Civil rights lawyer from Memphis inspires film
The first American slave ship — built in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1636 — was named “Desire.”
Other early slave ships serving the colonies included “Fortune,” “Hope” and “Prosperity.” Such names — positive and upbeat and aspirational, with no acknowledgement of the enterprise’s foundation in imprisonment and torture and death — are strikingly revealing.
“This is the way Americans considered the concept of owning other people as property,” says the director of the ACLU’S national Center for Justice, Jeffery Robinson, back recently in his hometown of Memphis. “Words matter.”
For the past several years, Robinson, 62 — a graduate of St. Louis Catholic School, Christian Brothers High School, Marquette University and Harvard Law School — has made words matter — and resonate — in a very public way, through a series of talks on what he describes as “the history of racism in the United States.”
The talks have inspired a documentary film now in production, tentatively titled “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.” A tagline promoting the nonprofit project states: “The secret history of our country hides in plain sight.”
Robinson and a small crew of filmmakers were in Memphis in January, to shoot footage at places public (the National Civil Rights Museum, Clayborn Temple, the sites of the relocated Confederate statues) and personal (Robinson’s childhood home on Yates Road, and the East Memphis church and school he helped integrate). They also met and interviewed such people as the Rev. Cleophus Smith, one of the striking sanitation workers whose plight brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, and Carolyn Payne, sister of Larry Payne, a teenager shot and killed by a Memphis police officer in 1968, not long after a sanitation strike march.
From 1619 to now
Birmingham, Charleston, Washington and other cities are on the filmmakers’ itinerary, but “I don’t think you can tell the history of race in America without coming to Memphis,” Robinson said.
“Jeff has this ability to unmask our shared history and make you realize how important it is to take ownership of that history, and take responsibility for being part of the change,” said Brooklyn-based filmmaker Sarah Kunstler, 42, who is directing “Who We Are” with her sister, Emily Kunstler, 40. “When you walk out of the room after his talk, you see the world differently.”
A Powerpoint presentation intended for peer groups, American Bar Association conventions and Continuing Legal Education conferences before it evolved into a general-audience performance, Robinson’s talk typically includes a reference to an unlikely source, William S. Burroughs’ experimental 1959 novel about drug use and social control, “Naked Lunch.”
Burroughs explained that the title of his book referred to the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Robinson borrows this idea, asking his audiences “to have a naked lunch moment with me about race in America — a moment to look at what is on the end of our collective fork.”
What follows is a slide-illustrated exploration of American history, from 1619 — marking a grim anniversary, the first slaves in America arrived at the Jamestown settlement 400 years ago this Aug. 20 — to now.
Covering the years between, Robinson discusses laws, court cases and all but forgotten tragedies (the “Tulsa massacre” of 1921, when white assailants in airplanes reportedly rained turpentine firebombs on black citizens). Emphasizing the notion that “words matter,” he references Hillary Clinton’s 1996 characterization of gang members as “super predators,” and Donald Trump’s 2017 insistence that “nobody asks” what caused the Civil War.
The message — which Robinson insists must be acknowledged before the country can progress — is that racism in America is not an aberration but a foundational principle.
“From 1619 to 1865 is 246 years when America used enslaved people to create, develop and enrich this nation,” Robinson said. “We have had more time in America with slavery than without it. America was founded on the philosophy of white supremacy.”
Family influence
A longtime public defender and private-practice lawyer in Seattle (his clients included one of the five men held at Guantanamo Bay in connection with the 9/11 terror attacks), Robinson is now deputy legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU’S Trone Center for Justice and Equality. An article about him in Harvard Law Today cited his “passion for reform,” while the Seattle Times dubbed him as “one of the city’s most prominent criminal-defense lawyers.”
Robinson cites the influence of his late parents as a source of his activism. Herbert (a longtime Memphis City Schools principal) and Lamaris Robinson were active in civil rights and in community affairs in general, but they also were pioneers, of a sort. In 1963, the Robinson family (which included Jeff and his four siblings) became the first black family to become members of St. Louis Catholic Church on White Station Road. The family also was the first to buy a home in an East Memphis neighborhood on Yates, although subterfuge was required to make the deal. After the Robinsons were rebuffed, the house was sold to white friends of theirs, who then turned around and sold it to the Robinsons.
Jeffery Robinson first started seriously exploring the often forgotten episodes and statistics of history that make up his talk after he essentially became a surprise first-time father in 2011, when his wife’s younger sister, Gladys J. Cruz, died.
He and his wife, Carmen Valdes, an architect, became responsible for the sister’s son, Matt Brooks. “I wasn’t prepared to raise a 13-year-old,” Robinson admits. “I was afraid of being a parent, but I found that I wasn’t reading parenting books, I was reading about race.”
In trying to better prepare the teenager for the challenges and potential dangers of the greater world, Robinson found himself researching the history behind the attitudes that influenced his practical advice (such as the idea that a black teenager must be especially careful around a police officer). “I was horrified and embarrassed that I didn’t already know this stuff,” Robinson said of his discoveries, which he first developed into a public presentation in 2013.
For example, Robinson said he had been unaware of a 1669 Virginia law that stated that an enslaved person’s death while resisting a “master” is not a felony. Said Robinson, alluding to the many recent high-profile cases in which a law enforcement officer escaped serious punishment after killing a black suspect: “That law may not be on the books any more, but it damn sure seems to be.”
Robinson met the Kunstlers after Sarah Kunstler — who is a lawyer as well as filmmaker — heard one of his talks at a 2017 Manhattan education program. She immediately called her sister and film partner, Emily, to share her enthusiasm.
To help boost the project, the filmmakers — who made their feature debut with “William Kunstler: Disturbing The Universe,” a documentary about their famed radical-lawyer father that premiered in 2009 at Sundance — organized a public “Who We Are” event built around Robinson’s talk on June 19 (”Juneteenth”) at the Town Hall theater in New York.
Joining the Kunstlers behind the scenes for this stage presentation were director Gbenga Akkinagbe (a star of “The Wire” and “The Good Wife”) and producer-director Jayashri Wyatt, also a producer of the “Who We Are” documentary. Onstage participants included actors Alfre Woodard, Denis O’hare and Amy Ryan, reading pertinent texts from American history. Footage from this Town Hall event will be incorporated alongside material captured during the filmmakers’ travels with Robinson to make up the documentary.
The Kunstlers, however, aren’t sure yet if their dozens of hours of footage will be sculpted into a single documentary feature or into an episodic series on race in America. They do plan to develop school and library programs with Robinson’s work, and they say that any profit that may come from the project will be distributed to racial justice initiatives.
Whatever form the material takes, the filmmakers’ motive is simple.
Said Sarah Kunstler: “How do we help more people hear what Jeff is saying?”