'Look what I've lost': a powerful decadespanning film about one American family
In 1999, Davy Rothbart was 23 years old and staying on a friend’s couch in south-east DC a few blocks from a basketball court, where he befriended 15-year-old Akil “Smurf” Sanford and his precocious nine-year-old brother, Emmanuel. An aspiring film-maker, Rothbart had a small handheld camcorder, which the younger brother immediately took a shine to; the two would mess around with the amateur device, taking in their everyday sights. “We learned how to use it together,” Rothbart told the Guardian – strolling about the neighborhood, interviewing people on the street, monkeying with the night vision setting, letting their curiosity guide the lens.
The resulting videos form 17 Blocks, which distills 1,000 hours of footage over 20 years into a poignant, at times gutting, astoundingly generous documentary on one black American family facing drug addiction, cycles of gun violence, and the passage of time’s gifts and losses. Though the film does not shy away from political commentary – the title is a pointed reference to the distance between the Sanford’s underfunded, largely segregated neighborhood and the Capitol which turns a blind eye – the project developed out of something smaller, more intangible: mutual friendship, and an interest in preserving things on film. Rothbart started leaving his camera at the Sanfords’, so Emmanuel and Smurf could film on their own time, often capturing their sister Denice, and mother Cheryl. “It was really an organic thing,” said Rothbart.
The first third of 17 Blocks, filmed in 1999 and the early 2000s, is alight with curiosity, mostly thanks to Emmanuel, who showed a special affinity for film-making, and for filling the screen with his exuberant grin (he describes his favorite subject as “talking on the phone”, for instance, then adds “and I’m a superstar”). “Even at nine years old, Emmanuel had a poetic eye,” said Rothbart. “He would shoot out his window like a branch swaying in the wind, or he would shoot two people – you couldn’t hear their voices – having a conversation on the street and twirling around each other. He just had a really interesting visual sense.”
Many of Emmanuel’s videos focused on his mother, Cheryl, who recalls appreciating the amateur filmmaking not so much as preserving memories than as a chance to shine. “At the time it was just home videos,” she told the Guardian. Sanford grew up middle-class, the child of a government worker in DC, and dreamed of becoming an actor, “so to me it was, ‘I’m a star of my own little movie’ … I thought I was Marilyn Monroe anyway.”
Sanford is unflinching at the uncomfortable, raw moments captured by Emmanuel at the time – a physical fight with her then boyfriend, moments when she’s passed out on the couch in an ongoing struggle with drug addiction, calling her father to ask for money, the many cramped houses within south-east DC in which the family lives. “You can’t change the past – the past is the past. For me it’s relevant to now,” Sanford said of allowing viewers into that era of her life. “My life experience is similar to a lot of single parents … it doesn’t bother me to have it on screen. My life is my life. This is what has happened to me. Maybe someone else having difficulty in life with some of the experiences that I experienced – maybe they’ll get something from it.”
The film is bisected by a horrific act of gun violence: on New Year’s Eve 2009, Emmanuel was shot and killed at home (no arrests were ever made). The carnage and devastation is captured by the Sanfords’ bravely rolling camera, as they course through a decade of grief, activism, reconciliation, forgiveness and learning to speak of an unimaginable loss, through the growth of anti-gun violence and Black Lives Matter protests. Rothbart had stayed close with the family through the years, spending holidays together and, in the wake of Emmanuel’s death, grieving (the rapport and respect between Sanford and Rothbart was clear in a joint interview).
“We felt really determined that we had to tell Emmanuel’s story, and we realized it’s not just Emmanuel’s story, it’s the whole family’s story,” said Rothbart. The cameras kept rolling after 2009, as it “was something we were in a ritual of doing when we were together.” By the film’s final third, in 2016, Denice’s son Justin – rambunctious, curious, hamming it up for the camera – is the same age Emmanuel was when
Rothbart first met him at the basketball court.
The freewheeling film project, and the trove of low-stakes, easygoing home video treasures he left behind, took on new purpose after Emmanuel’s death. “I wanted memories of him, period,” said Sanford. The collection of videos before and after his passing, distilled down from the thousand hours by video editor Jennifer Tiexiera, offer viewers a chance to know Emmanuel as something more than a grim statistic of gun violence often weaponized by US policymakers and pundits against black communities. “You may not have known him, but here, this is who I lost, look what I’ve lost,” Sanford said of the film. “This is but one story, and even though there are many, it’s the same story.
“This movie is real life,” she said. “It’s not like just what they see on TV, because TV is make-believe. This is real life, it happens, it’s quite the norm for a lot of us.”
“It’s so wonderful and brave for them to share their story in such an intimate way,” said Rothbart, who credited Sanford’s steadfastness in recognizing the power of simply observing their complicated, metastasizing, unbelievable grief. “Even at the time, [she] knew that this would have value someday,” he said. Having lost friends and children of friends to gun violence, she “knew how challenging and painful” the weeks immediately following Emmanuel’s death would be. But she said, “people need to see this,” Rothbart recalled. “People need to know what it’s like to go through something like this in your family. We have to film everything.’
“People could meet him as a boy, and then recognize the boy that’s been lost here.”
Time beats on, and the film’s latter section observes the now-adult Sanfords growing into the future – Cheryl fighting for sobriety; Smurf, spared prison time by a too-rare compassionate judge, finding steady work at a deli and playing with his sons; Denice training to be a security officer. Outside the frame, Rothbart and Cheryl Sanford look toward a safer future; the film-makers have partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety and Black Lives Matter for screenings, and together they started a program, Washington to Washington, which brings youth from the DC neighborhoods on camping trips out of the city.
“The title of the film is almost a challenge,” said Rothbart. “The family lives 17 blocks from the US Capitol, and yet this is what’s happening in this neighborhood. It’s kind of a challenge to people in power, and really to any audience member, to ask: what can I do to try to create more opportunities for people living in neighborhoods like this, and to change some of the outcomes?
“Gun violence is a symptom, not a cause, of other issues, other challenges that these neighborhoods are facing that aren’t being adequately met,” he added. (“Correct,” Sanford chimed in.)
17 Blocks ends with a tribute to those lost to gun violence in DC in the 10 years since Emmanuel’s murder – a list, over 1,200 names in tiny font, that goes on for pages, far too long. “Each one of those names could be its own documentary,” said Rothbart. “And that’s a family that’s grieving, still missing their loved one.”
17 Blocks is available in digital cinemas in the US with a UK date to be announced
battles successfully ended multi-racial democracy in the south for nearly a century. Black Americans, who had filled the south’s state legislatures and served in Congress after the civil war, were forced out of power, then barred from voting almost altogether, as white politicians reinstituted a full system of white political and economic rule. The south became a one-party state for decades.
It would take Black Americans until the 1960s to win back their citizenship.
Now, as Republicans have shut down any attempt to hold Trump and other politicians accountable for inciting the attack, historians like O’Bryant are warning of the known dangers of letting white mob violence go unchecked, and about the fragility of democracy itself.
The effects of the white terrorism of the 1870s lasted into O’Bryant’s own childhood: he vividly remembers the day his great-grandmother, grandparents and mother voted for the first time. It was in Charleston in 1968, and he was eight years old.
The reason American history is marked by repeated incidents of white mob violence is because the violence works, O’Bryant, 60, said.
“When you adopt a political strategy and you’re successful at it, you might as well continue.”
‘We took the government away from them’
By the summer of 1876, a presidential election year, some white citizens in South Carolina had reached a crossroads: they realized they would never again hold power in a state with fair elections.
Benjamin Tillman, one of the leaders of South Carolina’s white mob attacks, identified the “arithmetic” problem for white supremacists: “In my State there were 135,000 negro voters or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters,” he said later. “With a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it?”
Since they did not have the votes, white supremacists decided to take control of the South Carolina government through terrorism. There were white terror attacks across the southern US that year, all aimed at preventing Black citizens from casting their votes in national and state elections.
The first major attack in South Carolina came in July, in Hamburg, a growing center of Black political power. In Hamburg, the mayor was Black. The sheriff was Black. Most of the city officials were Black. Several prominent Black lawmakers elected to the state legislature also lived in Hamburg.
“These same slaveowners that once told you what to do – they might ride through Hamburg, and you might be the sheriff, and you might tell them to pick up their trash off the street,” O’Bryant said.
The rise of Black politicians such as Prince Rivers – a man who had liberated himself from slavery, served as a sergeant in the Union army and gone on to be a mayor, state representative and judge in Hamburg – undermined white supremacists’ arguments that Black Americans were unready for political power.
On the Fourth of July in 1876, two white men staged a confrontation with Black soldiers outside of Hamburg. The white men then went to court and tried to get a judge to take away the Black soldiers’ guns.
When the Black soldiers refused to disarm, they were attacked by a crowd of hundreds of white men, who even wheeled in a cannon to fire at the Black soldiers as they took refuge in a government building. Some Black residents were killed in the initial attack, and others were captured later and then executed in cold blood.
Hamburg’s Black sheriff was also killed and mutilated, according to some accounts: the white men cut out his tongue. In all, one white man and seven Black men died during the massacre.
As with the 6 January attack at the Capitol, the rioting in Hamburg in 1876 appeared spontaneous, but had been carefully planned in advance by white extremist groups, O’Bryant said. The South Carolina groups called themselves “Red Shirts” or members of local “rifle clubs”. O’Bryant said he saw them as the equivalents of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers militia today.
The violence sparked national outrage, O’Bryant said. There were official investigations of the massacre and in-depth coverage from the New York Times. Ninety-four white men, including a former Confederate general and other veterans and prominent citizens, were indicted for murder for their roles.
Worried that jailing the white defendants might spark another attack, court officials let all of the men out on bail,
O’Bryant said, and the decision was made to postpone the trial until after the 1876 election, because of the “climate of violence”.
As the November election approached, white violence in South Carolina escalated: two months after the Hamburg massacre, another series of white terror attacks in Ellenton, South Carolina, killed dozens of Black citizens, by some estimates as many as a hundred.
One of O’Bryant’s own ancestors, Needham O’Bryant of Hamburg, later testified before the Senate about the constant attacks and threats, describing a white man firing shots at his house, and having to flee and hide when posses of armed white men rode by.
In the 1876 election, one marked by murder and outright fraud – the county where Hamburg was located ended up logging 2,000 more votes than it had registered voters, O’Bryant said – white Democrats took control of the South Carolina government.
The continuing violence also “wore down northern commitment to enforcing the law in the south,” the historian Eric Foner said. “In the beginning, President Grant sent troops into South Carolina in order to crush the Ku Klux Klan. But over time, the willingness to intervene to protect the rights of Black people waned.”
After political negotiations over the contested presidential election of 1876, the federal government ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the south.
With white supremacists once again in control of the state government, Rivers, like other Black politicians, was accused of corruption and quickly forced out of public office. He ended up working once again as a carriage driver at a white hotel, the same work he had done when he was enslaved.
O’Bryant has records of one of his ancestors on the South Carolina voter rolls in 1868, and a record of another relative serving as an elections manager in 1876. After that, there is no record of them voting for 92 years. His family members, a long line of educators and academics, worked hard and were deeply involved in their communities. They faced the risk of being fired, he said, if they even tried to participate in an election.
Meanwhile, one of the men indicted in the Hamburg murders, Benjamin Tillman, rose to a position of national power, continuing to brag about having “shot negroes and stuffed ballot boxes” on his way to becoming South Carolina’s governor, and then serving for nearly a quarter-century as a US senator.
None of the perpetrators of the
Hamburg massacre was ever prosecuted or convicted.
“We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it,” Tillman said in a speech in the Senate in 1900. “If no other senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity.”
What Tillman and others had won through terrorism they later codified into law, writing a new South Carolina constitution explicitly designed to keep Black citizens from voting.
“We are not sorry for it,” Tillman said. “We of the south have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men.”
‘This is America’
Anti-democratic beliefs, white nationalism, and the glorification of violence have always been a “powerful strand” in American history, Foner, one of the most influential historians of America’s post-civil war period, said.
It is time to push back against the shocked statements of television pundits on 6 January “saying, ‘This is not America,’” Foner said. “It is America, actually. Not the whole picture of America, but it is part of the American tradition. And we need to face that fact.”
In the footage from the 6 January invasion – a giant Confederate flag being paraded through the halls of Congress, a gallows and noose being set up outside, furious white crowds chanting about hanging politicians – the echoes of post-civil war violence are unavoidable.
“Whether or not these men and women [who broke into the Capitol] are aware of how their actions replicated what has already happened in history, it’s so present – the past is so present,” Kellie Carter Jackson, an American historian who studies 19th-century political violence, said.
That does not mean that the violence is at the same level as it was directly after the civil war, Carter Jackson said. In 1895, Robert Smalls, a Black army veteran who became a South Carolina congressman, estimated that 53,000 Black Americans had been killed by white terrorists since the end of the civil war.
“That’s 1,766 murders annually, or five per day,” Carter Jackson said. “I don’t think we are at those levels of such open racial violence and hostility.”
In the the wake of the Capitol invasion, the problem facing the United States is often framed as one of “disinformation”: how were so many Americans convinced to attack the government based on claims that simply were not true?
Much of the media and political reaction has taken the invaders’ claims at face value: they believed the lies of Trump and Republican politicians that the election had been stolen. They sincerely thought Democrats were undermining democracy. Some had been radicalized by the lurid claims of the QAnon conspiracy theory about a cabal of powerful pedophiles torturing children.
But some experts argue the insurrection should be labeled a white supremacist attack, even if many of the attackers themselves did not talk explicitly about race. Trump’s evolving web of claims about election fraud, which were rejected by judges in lawsuit after lawsuit his supporters brought, revolved around the idea that the vote counts for Joe Biden in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, which all have large Black populations, were somehow fraudulent.
The former president’s repeated claims that he got the majority of “legitimate” votes suggested that the African Americans who cast decisive votes for Biden were inherently illegitimate.
Trump’s big lie about the stolen election was built from the same lies propagated by the white supremacists in the south: that majority-Black cities were corrupt, that Black politicians could not be trusted.
South Carolina’s white supremacists not only put up giant statues of the murderers who had stolen the state government, they also wrote history books for school children that described the state’s brief era of Black political participation as “the darkest days in the state’s history”, an era of rampant corruption and mismanagement, O’Bryant said. Those were the books he grew up studying.
After the victories of the civil rights movement, many Americans were taught a more triumphant version of their own history, with the arc of American democracy redrawn as a slow but inevitable march towards racial equality.
O’Bryant is proud of the legacy of the civil rights movement: he met Martin Luther King as a small child, attended marches in diapers, sat in the background at movement meetings in his home and at church. But he has also spent years spreading public awareness about the flourishing multiracial democracy that was ended through violence in the 1870s.
“If they had prosecuted and punished the perpetrators of the Hamburg massacre, they would have set a precedent that we won’t stand for these types of crimes,” O’Bryant said. “There would have been no need for me to have marched if they had done the right thing in Hamburg.”
The ruins of Hamburg
Today, the site of the Hamburg massacre is part ruin, part golf course. There is no marker there to the seven Black men who were murdered in 1876, just neatly maintained turf, fences and a few disintegrating buildings in the woods.
America’s civil war battlefields are the sites of intense, even obsessive, memorialization: hundreds of thousands of people visit the site of the battle of Gettysburg every year, and the government and private donors annually spend millions of dollars to maintain the town’s thriving complex of statues and museums. Gettysburg is remembered as the bloody turning point, the moment where the north, at great cost, began to win the war.
But the battlefields where America’s multi-racial democracy was lost just a decade later have not been preserved in the same way. Most of the memorials that exist were erected by white supremacists to mark their victory.
There is massive statue of Ben Tillman at the South Carolina statehouse, and an obelisk dedicated to Meriwether, the one white man killed during the Hamburg massacre, at the heart of North Augusta, the town closest to Hamburg.
Hamburg itself had been built next to the Savannah River, in an area prone to flooding, and while the army corps of engineers built a levee to protect Augusta, the white town on the other side of the river, the government left the Black town unprotected, O’Bryant said. After a particularly devastating flood in 1929, the town was abandoned. Today, all that is left on the site are a few ruins deep in the woods.
But Hamburg has survived in other ways. Forced out by flooding, the town’s Black residents moved to higher ground and built a new town, Carrsville.
“They didn’t have the money to buy lumber,” O’Bryant says, citing interviews with elderly residents who could recall the move. “They took their houses apart, brought the wood uphill, and reconstructed them.”
In 2016, after advocacy by O’Bryant and other local residents, North Augusta finally dedicated a historical marker and memorial to all eight people killed at Hamburg, including the seven Black victims. The place they chose for it was not the empty ground in Hamburg, but in Carrsville.
O’Bryant does not see it as an accident that Black primary voters in South Carolina, led by Jim Clyburn, a veteran
of the civil rights movement, picked
Joe Biden as the safest choice for the Democratic presidential nominee, or that Black voters in Georgia and other swing states turned out to help secure Biden’s victory.
Black voters fully understood the dangers of a second Trump term, O’Bryant said.
“It felt to us like it was life or death, not just for African Americans. It felt like it was life or death for the country.”