Author: Guest

“Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery. The Civil War, for the most part, dismantled the treasonous Confederacy. Yet Frederick Douglass inherently understood it would take more than words and war to grant African-Americans public register of their humanity. He had seen enough caricatures of blacks, their faces nose-deep in watermelons, or dangled above lakes as alligator bait. He despised drawings portraying his people with exaggerated features, slack-jawed expressions, or as giddy slaves. Such images, Douglass knew, reinforced white supremacy by presenting black people as simple-minded and subjugated. Douglass soon embraced a technological weapon to challenge his nation’s racism: photography....

Milwaukee-based creative studio 11th Story recently released a youtube trailer teasing a new documentary about the life of local Civil Rights leader, Father James Groppi. Expected sometime in 2020, the new film uses TV footage of Father Groppi from the late 1960s, along with photos and recorded interviews. This will not be the first documentary about him, and other than some highlights of his activism the trailer provided little else to explain this version’s narrative. We’ll uncover the story within the story of segregation in Milwaukee of a clergyman who questions a religious institution in order to pursue his...