Particular images will haunt you forever. That of the torture and lynching of two Black men in 1937 in Duck Hill, Miss., surrounded by an enormous white mob, which included women and children, is certainly one of them.
At a sold-out screening of Susanna Styron’s stirring documentary, “My Father’s Name,” on August 18, we learned that this dreadful scene was the secret buried deep in Jan Frazier’s family. Years after her father’s death, Frazier’s uncle disclosed that her father had participated at 18 years old in the lynching. Confronted by what happened, the uncle said, “Justice was served,” even though the two men pleaded not guilty to the murder with which they were charged.
Seeing photographs of Frazier’s father, it’s easy to believe, as she said, that she thought of him as Atticus Finch — kind, patient, the most loving of fathers. “It slammed me. I couldn’t sort it out,” she says about discovering the truth. “It always felt like it was other people’s lives, not anybody I would have known.”
Frazier goes searching for more information about the lynching, which made the news in many cities across the country. She discovered that no participants had ever been identified in the many articles. “That was shocking to me. Yet, to a Black person, that was no news,” she admits.
Frazier wrestles with inherited guilt and accountability, and begins to examine her unconscious racism as she grapples with how to hold her family accountable. “We have to stop letting ourselves off the hook,” she says.
The film was a perfect catalyst for the far-ranging panel discussion afterward, moderated by Charlayne Hunter-Gault with Styron, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Rabbi Caryn Broitman about race, reckoning, and individual and collective responsibility.
Some of what was touched on began with Hunter-Gault’s concern that the type of history in “My Father’s Name” is missing from schools. She shared that the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered that civil rights in American education boils down to two people and four words: Rosa Parks, Dr. King Jr., and “I Have a Dream.” “That’s it for so many people, and Susanna’s film may help us understand some of the vitriol over race today,” she added.
Gates, who, along with Hunter-Gault was a consultant on the project, spoke about his initial pushback with Styron in an earlier version. “My skepticism was, What was the role of this woman’s father, actually? What do we know that he did? He was 18 years old. What was he going to do? Everybody was all riled up. It was his family. He had to go.”
He continued, “I don’t think you inherit the guilt of your ancestors. I think we have a collective responsibility that comes down through American history for the horrible ways we have subjugated minorities in this country … Collective responsibility is essential to embrace; otherwise, how do we overcome and atone for the sins of the past? The only way we can figure this all out is to have a rounded, truthful history taught from elementary school up. Schools are where you learn how to be a citizen.”
Similarly, Rabbi Broitman shared how Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had a well-known saying: Some are guilty, and all are responsible. “Even things that happened generations before, we all have a responsibility to move them forward … As Americans, we have a sense of exceptionalism that gets in the way of our doing what in Judaism is called teshuvah, which means repenting, reviewing, and acknowledging what we’ve done wrong, and making some kind of restoration, where we won’t do the same thing over and over again … Sometimes, I think our country teaches the history of the Holocaust more easily than the history of slavery.”
Styron explained that what initially compelled her to undertake the project was exploring what you do when you discover something so horrible about somebody you love so much. How do you hold those conflicting feelings? “It’s very universal,” she added.
She spoke, too, about how making the film initiated her journey to recognizing her own blind spots and assumptions. “What I didn’t understand was how counterproductive white guilt is. I got to explore that, and go into the idea of accountability. Guilt asks for forgiveness, making it the other person’s problem. The first thing is to take responsibility and be accountable.”
Circling back to education, Hunter-Gault asked Styron, “How do you fight the effort to eliminate our history — or have it be told in a certain way?” Hoping to get “My Father’s Name” into schools, churches, museums, and libraries, she responded, “This film is designed to start the conversation. It doesn’t have answers. If we continue to acknowledge these kinds of things and our history, then we can continue to create a consciousness.”
