a person calls him- or herself, just listen to what is said when the guards are down. And the proof is always in the poems, because if your guards aren’t down when you go to that necessary place, then you were lying before you even started.

. 

—-

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. His memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009), won the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, and his collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), was awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.

Watch Aunjanue Ellis

In Clip From "The Tested"

+ Director Russell Costanzo

On The Film

Festivals by Tambay | February 8, 2012

Another highlight from the upcoming New Voices In Black Cinema Film Festival (which runs from February 17th through the 20th at BAM Cinemas in Brooklyn, NY) is a searing drama titled The Tested, a film we've covered quite a bit here on S&A over the last couple of years.

Based on an award-winning 2005 short film of the same name by Russell Costanzo, The Tested can be summarized as the long term ramifications of a single tragic event. A New York City cop accidentally kills an unarmed African American teenager (certainly topical); the film's plot then picks up a year after the incident, as we follow the lives of 3 people linked to the incident (the cop, the victim's mother, and the victim's brother), and the different paths each take, ultimately leading all 3 of them back to one another, and eventual redemption.

The film stars Aunjanue Ellis, Armando Riesco, and Michael Morris Jr.

It'll screen at the New Voices In Black Cinema Film Festival twice: Friday Feb 17 at 6:50pm & Sunday February 19 at 2pm. 

A Q&A with director Costanzo and actors Aunjanue Ellis, Armando Riesco & Michael Morris will follow the Friday screening, so you should be there!

First watch a newly-released clip from the film below; and underneath you'll find a video with director Costanzo talking about his background, developing the film, and what you can expect from it.

Head over to BAM's website for more info on the upcoming film festival, including how you can purchase tickets: