What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right
- He used the N-word and told racist jokes. He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites. He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa
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And because of them, I am so disdainful of the "it was just like that back then and no one knew differently." No, it wasn't. People knew better. Maybe they weren't brave enough to say differently (it still happens now - with anti-war movements, anti-child-labour movements, any movement really) and maybe they couldn't bring themselves to care because they were too self-absorbed (that hasn't changed either) but everyone knew it was WRONG.
Have you ever read Douglass's autobiography. I read that and I cried so hard. It's so beautiful and high-flown (you know how Victorians wrote!) and when I finished reading it, I didn't even get up, I just read it again. It's not very long. It was a very, very slender book. But it was the most powerful thing I'd ever read.
I CANNOT WAIT for John Brown. I was born in Virginia (kinda by accident - I'm actually a German in Canada) and on a trip back my parents took me there and to a number of civil war battlefields, and Appomattox (we had friends living nearby) and then we went to Gettysburg - the most awesome experience ever. I'd studied the battle (I was a highly obsessive 12 year old) but to actually see the ground. It makes it real.
One thing they are really acing with this PBS thing is the link to the women's rights movement - how it became entwined. You had someone like Grimke Weld only thinking about abolition, but then being told to shut up because she was "just a woman" and then realizing that perhaps her rights were important too.
I think of Sojournor Truth, for example. I'm sure you've read her "Ain't I a woman" speech - it's so powerful how she exposes the hypocrisy of treating women like infants and weak little things but then forcing her to work in the fields and selling off her children. It's so beautiful and powerful.
<3 I hope you enjoy the episode on Tuesday. I've cleared that space already!
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