Fresh Loaf

John Oxendine

GOP gubernatorial candidate John Oxendine sent an e-mail blast to supporters last week targeted at African-American voters that hit on every fear they could imagine, starting with his opening line: “The family is under attack, and in Washington D.C. this weekend, so is the President.”

Who is attacking our families?  And who attacked the President?!  Ah yes, those pesky gays.

Oxendine used the occasion of last weekend’s National Equality March to take to task the LGBT community for daring to hold their President accountable for his campaign promises.  The march was about many issues, including job discrimination and serving in the military, issues of which the African-American community surely knows nothing about.  But another of those issues was marriage equality, and that’s the one Oxendine wanted to home in on:

One of the most important issues to conservative voters is the institution of marriage.  But not just white voters.  Many minority voters are very traditional in this area and they tell me they resent the gay lobby ‘hijacking’ the civil rights movement for something besides skin color or gender.

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Imagine that. Somewhere in the legislative process, a piece of chest-thumping Dixieland legislation about the Civil War morphed into — a bill about Civil Rights?

Last week, Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a bill sponsored by state Sen. John Bulloch, R-Ochlochknee, that designates April as “Confederate Heritage and History Month” — a 30-day tribute to one of the country’s darkest periods and the first holiday of its kind in the country. I know, you’re shaking your head, saying “Oh, dear God, those mouth-breathing lawmakers are at it again.” Quite understandable if you just look at the name of the monthlong holiday.

But the actual language of the bill that ultimately passed might surprise you. And for all the negative publicity the bill had the potential to attract (and oddly enough didn’t), you wonder why lawmakers decided not to point out an olive branch — designating a Savannah museum as an “official Georgia historical civil rights museum” — that was inserted into the bill.

First, let’s take a look at the bill when it was first introduced:

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GUIDING LIGHT: Andy Ditzler and one of his beloved projectors (Photo by Joeff Davis)

Film Love curator Andy Ditzler treats old short films, and even film projectors, with the care and attention most people reserve for their children.

Before screening “Movies of Local People: Kannapolis” in the basement studio of his Grant Park home, he uses a cotton swab to clean his 16-mm projector. “You should always do this. There’s a lot of motion of the film inside the gate, where the buildup of emulsion takes place. That’s how film starts to get scratches. I love film, but it’s stressful to work with it.”

After threading the film onto the reels, Ditzler dims the lights, switches on the projector and soaks up “Kannapolis’” vision of a segregated North Carolina town in 1941. Throughout the Great Depression, photographer H. Lee Waters traveled the South, filming people on the streets and then showing the images at the towns’ movie theaters so they could see themselves on the big screen. (It’s a far cry from the online exhibition of snapshots on, say, today’s Flickr photo sites.) Selected for the prestigious National Film Registry, “Kannapolis” first shows the blue-collar white neighborhoods, then the more impoverished African-American ones. The film serves as a kind of silent slide show of faces, the vivacious and the dignified, the camera-shy and the camera-hogs, and how one community lived in the Jim Crow South.

“What a beautiful print!” Ditzler says when he first sees the crisp, sepia hues of “Kannapolis.” In part he’s relieved because he programmed the film, sight unseen, as one of the introductory subjects of this month’s installment of his 6-year-old film series, Film Love. For February, Ditzler curates four evenings of Civil Rights on Film: Rare Films on African-American Life, 1941-1967, which offer richer and more complex glimpses of the civil rights era than we get from history books.

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