FAMOUS QUOTES
KEY QUESTION
HOW IS PROGRESS ACHIEVED? OR :WHAT MAKES PROGRESS POSSIBLE? WHAT MEANS CAN BE USED TO MAKE PROGRESS POSSIBLE?
I WILL USE 2 FILMS THAT DEAL WITH INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE TO SHOW HOW PROGRESS CAN BE ACHIEVED ON A PERSONAL AND A HISTORICAL LEVEL. BOTH THESE FILMS WERE RELEASED THIS YEAR.
PART I: LOVING - A TRUE STORY
1. FILM POSTER: LOVING ( written and directed by Jeff Nichols)
PART I: LOVING - A TRUE STORY
1. FILM POSTER: LOVING ( written and directed by Jeff Nichols)
The second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence
(1776) starts as follows: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
2. VIDEO
THE LOVING CASE: NBC NIGHTLY NEWS (2012)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLngXMpv8Z4
3. THE CRIME OF BEING MARRIED, LIFE MGAZINE, 1966
The Crime of Being Married
A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation
A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation
She is Negro, he is white and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.
Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again and they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and life hood.
Both Lovings were born and raised in the isolated hill country around Caroline County, north of Richmond, where there has always been an easy-going tolerance on the race question. It stirred little fuss when the couple culminated a long and agonized courtship by traveling to Washington, D.C. to get married in 1958. But five weeks later thecounty sheriff routed them out of bed at 2 a.m. and took them off to jail. A local judge handed down a year’s sentence but suspended it if they agreed to leave the state immediately and stay away for 25 years. Badly frightened and unaware of their right of appeal, the Lovings lived five years of hand-to-mouth exile in Washington. Even so, they were re-arrested when they returned for a visit to Mildred’s family. Released on bail, they wrote a letter to then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking for help. This led the American Civil Liberties Union to take an interest in their case. The Lovings decided to take up permanence residence in Virginia and
fight. Now their case will return to federal court – where Loving vs. Virginia may well become the next big landmark in civil rights. The children manage to take it all in stride.
« Folks here just want to live and be left alone »
Richard and Mildred’s families have lived in Caroline County for generations. They were friends and neighbors when they were two children, and they still are. In fact, Richard’s mother, a licensed
midwife, delivered all three of Mildred’s children. « It never was like a lot of other places » Richard explains. « It doesn’t matter to folks around here. They just want to live and be left alone. That’s the way I feel. » A family of simple wants and needs, the Lovings keep largely to themselves. Richard keeps busy as a $5-per-hour construction worker. On weekends, he likes to go drag-racing in a souped-up car, which he owns with two boyhood friends, both Negroes. The Lovings’ white neighbors have grown accustomated to the marriage and they encounter hostile stares only when they venture away. « It makes me want to ask them what the hell they are staring at. » he says. « I haven’t yet, but once we are allowed to live here legally, I will. »
4. .
‘The
Loving Story,’ an HBO Documentary
The
New York Times, Feb. 2012
The improbably named Lovings, Mildred and Richard, make a compelling
couple, and not just because she is half-black, half-Native American and he is
good ol’ boy white. In a rich collection of 16-millimeter film, old news clips
and still photographs, the Lovings don’t look like two people caught up in a
cause, they seem like two people caught up in each other.
The Lovings became civil rights activists by default: victims of the times,
the color of their skin and a willful, wrongheaded judge in Virginia. By accident, more than design, they
made history.
And it was a remarkable moment in time, one that today seems prehistoric.
In 1958, only three years before Barack Obama’s parents married, the newlyweds
were awakened in their bed in the middle of the night by flashlights shining in
their faces. Mildred explained that she was Richard’s wife. “Not here, you’re
not,” the sheriff replied as he put them under arrest.
Not long after, in a plea bargain, Judge Leon M. Bazile essentially
banished them — back then, interracial marriage was illegal in more than 20
states, including Virginia.
Richard and Mildred spent the next nine years fighting for the right to go
home, and the film helps explains why this reserved, quiet husband and wife
were so determined to return to a state that had tossed them out. Both were
simple country people who wanted to be near their families and friends in tiny
Central Point, Va. — for Mildred, especially, nearby Washington might as well
have been Siberia.
Mr. Loving, who died in 1975, in the film has a crew cut, a backwoods
accent and a taciturn manner; he looks like the kind of person who would be
more likely to favor segregation. His own lawyer confesses that he was
suspicious at first because Mr. Loving a construction worker, looked, as he
puts it, “like a redneck.”
But Mr. Loving grew up in a farming community in rural Virginia too small
and intertwined for race to become an issue or a problem. “There’s a few white,
there’s a few colored and we all, as we grew up and as they grew up, we all
helped one another,” he says bashfully. “It was all mixed together, you know,
to start with, so we just kept going that way.”
Mrs. Loving grew up in the same community and didn’t really pay attention
to the Jim Crow laws that ruled the world around her.
“You know the white and colored went to school different, things like that,
you know, they couldn’t go to the same restaurants,” she says softly. “I knew
that, but I didn’t realize how bad it was until we got married.”
Mrs. Loving wrote to Robert F. Kennedy, then the United States attorney
general, asking for help, which came from the American Civil Liberties Union.
At least half the film focuses on the legal battle to strike down Judge
Bazile’s decision, a struggle that was finally resolved by the Supreme Court in
1967.
“The Supreme Court held today that marriages of whites and Negroes are
legal and no state may stop them,” is how David Brinkley, then an NBC News
anchor, described the decision. The ruling was unanimous, and Chief Justice
Earl Warren wrote the opinion.
http://time.com/4364686/loving-day-loving-v-virginia/
6. CIVILS RIGHTS TIMELINE
http://www.layers-of-learning.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Civil-Rights-Timeline.pdf
7: 30 Interracial Couples Show Why Their Love Matters
Love is love.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/30-interracial-couples-show-why-their-love-matters_us_575aff03e4b00f97fba83357
PART 2
1. The true story of a love that shook an empire
A United Kingdom (directed by Amma Assante)
2. David Oyelowo on How to Play a Real King
video: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/movies/david-oyelowo-interview.html
3. REVIEW: Colour Bar By Susan Williams
Book Review:
Colour Bar by Susan Williams
Colour Bar: the Triumph of Seretse Khama and his
Nation, by Susan Willliams
The Guardian, August 2006
At the heart of this engaging book is the story of an enduring love affair between a black man
and a white woman, which began one summer night in gloomy, rationed
postwar Britain. But this was no ordinary man, nor indeed any ordinary woman. He was Seretse
Khama, the heir to the kingship of the largest tribe of an African protectorate
under British control; she was Ruth Williams, a 23-year-old clerk
in a shipping company, and a conservative, with a small and large c.
As Susan Williams shows in this extensively researched and elegantly
written account, the love story of Seretse and Ruth defines an era of dying
colonial power. Stymied in their relationship at every turn by the
British government, in covert alliance with apartheid South Africa, the dignity of Khama and his strong-willed bride came to
represent the emerging freedoms and racial tolerance of Africa as a whole.
The young Khama was sent over to London in 1945 to study law by his uncle,
the Regent of the Bangwato tribe to which Seretse was heir. Lonely at first in the chill world of Oxford, he moved to London, where
he met several other politically minded young Africans; and then Ruth, at a
dinner dance, in June 1947. Within months, the couple were engaged.
Almost immediately, the young mixed-race couple faced trouble. They were
plagued by racist landlords and casual abuse in the streets. British government
officials, family friends and church figures tried to prevent the marriage.
Four days after their first attempt to wed in a Kensington Church was blocked
by the Bishop of London, Seretse and Ruth were married in a civil ceremony. The
bride wore a black suit.
In late 1947, Seretse returned to Bechuanaland to seek ratification of his
marriage from his tribe: at an extraordinary tribe assembly, thousands of men
stood up in a dramatic show of support for their future Chief. Sadly,
the British response was not so sophisticated: under intense
pressure from South Africa, which bordered Bechuanaland, and in alliance
with Khama's uncle, who violently opposed the marriage, they began to find ways
to block the return of Khama to his native country.
Williams has done a masterly job in unravelling and chronicling a shameful
piece of colonial history, in particular, the twists and turns of the Harragin
special inquiry and its political aftermath. Set up to decide whether Seretse
was a fit and proper person to discharge the functions of Chief, the inquiry
found in his favour but nonetheless argued that South Africa's opposition to
his marriage, and therefore his chieftainship, constituted enough reason to bar
Khama from returning to his country.
Khama was
summoned to Britain, and was discourteously made to wait through a
general election before being informed of his banishment from his homeland
and the postponement of any decision about the chieftainship for five years.Khama fought a dignified campaign against his painful seven-year exile in Britain. His case became a cause celebre among MPs, left and right, who kept up insistent pressure in Parliament, as well as prominent actors, journalists and churchmen
The government's eventual capitulation was in large part due the advancing
tide of colonial freedom. In late 1956, Alec Douglas Home, the Commonwealth
Secretary, persuaded Eden, preoccupied with the impending Suez debacle, of the
case for negotiating a return home on condition that he renounce his claims to
be chief.
Susan Williams has succeeded in the difficult feat of seamlessly entwining a political and
personal story. She conveys the human aspects of her tale, from the
pettiness of the white settler population to the distinctive personalities of
Ruth and Seretse - she, fiery; he, charmingly even-tempered - just as
powerfully as the political ins and outs of this famous case.
The even-handed narrative also cleverly underlines the casual racism,
arrogant patronage and incredible hauteur of both Labour and Tory politicians.
Writing of his 1950 meeting with the Commonwealth Secretary, Patrick Gordon
Walker, in which he was first informed of his banishment, Seretse Khama was
most struck by the politicians' manner: "as unfeeling as if he was asking
me to give up smoking... I doubt that any man has been asked to give up his
birthright in such cold, calculating tones."
Ultimately, though, this is a story of love and redemption. After his
return home, Seretse Khama was duly elected first democratic head of the newly
created nation state of Botswana, which he ruled for over 20 years
before his death from cancer in 1980. Ruth, who adapted remarkably easily to life both in
Africa and the political spotlight, took her place as the mother of the nation
during Seretse's life and after.
As for Khama himself, he never let anger sour his outlook. "I
myself," he said on a 1967 visit to Malawi, "have never been very
bitter at all. Bitterness does not pay. Certain things have happened to all of
us in the past and it is for us to forget those and look to the future. It is not for
our own benefit, but for the benefit of our children and children's children
that we ourselves should put this world right."
4. Film Review:
A
United Kingdom review – black king to white queen…
This true-life romance between an
English office clerk and the future king of Botswana is a beautifully shot,
crowd-pleasing gem
Mark Kermode The Guardian, November 2016
As a female British film-maker of Ghanaian heritage, the director Amma
Asante broke several glass ceilings when her third feature, A United Kingdom, opened the London film festival in October. With an awards-worthy,
powerhouse performance by producer/star David Oyelowo – whose brilliant portrayal
of Martin Luther King in 2014’s Selma was overlooked at the “so white” Oscars – A United Kingdom also chimed with the launch of the BFI’s Black Star season, a
programme “celebrating the range, versatility and power of black actors”.
Screenwriter Guy Hibbert’s screenplay (from Susan Williams’s 2006 book Colour Bar) revisits an often forgotten chapter of postwar history that might be
filed under “stranger than fiction”. Rosamund Pike is Ruth Williams, a clerk from
Blackheath, south London, working in Lloyds of London in 1947, who is swept off
her feet by handsome law student Seretse Khama (Oyelowo). Ruth doesn’t know
that Seretse is an African king in waiting, leader-to-be of the Bamangwato
people of Bechuanaland (later Botswana), the British protectorate to which he
is due to return on completion of his studies.
When Seretse proposes, having duly explained his true identity, Ruth
imagines a new life away from the misty drizzle of London, a life that, she
assures her fiance, will be taken “moment by moment – together”. But when the
news of this high-profile black-and-white union reaches neighbouring South
Africa, whose National party is busy enshrining apartheid in law, the
cash-strapped British authorities move first to forbid and then to undermine
the marriage, scared of alienating their supplier of cheap gold and
uranium. Seretse’s
regent uncle, Tshekedi Khama (Vusi Kunene), also refuses to countenance a white
queen and a rift develops that threatens to tear apart more than
just love.
For all the film’s vibrant grandeur, though, our attention is kept tightly
focused on the central couple’s romance, even when they are separated by geography, economics
and politics. Much is made of the world-turned-upside-down absurdity
of Labour prime minister Clement Attlee’s obsequious loyalty to South Africa
while the Conservative Churchill appears to be an ally of Khama’s progressive
cause (although pragmatism soon overrides opposition promises), but it’s the
wholly believable and tangible bond between Oyelowo’s Seretse and Pike’s Ruth
that delivers the real emotional punch.
A United Kingdom depicts a world in flux, and once
again Asante
manages to dramatise global upheavals through intimate personal observations
– Pike’s anxious yet resilient smile , Oyelowo’s defiant boxer stance and
commanding vocal manner.
“I want to make pieces of
entertainment and art that mean something,” Asante recently told the BBC while
musing upon her forthcoming film, Where Hands Touch, a longstanding
passion project about a relationship between a bi-racial girl and a Hitler
Youth boy in 1930s Berlin. “I want to make movies that leave some kind of mark
on you.” With A
United Kingdom she has done just that.
SYNTHESE DES 2 ARTICLES:
ADDITIONAL DOCUMENT
THE
COUPLE – an inter-racial love story
|
THE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
|
A love
affair between a black man and a white woman
Seretse
Khama and Ruth William came from widely different social backgrounds :
Seretse was the heir to the throne of an African country called Bechuanaland
– Ruth from a white middle class family – worked in an office
Seretese
was sent to London to study law (to prepare him for his future role as king)
Decided
to get married
|
Right
after WW2 – met in 1947 (post war era)
Bechuanaland
was a British protectorate = now known
as Botswana
Close to
South Africa = a close ally of Britain – SA was just beginnning to establish
apartheid so didn’t want to have an interracial couple at the head of
Bechuana = apartheid = a form of
regression (the opposite of progress) = a backward movement
|
OBSTCLES
FACED BY THE PROTAGONISTS
Racism –
rejection from both whites and blacks
Seretese’s
uncle refused to have a white queen
The
British goverment tried to stop them from getting married
Seretse’s
uncle tried to take advantage of the situation to stay in power (the regent)
|
PROGRESS
ACHIEVED DESPITE THE ODDS
The
people of Bechuana stood by their king, Serestse. They supported his decision
to marry to woman he loved and accepted her as their Queen = tolerant –
open-minded – symbol of political and social progress
After
being banished for 7 years, he went back to his country and was elected
democratically at the head of Botswana
A FORWARD
THINKER
Embodies
a new Africa, a post colonial world
“ It is
not for our own benefit but for the benefit of our children and our children’s
children that we ourselves should put the world right” = a good defintion of
the idea of progress
|
ADDITIONAL DOCUMENT
