Ted Koppel documentary about Obama, politics and the last lynching
We’re often reminded of Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It truly applies in the case of “The Last Lynching,” an hourlong sampling of American civil rights history on Monday night, a “Koppel on Discovery” special.
In telling the stories of three delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, Ted Koppel weaves Senator Barack Obama’s presidential nomination into the same social fabric as some of the best-known events of the civil rights era and some of the country’s least examined acts of violence.
We hear from Bob Filner, a California congressman who in 1961 was a Cornell University sophomore turned Freedom Rider arrested in Jackson, Miss., and sent to Parchman Farm, the state’s maximum security prison, for breaching the Jim Crow peace. And we hear from Lizzie Jenkins, president of the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida, who recounts two little-discussed outbreaks of lynch-mob violence against blacks in her state in 1916 and 1923 — both part of her family’s lore.
But even with these reminiscences, those times have the feel of distant history, of dusty newsreels and faded photographs. So the program’s central focus is on what it calls the last lynching in the United States: the murder of Michael A. Donald, 19, by two young Ku Klux Klansmen in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. Or as Representative Artur Davis of Alabama, the third delegate Mr. Koppel spends time with, says, “in the era of color TV.”
Read entire article at NYT
In telling the stories of three delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, Ted Koppel weaves Senator Barack Obama’s presidential nomination into the same social fabric as some of the best-known events of the civil rights era and some of the country’s least examined acts of violence.
We hear from Bob Filner, a California congressman who in 1961 was a Cornell University sophomore turned Freedom Rider arrested in Jackson, Miss., and sent to Parchman Farm, the state’s maximum security prison, for breaching the Jim Crow peace. And we hear from Lizzie Jenkins, president of the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida, who recounts two little-discussed outbreaks of lynch-mob violence against blacks in her state in 1916 and 1923 — both part of her family’s lore.
But even with these reminiscences, those times have the feel of distant history, of dusty newsreels and faded photographs. So the program’s central focus is on what it calls the last lynching in the United States: the murder of Michael A. Donald, 19, by two young Ku Klux Klansmen in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. Or as Representative Artur Davis of Alabama, the third delegate Mr. Koppel spends time with, says, “in the era of color TV.”