In a minute, we’ll speak with the directors and one of the people featured in Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power. Sam Pollard is a veteran feature film and television director whose work includes the groundbreaking Eyes on the Prize and Slavery by Another Name. Sam Pollard has edited over half a dozen Spike Lee films, including Four Little Girls and When the Levees Broke. We also spoke with co-director Geeta Gandbhir, an award-winning director, producer and editor. And in Jackson, Mississippi, we were joined by one of the people featured in the new film, Reverend Wendell Paris, former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After the Lowndes movement in Alabama, he founded the Southern Cooperative Development Group and is now with New Hope Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi.
First, one more clip from the film. It shows how SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, first began working with the Lowndes County movement. There was no place for the SNCC organizers to gather, forcing them to make dangerous drives in and out of town, risking arrest or attacks by white supremacist vigilantes. In this clip, John Jackson describes how his father Matthew Jackson turned a small house on their property into a home base for the Lowndes County Freedom Movement and sanctuary for the SNCC workers, known as the Freedom House. Courtland Cox, a SNCC worker, and professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries then describe how, despite the modest facilities, continued organizing in Lowndes County would not have been possible without the Freedom House.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 12, 2022