We begin with an image that conjures all manner of unspeakable horrors: the crumpled grimace of a Klansman. With this black-and-white photo—the first in a series of vintage pictures—the film I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1982) announces a history of violence known and unknown. Recently restored through the efforts of the Harvard Film Archive, the documentary, directed by the filmmakers Dick Fontaine (who died last October) and Pat Hartley (a former actress who appeared in the 1972 underground film Ciao! Manhattan), pulls back to reveal James Baldwin bent over these photographs, which convey him—musing aloud—some 20 years into the past. He mourns his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1980, when this sequence was filmed, Baldwin would have been in his mid-50s, but none of these men—whose names fall from his tongue like hushed embraces—ever saw 40. The film that follows, Baldwin reveals, concerns instead the “roll call of unknown, invisible people who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on the freedom road.” Grief had transformed him and the South, significantly, on that perilous journey down “freedom road.” Fontaine and Hartley’s documentary maps those turbulent years when the civil rights movement climbed to its apex, through the recollections of Baldwin and other activists and intellectuals.
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