A Binding Truth' shows the long legacy of slavery

Kirk Boxleitner | Sep 19, 20240

Courtesy photos count

Hugh "De" Kirkpatrick and Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick, who were high school classmates in 1965, discovered decades later how the history of slavery had intertwined their families.

It's my final weekly review prior to this year's Port Townsend Film Festival, and it's also one of the films set to be showcased during the 25th annual PTFF this coming weekend.

Filmmaker Louise Woehrle won the PTFF Best Feature Documentary Audience Award for 2019, and she's returning this year with her latest documentary, "A Binding Truth," which scored a 100% "fresh" rating among film critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

While PBS is planning to broadcast a one-hour version of the film in February of 2025 for Black History Month, it's worth catching the full hour-and-a-half cut.

Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick and Hugh "De" Kirkpatrick both attended high school in North Carolina in 1965, but while De already attended an affluent white school in Charlotte, Jimmie transferred to that same school his senior year, becoming its first Black football star.

In spite of the racism he was raised with by certain members of his white family, De always empathized with Jimmie, whose promising scholastic football career led to what Woehrle pointed out was one of North Carolina's "most volatile" civil rights cases.

Decades later, De and Jimmie's lives would intertwine again, when they learned that their shared surname was no coincidence, due to what one man's ancestors had done to the other.

From a narrative standpoint, this documentary benefits tremendously from the fact that Jimmie and De are both deeply thoughtful, talented and ultimately humane guys, who have made concerted efforts to be better dads than the fathers who raised them (or didn't).

Either of them would have made for a fascinating biography subject on their own, even before we learn how their families were intertwined by the complicated, long-reaching legacy of slavery.

But what struck me most strongly was that both of these men are roughly the same ages as my Baby Boomer parents, who are now comfortably retired in their 70s.

All too often, slavery and the many forms of legal racial discrimination that followed are dismissed as no longer relevant to the present, as though it's all confined to the ancient past.

"A Binding Truth" shows how the consequences of our nation's treatment of Black people have remained part of far too many living Americans' experiences in the modern day.

We see Jimmie and De piecing together the carelessly documented histories of slaves' lineages, as they were subjected to similar erasure through ill-maintained graveyards that didn't even bother to place markers where they were buried.

Woehrle employs some simple but clever visual tricks to illustrate that the erasure of Black culture within America didn't end with slavery, as Jimmie shows his adult son J.J. some of his old haunts in Charlotte, many of which have since been razed or "developed" for the sake of corporate progress, stripping those places of their histories.

Woehrle also points out how, in the South, the hierarchy of slavery persisted in the form of Black women finding jobs by caring for more affluent white children, often better than they could afford to care for their own children.

After helping to integrate the schools he attended, Jimmie's football career was sidelined by an injury in college, and he decided he was tired of living up to everyone else's dreams for him as an aspirational figure, while De interrogated his own white privilege by researching the roots of slavery, always challenging, "How was owning another human being morally defensible?"

In a telling moment, an older Southern white woman who assists Jimmie and De in their research asks if the Black people in the room feel any ill will toward her, because of what they've learned about white slave-owners in the Kirkpatrick family.

She confesses to feeling guilt, even though she hadn't committed any of those misdeeds herself, while the Black people she's talking to reassure her that they don't hold it against her.

Eventually, everyone agrees that what matters is making sure that these historic truths are unearthed and become widespread knowledge, so that all of us can earnestly address them.

"A Binding Truth" runs 91 minutes, and will be screened at the Rose Theater, at 235 Taylor St. in downtown Port Townsend, on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10 a.m., and on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 7 p.m.

Jimmie Lee Kirkpatrick will be joining Woehrle for question-and-answer sessions after both screenings.

The film will also be among the subjects of the forum on "Erasure: What Exists Beyond the Social Veils," on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 2 p.m. at the Pope Marine Building, presented in partnership with Well-Organized and Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County.