Before COVID-19 struck, the city of Windsor, Ont. was looking forward to itsbiggest Emancipation Day celebrations in recent years on Aug. 1. And, thanks to the efforts of local history buffs, it was well on its way to bringing back an event that recalled the days when Windsor attracted famous civil rights activists and Motown stars to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in most of the British colonies in 1834.

The history and recent revival of Windsors Emancipation Day is being closely followed by Tonya Sutherland, who graduated from the University of Toronto with a masters degree in museum studies this year. Building on research for her 2018 capstone project,Sutherland and two other women from the Toronto area retired teacher Catherine MacDonald and actor and producer Audra Gray sought to bring this chapter of Black Canadian history to a wider audience.

In the 1950s and early1960s, hundreds of thousands of people would arrive in Windsor for the multi-day festivities that took place the first weekend in August. They heard from figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and watched the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations,whocrossed the Detroit River to perform at Windsors Jackson Park. But by the late 1960s, Windsors Emancipation Day festivities had begun to lose steam.

These celebrations were some of the biggest in North America, but they didnt remain in peoples consciousness, says Sutherland. Its a bit of a shame how theyve been mostly forgotten.

But efforts are underwayto make Emancipation Day a big deal again. When Windsors Emancipation Day Committee announced it was cancelling this years events, it also said it was planning for an significant event in2021.

In the meantime, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto will mark Emancipation Day with a special ROM Connects talk moderated by Sutherland on Aug.5, which follows an earlier talk given this month.

Working under the umbrella of the Jackson Park Project, named for the park where the Emancipation Day celebrations were held in Windsor, Sutherlands goal is to create a digital archive of historical material.

As for Sutherlands partners in the project, MacDonald is aiming to createeducational resources for use in classrooms that would be hosted by the digital archive while Gray wants to produce a drama television series based on the annual festivities as well as a documentary. The documentarywould chronicle both the teams behind-the-scenes journey and a proposal before Parliament to formally recognize Emancipation Day nationally (Ontario officiallyrecognized the day in 2008).

Audra was watching TV one day and came across this documentary, The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth. It was a larger history of Emancipation Day, somewhat focused on Windsor, but with a broader view, says Sutherland. She wondered why she had never heard of it.

Thinking it a story worth dramatizing, Gray linked up with MacDonald, her former teacher who was also interested in Canadas Black history. MacDonalds husband mentioned the project to his co-worker, Sutherlands father, who in turn told his daughter about it.

I tend to get really invested in the personal element of history, says Sutherland who alsoearned an undergraduate degree in English and history from U of T in 2016. That interest caused her friends to suggest she might want to check out the Faculty of Informations museum studies program. The idea resonated with Sutherland, who had also been inspired watching the TV programMysteries at the Museum.

During their first research trip to Windsor in 2018, Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray spent a week researching and filming. Irene Moore Davis, president of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, shared a wealth of information with the visitors. While we say this is a history thats not known to a broader audience, people from Windsor whose families were involved are very aware, says Sutherland. Irene has been really key to our project because she has quite a large collection of family history including boxes of documents. Her family was very involved in Emancipation Day.

While in Windsor, Sutherland visited the University of Windsor archives, looked at hundreds of photographsand examined the programs printed annually, which typically included a letter from the mayor of Windsor and sometimes featured messages from prominent speakers. From magazines, you could see who was buying ad space and supporting the celebrations, she says, adding that the documents helped with her primary research.

Sutherlanddigitized the materials as part of her capstone project with the goal of creating a permanent digital archive. Ive learned all the things that go into creating an archive and a digital archive, she says. The more I learn, the more it teaches me what I dont know.

That also goes for Black Canadian history, says Sutherland, who adds that Canadians often dont know what became of the people who arrived in places like Windsor via the Underground Railroad. Was everything amazing? Did they face racism and struggle?

The holes in our knowledge speak to a larger unknowing, she says. This whole thing has been extremely eye-opening to me.

MacDonald says the history of Windsors Emancipation Day is a perfect subject for teaching because it is so multi-faceted. Its the story of Canada and the Black diaspora. Its the story of English and French, and the story of Canada and the U.S. Its the story of two cities.

Black families were often divided between Detroit and Windsor with cousins walking across the frozen Detroit River in winter and holding large family get-togethers at Emancipation Day events in the summer. A Detroit historian, Kimberly Simmons, has spent more than a decade trying to get the Detroit River declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for the role it played in the underground railroad.

Meanwhile Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray continue to move forward on their Windsor projects. The teaser for Grays documentary debuted last summer at Emancipation Day. MacDonald is working with local Black educators, members of Windsors Black historical society and the Ontario Black History Society to produce lesson plans. And Sutherland has produced a digital archive feasibility report as her capstone project in museum studies.

In some ways, the work they are doing emulates that done almost a century ago by Windsor citizens. In 1932, they, too, decided that they wanted to build up their small Emancipation Day celebrations into a much bigger event and eventually turned their vision into reality.

Despite COVID-19, the work behind the scenes on bringing Emancipation Day to a wider audiencecontinues. Were now trying to seek out and establish viable and more stable sources of funding, Sutherland says.

Link:

U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience - News@UofT

It is now just over 10 years since the shock news of the abolition of the UK Film Council (UKFC) by David Camerons coalition government. Earlier this week,Screen looked at the events surrounding the abolition and the fallout from it, and asked senior UKFC executives and board members how effectively they believe the British Film Institute which inherited key UKFC functions and 44 staff roles in April 2011 was able to fill the void that was created. Now, we consider the achievements of the UKFC, and the degree to which it succeeded at achieving its original aims.

The Film Council (later UK Film Council) was created in 2000 after Culture Secretary Chris Smith commissioned a comprehensive review of film policy, A Bigger Picture, and as a consequence of lobbying efforts by David (later Lord) Puttnam and Lord Attenborough.

With the report recommending consolidation of government film bodies, Smith asked Alan Parker, then chair of the British Film Institute (BFI), to chair the new organisation, with Stewart Till president of international at Polygram Filmed Entertainment from 1992-1999 and president of Universal International Pictures in 1999-2000 as deputy chair. BFI director John Woodward was appointed CEO.

The Film Council absorbed the British Film Commission, and the filmmaking activities of both British Screen and the BFI Production Board. It also took over the granting of Lottery money for film from the Arts Council including for the three franchises that had been awarded at Cannes 1997 to funnel 90m of Lottery money into film, which were Duncan Kenworthy and Andrew Macdonalds DNA; Pathe, in alliance with an array of producers including Thin Man and Fragile Films; and the Film Consortium, which combined Scala, Skreba, Parallax and Greenpoint with Virgin Cinemas and Carlton Film Distributors.

Paul Trijbits (head of UKFC New Cinema Fund, 2000-2006): You need to always look at it from the lens as to: what was there before? The Arts Council distributing lottery money for film, nobody thought that was a good idea. The only people who thought that was a brilliant idea were the three that got the Lottery franchises. Everybody knew it was a disaster.

Having the British Film Commission in a crummy office in Baker Street, and British Screen somewhere else it worked in a sort of British way, but it wasnt very cohesive. Most other countries had one national agency for film, and it always would encompass exhibition, cultural activity, education, strategy, production, development and distribution. [Bringing the functions together] felt at the time the right thing to do.

Robert Jones (head of UKFC Premiere Fund, 2000-2005): Its important to remember that period, because that was one of the primary reasons that the Film Council was formed because of the massive negative publicity on use of Lottery money by the likes of the Daily Mail, around the fact that money was going into films that just werent being seen.

The Film Council came into being amidst a lot of enthusiastic ambition, but also managed to disaffect a lot of people who they were effectively replacing. A lot of people werent happy about the demise of British Screen. A lot of people at the BFI were not happy that this seemingly Blairite New Labour quango was being formed.

Carol Comley (head of strategic development, UKFC and BFI, 2000-2020): From my perspective, the UK desperately needed a body such as the Film Council. It was very different from the BFI, where I had worked before. But it was a difference that was needed in order to achieve the objectives for a vibrant culture and competitive industry.

If youre organisationally not weighted down by history, what may be termed encumbrance of all sorts, and if youve got a government or a set of political arrangements that are going to help you fly your kite, then organisationally you have the best possible prospects for success enabling the Film Council to positively reposition UK film internationally.

Vince Holden (head of production finance, UK Film Council, 2000-2011): When I took over the Arts Council portfolio, its projected recoupment rate was 10%. They invested about 42m over the years, and they were targeting a 10% return. I brought in a royalty analyst and money chaser to aggressively chase revenues, and we got their final return up to 21%.

The [Arts Council] franchises were a fricking mess when we took them over. We took a projected 15-18% return, and converted it into a 40% return. That rigorous policing of the franchise deals, getting better terms, policing royalty statements, auditing distributors, got 8m-plus over and above what they were earning before we joined.

Lottery money was on the decline virtually from the day I walked through the door, every year. Which is why the drive to try and make sure that I uncovered every stone, and got back as much money from our investments to make up the gap, was important.

Paul Trijbits: One of the things we did, we pulled out the Arts Council application form, which ran to 40 pages and was asking all those questions of everybody about every bit of the Lotteries Act they needed to adhere to, if they were so lucky to get the money. Well, hold on, all those obligations only apply if youre a recipient of the money. The first stage is a creative assessment. That meant that the application form went down from 40 pages to four pages, and we could turn stuff around much quicker. To me, that demonstrates the can-do mentality, the professional-input mentality of what we were asked to do at that time.

Will Evans (UKFC director of business affairs, 2002-2011): I was very nervous about accepting the job because, having been in the private sector for 22 years and not being the most patient person, I thought, God, this is the public sector, its going to be like the gas board. I thought it would be forms in triplicate. I was massively surprised that it wasnt like that at all. It was a very fast-moving organisation. It wasnt bureaucratic. It was a smallish organisation, probably 90 people top to bottom at its height.

Stewart Till (deputy chair of UKFC board 2000-2004, then chairman 2004-2009): For the board, we wanted to get the creme de la creme of the British film industry, we wanted to represent all sectors. So there was quite an aggressive search and hire for the board. In terms of executives, the philosophy was, Its the public sector, but intervening in a commercial marketplace.

Paul Trijbits: Having a leader like Alan [Parker] was brilliant because it was somebody, even if you might not have agreed, at least you knew he did it with chutzpah and style and conviction. And the board was extraordinary: people I could call upon were the likes of Tim Bevan [Working Title], Nigel Green [Entertainment Film Distributors], Paul Webster [Film4]. That initial board was a really positive, proactive, smart group of people who had genuinely nothing but the best interest at heart for the British film industry.

The board never interfered with any of the decisions about individual projects. The people you might expect to be most sceptical about some of the things that we did, that were right on the edge of what a feature film might be, were the most supportive.

I particularly reference Bloody Sunday, which was one of the first decisions we made. It was a film made for ITV, a TV movie, and made by not a new director, Paul Greengrass, who had already made one or two feature films before and vowed not to do it again. It was quite clearly a film with a point of view, and all of a sudden this NGPB this non-government public body was making a film that was going to cause some ruckus.

When the UK Film Council was set up, it was decided to have separate funds for development (led from 2000-2007 by Jenny Borgars, then by Tanya Seghatchian) and two for production. This three-fund system Premiere (10m annually), New Cinema (5m) and Development (5m) was abandoned in 2009 with the creation of the unified Film Fund (15m).

Will Evans: I think there was a school of thought at the Film Council that it might not be a good idea to have one person in charge of such a large sum of money. If you find the right person to be in charge of a lot of money, then I think its fine. So, for example, Im a massive fan of [the BFIs] Ben Roberts. I think he walks on water. He showed its possible to have one person in charge of a lot of money if you get the right person.

Sally Caplan (head of UKFC Premiere Fund, 2005-2010): I think that it was a good thing to have both the New Cinema Fund, focusing on newer talent, and the Premiere Fund looking after ostensibly more commercial, bigger-budget projects. There was some fluidity between the two funds, which was good, and both funds were trying to promote gender equality and diversity and inclusion.

Paul Greengrasss directing career arguably faltered after his first two films until the New Cinema Fund backed Bloody Sunday from which there has been no looking back. Kevin Macdonalds career was [pushed forward] as a director off the back of the UKFCs support for Touching The Void. Lynne Ramsay was launched with Ratcatcher and Sarah Gavron with Brick Lane. I guess my departments biggest success was backing The Kings Speech when other funding bodies turned it down which extraordinarily was the first film that Iain Canning produced. Not a bad way to start.

Robert Jones: The flip side of that is youre getting hundreds and thousands of applications every year and you can only say yes to less than 1%. So youre doubtless going to piss a lot of people off Which I managed to do, Im not happy to say, but it was inevitable.

Jack Arbuthnott (UK Film Council Development Fund executive, 2006-2008): Every script that was sent to the Development Fund was sent out for external coverage, and someone would write this very stern report, and obviously most of the stuff youre getting is not deemed to be worth supporting.

A meeting was held where we looked at the report, and maybe at the script itself, and then a very offensive letter was sent to the applicant, explaining to them why their script wasnt commercial based on some choice extracts of the coverage.It seemed to me it was a system to generate needless contempt from the applicant. And so one of the things that Tanya introduced was a more evasive [approach] it just didnt piss people off in the same way.

One of the problems that the Development Fund had was it set itself up to be this arbiter of commercial viability. Ironically, it demonstrated absolutely no ability to do that over its lifetime. But even if it had, its just a very obnoxious role to be in.

The recoupment targets for the Film Councils two production funds quickly became a bone of contention with producers, whose scripts were being rejected on the basis that the completed films were not deemed likely to meet the targets. Producers also found the commercial terms offered by the UKFC to be ungenerous, and there was inevitable jealousy of well-paid fund heads such as Jones and Trijbits, who were both former producers.

Vince Holden: John [Woodward] initially suggested a 100% recoupment target. I said, If thats what you want to do, I can do it. But its not really going to stimulate anything. Its just going to replace banks with cheaper funding, which is not really what we should be doing. So we set a target 50% recoupment for the Premiere Fund, 25% recoupment for the New Cinema Fund and I basically policed it. It was my job to make sure that those guys hit their targets in a very soft kind of way.

That credit committee sat religiously, every Wednesday morning at 10am. We had a pile of thinned-down applications that we all wanted to do, and it was kind of like a greenlight process. And thats where the arguments came The arguments over Mike Leigh, I cant tell you. We backed him three times. My argument was, why when we add up all these territories that Mike Leigh films sell for, are we all of a sudden making a film for twice that amount? Its disproportionate. Mike Leigh should be making a film for a budget that the commercial market can actually stand. I mention Mike Leigh because I love him to bits.

In the end, across the Premiere Fund, New Cinema Fund and Tanyas Film Fund, we hit 40%, which Im happy with. Overall, 132m was spent and 40% came in. You can do the maths, thats a lot of money that came in and was recycled.

Rebecca OBrien (UK Film Council board member, 2006-2011; producer): What we fought for was a tiny share of any of the money that came back in if your film was successful, and that was the big battle that I was involved in: for producers to get a share of revenue so that they could support themselves, rather than always being dependent on beneficence from the Film Council.

There was also this feeling at the Film Council that producers were useless that they really werent very good at their job and that they all needed hands holding. So there was an awful lot of infrastructure at the Film Council, with a lot of employees.

For producers, there was a lot of mistrust of the Film Council and a lot of misunderstanding as to what on earth they were doing, and the feeling that they just didnt get what producers did. There was definitely the feeling that if you got one of those jobs, you didnt have to be a producer anymore. Especially when you have producers earning a tiny bit of development money trying to get projects off the ground.

The UKFCs position on both recoupment targets and sharing equity with producers did change over time.

Will Evans: PACT were repeatedly saying to the Film Council, We believe that the amount of the UK tax credit in each British producers film should be a recoupable sum for that producer on that film. In the end, the UK Film Council said, OK, we will support the notion of this producer equity entitlement equal to the amount of the tax credit, provided that all the other financiers public and commercial in the particular film are prepared to allow it. And in 2010, the UKFC was successful in persuading BBC Films and Film4 to both take the same position.

At the beginning, it was very difficult to get commercial companies to agree to it because they would say, Hang on a minute, you want to dilute my return, and the answers no. But as the years went on, and when we transferred over to the BFI, it became a more accepted position in the industry.

In the early days, the Film Council used to give back to the producer on each of their films 5% of the Film Councils revenue recoupment just a small notional sum. It wasnt able to give any more than that because, in effect, its state aid.

PACT said producers want more than 5%. So the Film Council then went to Brussels and asked if it was possible to increase the percentage, and approval was given to increase it to 25% of the Film Councils income until they were 50% recouped, and 50% of the Film Councils income until full recoupment. This gives a blended percentage of 37.5% of the BFIs recoupment income, and that still stands today. Its called the BFI Producer Corridor and it goes into a lockbox administered by the BFI for the benefit of the UK producer, director and writer, subject to certain restrictions.

In April 2011, the BFI took the same position that had previously been adopted by the Film Council: you can either have the Producer Equity Entitlement or you can have the BFI Producer Corridor, you cant have them both. BBC Films took the same view at the time regarding its own producer corridor. In the last seven years, of the three principal public funders, the BFI allows you to have both of these things but they go into a lockbox to be administered by the BFI.

In 2002, the UKFC recruited former Film4 deputy chief executive and head of distribution Pete Buckingham to head up a new distribution and exhibition department, which introduced innovations including the P&A Fund (to help distributors reach bigger audiences for specialised films) and the 12m digital screen network (which helped 240 cinemas digitise their screens, in return for a commitment to show a wider range of titles).

Carol Comley: If innovation is doing things differently, looking to the future, then Pete Buckingham was the person that best represents that side of the Film Councils way of thinking. The fund heads, for example Tanya, Paul and Robert, at different moments were all very strategic. They were strategic in terms of creative production, whereas Pete was the one alongside John who always took a 360-degree approach who considered both supply- and importantly demand-side challenges.

Pete Buckingham (head of distribution and exhibition, UK Film Council, 2002-2011): We wanted to get more and more people watching a wider range of films across the UK and enjoying them. And the question is, Well, what is it we want to do to try and achieve that?

We decided that we were not going to subsidise [distribution of] films that were core films to a core audience. We were looking for those kind of middle-ground films that had a chance of reaching out to wider audiences. The film needs to have a shot, in our opinion, at reaching 1m box office. Now, that is just unheard of; back then, in 2002, it was a stretch target.

So thats what we launched, not without some criticism, most notably from [Artificial Eye co-founder] Andi Engel. We were not going to give money to people who had pure arthouse films for pure arthouse release, that was not part of our equation.

To the UKFC, it didnt matter if the distributor was a Hollywood studio the investment decision was about the film, and whether matching funds could help it reach a wider audience.

Pete Buckingham: That was an ongoing problem. People were very upset about that. It was too easy to target and say, Well, 20th Century Fox have got money for that. And yet they were perfect partners to achieve our strategic objective, which was to get more and more people used to watching a wider range of films across the UK.

The majority of people we worked with were independents because they had these movies, but we would inevitably tend to work with the people with bigger pockets [such as Lionsgate, Pathe, Studiocanal and Momentum] because they would have the wherewithal and the ambition. They were more able to take the risk, and were prepared to have a go.

Vince Holden: The digital screen network that Pete did I mean, just a brilliant idea. That was commercial meeting government meeting brains, and pushed us on disproportionately in the digital exhibition world.

Pete Buckingham: We thought it would be an amazing thing to have, lets say, 200-odd cinemas across the UK of all types, which will now have a programming commitment to for want of a better word specialised films. That worked. If you look back at those numbers, the numbers are very big. Subtitled films and difficult, specialised films got a wider range and people went to them.

All we were trying to do was give confidence: that actually when the heroin is withdrawn, you dont revert back to [how it was before]. The new normal could appear and people would operate in that normal. The problem is I dont think that happened. There are market forces, changes of business structures and philosophies.

I feel sad because for about five or six years, we had all the chains really engaged in successfully building people to watch these films in places theyd never really get a chance to see them. It just slipped back. There was a short period of time when things did look like they might be changing. But then it just fell back to worse than it ever was.

Following recommendations contained in the Film in England report, nine regional screen agencies for England were created from 2001 onwards. In summer 2010, the new Coalition Government announced the abolition of the regional development agencies, which had provided substantial funding to the regional screen agencies. With no replacement funding available, Creative England stepped into the vacuum with some support from the BFI. Meanwhile, in 2004, the UKFC invited bids for what became known as development franchises, or super slates, which required successful applicants to create strategic partnerships. We want distribution and sales to be involved in development from the get-go, said Jenny Borgars at the time of announcement.

Rebecca OBrien: That was a good thing about the Film Council: there was definitely a real effort to push film industrially all over the country. The problem was the influence was always top down. They were prescribing what people should do in the industry, rather than listening and watching what people wanted to do in their own areas. It was very prescriptive, and it was very top down.

Paul Trijbits: One of the challenges you face is that as time goes on, different priorities get set: the endless shifting from national to regional and back, and where should the decision-making lie, and how to push it out, and then end up with all those regional screen organisations, which were costing too much money. And then it was seen that that wasnt the right way. In the end, it doesnt feel like youve made a lot of progress.

Jack Arbuthnott: The super slates were a big deal, very ill-fated, and also probably quite exposing. It was stated to say: companies will perform better if theyre forced to work together as bigger entities, therefore to get this money you have to pitch as a consortium. But the consortiums didnt seem to particularly work. Its a difficult thing to do right because most of the things youre going to support are not going to work, so how one is covered for that is really important.

Paul Trijbits: I think organisations that do well seem to have a six-, seven-year period when things go very well. And then I think you end up with something that already looks a bit like decline, often not recognised by the people in it, and that you are probably not able to innovate.

I can certainly tell you that when I left after six years, I had lost some of the more risk-taking boldness that the funds certainly displayed at the beginning. That is an absolutely normal human trait. Because if you know something is good but painful, the second or third time, you might remember and say, Lets not do that.

One of the key aims of the original Film Council was to create a self-sustaining UK film industry. Thanks to the 2007 UK Film Tax Relief, which improved on earlier tax schemes that were open to abuse, a transformation was finally achieved, but indigenous independent production remains selectively supported by public investment, notably the BFI Film Fund, as well as by the tax credit.

Tim Bevan (chair of UK Film Council, 2009-2011): Pre-tax credit, there were all these Mickey Mouse tax schemes and shyster financiers and all the rest of it. And the tax credit and the cleanliness of the tax credit has been way and beyond the backbone of whats gone on in the last decade or so in film in Britain, because its a fantastic scheme that is transparent, is rock solid, everybody can rely on it, and its attracted tens of billions of inward investment because of it.

Robert Jones: It was very important to try and help the UK film businesses become self-sustaining, and that was something that the Film Council failed to do. It was something that we talked about endlessly and tried to think of ways, but it didnt have enough influence and power over the industry as a whole, to change the ecology of the industry in terms of how independent films are financed.

We always held up Jeremy Thomas as the example of a producer who owns a library of his own projects, so has a business that has an asset value and a turnover, whether or not he makes a film every year. Unfortunately, those examples are still very few and far between. Most companies cant do that, and even more so now in the days of Netflix and Apple. Its another way of financing but its essentially working for a studio. You dont own anything.

Jack Arbuthnott: The Film Council had clearer aims [than the BFI does], and aims that were clearer to evaluate. It was very focused on building a sustainable film industry but the trends that determine these things were not within the Film Councils power to alter. So you could very easily say, the Film Council is clearly failing because its not contributing to building a sustainable film industry. The decision to nix it, Im sure, came from how exposed it was.

Vince Holden: On my leaving day, [a colleague] came up to me, and we had had lots of lively discussions over the years about whether government funding or charitable funding should be going into the film industry, and how to make the UK film industry sustainable. She said, So now youre leaving and you dont have to worry about it anymore, how much would it take to make the UK film industry sustainable?

I said, Youre not going to like the answer. She said, Its hundreds of millions, isnt it? And I said, No, its nothing. You take away the subsidy, you wait three or four years. And when theres only three or four producers left, and three or four distributors left, that is sustainable.

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10 years on: The UK Film Council's achievements, missteps and enduring impact - Screen International

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law have been writing about the shortcomings of prisons for years, but as the pandemic continues, their collaborative effort Prison By Any Other Name questions the inefficacies of the system, with its scant alternatives, providing examples of how these institutions extend the control and surveillance over those who are involved with the criminal justice system. Schenwar talked with Newcity about the impact of alternatives in Chicago as well as nationally, the Chicago Gang Database, sex offender registries, defunding police, removing police stations from schools, and the role of Black women in rethinking prisons. We even talked about how her work is received not just as a family member of a formerly incarcerated sibling, but as a white activist who sometimes engages with predominantly white audiences.

Tell us how you and Victoria started collaborating on Prison by Any Other Name.

Both of us were coming from backgrounds of writing and editing about prison. In addition to all of Vikkis freelance work and my main work with Truthout, Vikki had written a previous book,Resistance Behind Bars, about incarcerated women organizing, and Id written Locked Down, Locked Out, which is primarily about the impact of prison on families and communities. As we interviewed people about incarceration, we became more and more aware that for many people, being released from prison does not mean being freed from the system. These are all extensionsfrom electronic monitoring and house arrest to locked-down drug treatment and psychiatric hospitals to probation and sex-worker rescue programs, not to mention the child welfare system, community policing and all the other ways that police and prisons entangle themselves in homes and communities, systematically targeting Black communities and other communities of color. We were also seeing how these extensions of the system were targeting disabled people, trans people, drug users. These alternative systems were endangering peoples lives and deeply harming marginalized communities. But much of this was not being documented because it doesnt fall into the category of what most people see as prison. Its all part of what Beth Richie calls the prison nationour culture of policing and imprisonment that has very long tentacles. Both Vikki and I also had personal experiences which drove our work. Vikki had been on probation as a teenager. And my sister spent the past fifteen years in and out of jail and prison. During that time, for my sister, being out of prison meant being under heavy surveillance, including probation, monitoring, drug court, and other punitive so-called alternatives. We realized that there was a need for a book tying together all these thingsall these ways that prison extends far beyond prison wallsto show that many popular alternatives to incarceration and policing are simply expansions of the same old oppressive systems.

There are several approaches to the idea of prison abolition and defunding the police throughout the book. Could you talk about the work here in Chicago thats highlighted in the book or that you wish you couldve covered as Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and prisons have taken on even more significance after COVID-19 and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor?

Yes! Most of the book focuses on whats wrong with many popular reforms to prisons and policing, and how theyre widening the net of who gets policed and punished and surveilled. But in the last chapter, we talk about how things could be different: What does a world look like in which not only police and prisons, but these harmful alternatives, are abolished? We discuss projects around the country that have contributed to this work, and mention some past and current efforts in Chicago that address extensions of the prison-industrial complex, including [the former] We Charge Genocides efforts against community policing, the Just Practice Collaboratives role in training people to facilitate transformative justice processes, the Visible Voices collective that provides a space for formerly incarcerated women, many of whom are still under state surveillance, to tell their stories, the ways in which restorative justice practitioners have worked within Chicago Public Schools to counter the police, how Ujimaa Medics are providing community health care. We highlight efforts happening around the country that provide a glimpse of what the world could look like, beyond the prison nation.

We turned in our final-final manuscript in January after many drafts. After our book went to press, COVID erupted, then the police-perpetrated murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade, and the uprisings followed. Suddenly, abolition was being uttered, if not endorsed, in mainstream circles! Mainstream newspapers were publishing the words of Mariame Kaba. Multiple large cities were committing to seriously reduce police funding, thanks to powerful grassroots organizing. If we were to write the book now, our final chapter would include some of the recent visionary work being done primarily by Black-led abolitionist groups to defund police. This connects deeply with the goal of our book, because the current movement is not saying, defund the police and instead fund electronic monitoring or just switch the money over to community policing. People are saying no, we need healthcare, education, housingactual support and liberation, not punitive, racist, oppressive alternatives. In Chicago, were seeing powerful efforts like the newly formed Black Abolitionist Network, which is calling for a seventy-five percent cut to Chicagos police budget and the investment of that money in real community programs and services, the removal of police from schools, and an end to the gang database, among other demands. And there are many neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that have sprung up during the pandemic, in which neighbors are building connections and figuring out how we can provide for each other, how we can ensure that everyone has housing and food and care. Thats abolitionist work; its building the world we want to live in, wholly outside of policing, surveillance and imprisonment.

The earlier chapters discuss the problems with electronic monitoring. Could you talk about the challenges that families face when a relative is under this sort of surveillance?

I think a lot of times people forget that incarcerationof all types, including electronic monitoring, which scholar-activist James Kilgore and others have termed e-carcerationaffects whole families and communities, in addition to the primary impact on the person whos incarcerated. Electronic shackles amount to home confinement: You cant leave your house without pre-approval. Many things outside of a job and essential medical appointments arent going to be pre-approved. One key impact is on children. One of the people we interviewed who was confined on a monitor for several years talked about how she couldnt take her children to the park, or drop them off at school, or attend their sports games and practices. She had five kids. But she could not participate in whole swaths of her kids lives, particularly as they grew older. We need to think about the impact of that on kids lives. When kids are old enough, they often also begin to worry about the fact that since their parent is shackled with a monitor, that parent is always one step away from jail or prison, because the consequence of violating the monitors strict conditions is often incarceration. In one study, kids expressed fear that their parents would be taken to jail anytime the monitor beeped. Beyond children, family members often become the ones responsible for attending to the basic needs of a person whos shackled with a monitor. When my sister was on electronic monitoring, we were bringing her groceries and other supplies, and checking in constantly because we were worried about what this confinement was going to do to her mental health. Knowing that your family member, who is probably already struggling, risks incarceration if they leave the houseeven for, say, an emergency room visitis terrifying.

Another idea that you mention is Mariame Kaba describing the idea of Somewhere Else as a place that people could find support services as a substitute for prisons that are often vague suggestions or theyre fraught with common shortcomings as institutions. Also, there are many existing alternatives that invade peoples privacy and impede their ability to work. Can we talk about how such existing institutions could become better possibilities?

Yes, Mariame was one of the first people we interviewed and this idea that she mentionedthe Somewhere Elseguided a lot of our work thereafter. The idea is that under the logic of our prison nation, people cannot simply be freed. Instead, they need to be put in some other restrictive, coercive institution, even if that institution purports to help them: a kinder, gentler cage. Electronic monitoringconfining people to their homesis a Somewhere Else. Psychiatric hospitals are a Somewhere Else. Locked-down drug treatment centers are a Somewhere Else. These are still places to put people whove been deemed criminal, to remove them from the larger society. This is why Mariame, and many others, talk about the need to challenge criminalization itself. Get rid of that label and that system. Instead of thinking in terms of Somewhere Else, we need to think about building support for peoples self-determination and expand their options for what kind of support they can get voluntarily. For example, its been shown again and again that forcing people into some treatment (addiction treatment, mental health treatment) does not actually succeed, even by the systems own standards. It doesnt improve peoples lives. Instead, these coercive measures are unethical and often very traumatizing, and sometimes enact the opposite of whats needed. My sister was placed in a mandated drug court program after her last incarceration. She wasnt ready to stop using heroin, but the program forced her into abstinence from the drug, lowering her tolerance and making her more vulnerable. When she left the program, she overdosed and died.

Instead of these harmful and even deadly measures, we need to think about how treatment could be offered on a voluntary basis in ways that account for peoples autonomy. Not everyone wants toor is ready tostop using certain drugs. So, what kinds of harm-reduction measures, such as safe consumption or safe injection sites, can we offer to make survival more possible for people with substance dependencies? How can we decriminalize all drugs so people are not being traumatized further by being trapped in cages? And how can we offer optional support so that people can get medical care and housing and their other needs met, regardless of what drugs theyre using?

Another example: We need to be thinking about what voluntary and non-coercive might mean in terms of mental health treatment. Psychiatric hospitals and court-ordered assisted outpatient programs operate by holding everyone to a certain norm, and medicating them and prescribing certain therapies to try to shape them toward that norm, but not everyone sees the condition theyve been diagnosed with as a problem needing to be eliminated. For example, some people who hear voices and see visions dont want to lose those voices and visions, though some do. How can we develop networks of mutual aid and healing justice that allow people to choose how they live in the world? How can assistance be offered in ways that dont intend to force everyone to align with a certain norm? These are questions we can be asking. We can look to the work of groups like the Fireweed Collective, a mental health education and mutual aid project, for more on this.

Many protests around removing police from schools in Chicago have centered on providing other resources, like school nurses and counselors. I know BYP100 [Black Youth Project 100] and other organizations were demanding mental health care centers on the South Side. I kept thinking about the statistic cited in Prison By Any Other Name where you cited that seventy-five percent of the students arrested by police in schools are Black.

Yes, that seventy-five percent number was from a Project NIA and Loyola University study from a few years back, specifically focused on Chicago, and we see similar patterns in other cities. A 2018 study showed that ninety percent of students arrested in New York schools were Black or Latinx. Like so many of these systems, school policing does not work in the ways that many people assume it does. Theres no research showing that it decreases violence in schools. Thereisplenty of research showing that school policing targets Black students and other students of color and disabled students, and increases the number of students who are arrested and entrapped in the prison cycle.

Crystal Laura, a Chicago writer and scholar who we interviewed for our book, wrote a great book called Being Bad about the school-to-prison pipeline. She talks about how all kinds of resources have gone into policing students, essentially creating police stations inside of schools, where students can be bookedand also the morphing of schools into more prison-like institutions in other waysrequiring uniforms and metal detectors, dispensing horrible food, not letting people leave the room even to go to the bathroom. So, what could we do with the resources that go toward school policing and school prisonization, if they were reinvested? Wed need to absolutely increase nurses and counselors and mental health care, as you mentioned, especially given how those resources have been nearly entirely stripped from so many schools and communities. Also, despite Chicago Public Schools constantly mentioning restorative justice as a buzzword, their funding for actual non-punitive restorative justice programs, which eschew police involvement, is meager. And all students should have access to smaller class sizes and recess and arts programs, which are provided as a given at schools filled with middle-class white students. I also think about how the Movement for Black Lives platforms education section called for not only better services, but also good-quality food and recreation and a curriculum that meets students needs both culturally and materially. There are plenty of important places that reallocated money can go, if it doesnt go to police. The calls for CPD out of CPS right now are so essential.

So many Black women are central to shaping the ideas in Prison By Any Other Name. Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Beth Richie and Ruth Gilmore among them. Have you found that people respond to you differently as a younger white woman and a journalist? If so, how do other people react to you writing about prisons and other forms of state supervision?

Yeah, in Prison By Any Other Name, Vikki and I wanted to center the words and work of Black women abolitionists because this is where abolitionand so much of the most important work against prisons and policingcomes from. When I wrote my last book and was going around talking about it, I noticed that particularly in predominantly white spaces, people saw me as something of a novelty and were quick to attribute these interesting new ideas to me. This is part of the reason we have like twenty-million citations and so many interviews in Prison By Any Other Namebecause abolition is a collective project with Black feminist roots and roots in incarcerated peoples organizing. We want to make clear that we did not come up with those things ourselves.

Another thing I notice, in terms of reactions, is other white people often respond to me by knowingly saying, But you cant really want to abolish the police, mentioning all the ways in which police supposedly protect communitiesand this goes unsaid, but its usually white communities that theyre talking about. Theres an assumption that I must see the police as a force that actually protects me in some way, when some of the most traumatic experiences of my life have happened because of police and prisons.

In terms of being a journalistIm definitely that, but in addition to my work at Truthout and my writing, Im also an organizer, currently mostly with Love & Protect, a Chicago-based collective that supports women and nonbinary people of color whove been criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence, so Im bringing that work to bear in my writing and speaking. I dont think there should be a hard line between journalism and activism.

Although there has been public discussion about getting rid of the Chicago Gang Database, Prison By Any Other Name also addresses how sex offenders registries are not always effective as a community safeguard. Could you talk about both databases?

Gang databases are part of a whole range of data-driven reforms that are marketed as savvy ways to prevent crime, but actually put targets on peoples backs, particularly Black and Brown people, making people more vulnerable to the police and, very often, officers arent required to provide evidence for designating someone as a gang member. And once people are in the database, whether or not theyre actually in a gangthe database isnt even accurate about thatthey can lose out on jobs, be further subject to immigration enforcement, face worse consequences within the criminal legal system, miss out on educational opportunities. Last year, ninety-five percent of people on the database in Chicago were Black or Latinx.

Even if the databases were entirely accurate, wed have to ask: Why are police recording data on gang membership? Why should gang members have this additional target on their backs? Why do people join gangs in the first placeas New York organizer Josmar Trujillo asks in our book? (He pointsout that although gangs are obviously sometimes involved in violence, they also are places where people organize and build community, often in neighborhoods where few resources or support structures exist.) Here in Chicago, the Erase the Database project, a collaboration between Organized Communities Against Deportations, BYP100 and Mijente, has exposed the racism and cruelty of the database and called for its elimination. The recently formed Black Abolitionist Network is also calling for the elimination of gang databases, including the citys new criminal enterprise database.

Sex offender registries, like gang databases, are not cultivating safety for anyone. Theres no research that sex offender registries do anything to prevent sexual violence. Yet there are around 900,000 people on these registries nationwide. Thats a huge numberand people on the registries are listed publicly, leaving them and their families open to massive stigma and vigilante violence. Meanwhile, harsh conditions are imposed on them, sometimes for life, including residency restrictions that often leave them with very few places theyre allowed to live. Again, theres no evidence this prevents abuse in any way, but it leaves a lot of people unhoused. One woman I interviewed who was on the registry, due to having dated an underage boy when she herself was young, had her children automatically taken away from her and, for a long time, was not even allowed supervised visits with them. Many people are not allowed to use the internet even if their offense had nothing to do with the internet. Jobs are severely limited, too.

Meanwhile, with both the gang database and the sex offender registry, this punitive data collection allows officials to completely sidestep dealing with the actual roots of violence. Obviously, these databases do nothing to address poverty, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on. Instead, they punish and surveil marginalized people, trapping them in an ever-growing cycle.

You and Victoria talked about the organizations and practices that people are creating in several cities to enact alternatives to prisons via restorative justice and practices from small organizations, but you also talk about challenges that they face. What else would you add to that discussion since the book is already in print and the landscape has shifted so dramatically?

The groups we mentioned in our bookfrom the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective to the Audre Lorde Projects Safe Outside the System to Creative Interventions Storytelling and Organizing Projectcan provide models for different ways to approach dealing with harm, without prisons or police. And new models are always growingnow we can also look to projects like Los Angeless CAT 911, which is building community alternatives in emergency situations, and the ongoing way that Minneapolis Black Visions Collective has combined calls to dismantle the police with building spaces for healing justice.

Of course, responding to harm is just one aspect of abolition work,as the current defund police movement is reminding us. A large part of it is building up structures of support, from quality health care for all to liberatory education to universal housing, and childcare and robust funding for the arts and youth programs. A large part of it is digging up the roots of these oppressive systemsdismantling white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism and other structures of oppression.

I hope that as some people with political power begin to adopt the language of defunding (and even dismantling!) the police, thanks to the longterm efforts of grassroots groups, these people with political power take the work of organizers to heart. Theres always a risk of powerful people using radical language while maintaining the same old systems. Were seeing some of that play out now, as always. But, of course, those attempts at co-opting language or concepts doesnt diminish the fact that this powerful organizing has been happening for decades. Abolition has always been about challengingstructures of power,and so activists have always known that the abolition of policing and prisons will not come from above. The whole structure of society will need to change, including political hierarchies. That may be daunting, but its also exciting. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.

Newcity Lit Editor Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. Her interviews and features have appeared in publications such as Hello Giggles, Mosaic Magazine, NYLON, The Source, Sixty Inches from Center, and Poetry magazine. She also hosts author chats at the Seminary Co-Op bookstores in Chicagos Hyde Park neighborhood.

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Writer of the Moment: Maya Schenwar - Newcity Lit

Professor Linda WynnPhoto: Eric England

From its launch in the mid-1800s, the womens suffrage movement was fraught with challenges and controversy, as most pivotal moments in history often are. But with Harry Burns tie-breaking vote, cast on Aug. 18, 1920, none of those troubles mattered anymore at least not to many of the women whod finally witnessed their wildest dreams made manifest. Indeed, while awash in the victorious glow of the franchise, those women mostly white used their pens to draft a version of womens history that was formed in their own image. In the process, they erased the Black women who made it all possible.

Professor Linda Wynn of Fisk University has worked tirelessly to tell the stories of too many Black women whose efforts were directly responsible for the 19th Amendments ratification, but whose names have been largely lost to time. For those women, gaining the right to vote wasnt about wresting independence from an abusive husband or an overbearing father. It was a small but mighty step toward equality for the entire Black race, the opportunity to advocate for neglected Black children and marginalized Black men men who were still struggling to cast their own ballots. In a phone call with the Scene, Wynn discussed the complicated but constructive relationship between Black and white suffragists. In so doing, she also reminds us of the dangers in whitewashing history.

Initially, the suffrage movement was closely linked to the abolition of slavery. Can you talk about the link between Black rights and womens rights?

When you look at social movements, what you find is that womens movements generally come after social movements pushed forth by, and for, African Americans. You have the abolitionist movement, that starts around the 1830s, maybe just a little bit before. Then you have a womens movement that starts, and you can look at Seneca Falls in 1848. If you look at the modern civil rights movement what comes after the modern civil rights movement? The womens movement. And I think you can probably even take that into the present day. Everybody thinks Black Lives Matter started last year, or the year before. But it started a little bit before the #MeToo movement.

I think [the womens suffrage movement followed the abolition movement] because women were second-class citizens too. They were going to bat for another suppressed group, and they realized, Well, Im just as suppressed as they are. So they decided, Im out here fighting for that cause, but Im suppressed, so Im going to fight for womens rights too.

But there were white women who didnt agree with the 15th Amendment because it gave Black men the right to vote before the white women received it.

Yes. That is the amendment that, as you said, splintered Black women and white women or further enhanced the dissent. For example, I think Susan B. Anthony made the statement, I would cut off my right arm, this right arm of mine, before I will answer the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.

As they moved toward the first part of the 20th century, white women were trying to gain the right to vote, and they would have been looking at Southern states remember, most of the Southern states had not voted to ratify the 19th Amendment. So in order for them to get those states on board, they had to sort of follow the principles of the lost cause; they had to look at the South and its ubiquitous racial climate. And it became a big problem.

So how did it happen that Tennessee a Southern, former slave-holding state became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment?

It was a quid pro quo. Suffragists wanted as many people as possible to support the amendment, and there was a fairly large contingent of Blacks in Nashville who were for it.

Youve got the womens clubs for example, the National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 by Mary Church Terrell, a native Tennessean, and the organizations first convention was held in Nashville. You have Fisk University; you have Tennessee State; you have Meharry; and you have a well-rounded Black middle class. Booker T. Washington spent a lot of time here because he was friends with [Black politician and civil rights activist] J.C. Napier. By 1904 you had [One Cent Savings Bank], a Black-owned bank that is still the oldest Black bank in the nation. So you have all of these coalitions being built in Nashville. Then there was [educator and activist] Frankie Pierce and [physician] Dr. Mattie Coleman, who registered 2,500 Black women to vote [in the 1919 municipal election].

White women were not unaware of what was going on in the Black community, and they realized that they needed the organizational skills of Black women. They knew they had an interest, those women had an interest, and maybe those interests were one and the same. So while we may not affiliate socially, we can work together politically because we have the same goal.

Right. And the interests of Black women extended beyond the right to vote.

What Coleman and Pierce really wanted was a vocational school for delinquent girls. Prior to them having the vocational schools, Black girls that got into trouble were basically thrown in jails with adults. So that was the deal that they struck with the white women.

If you look at that 1920 convention [the first of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, held in May], Pierce used that opportunity to lay out her vision for linking women together across racial lines. When she spoke, the question was, What will the Negro woman do with the vote? And she gave them a very clear and concise answer. She said, Yes, were going to work with you, and we will stand by you, white women. Were going to make you proud of us; were going to help you help us and yourself.

Do you think that the school took precedence over the vote since in many areas, especially in the South restrictions like literacy tests made both the 15th and 19th amendments largely theoretical for Black voters?

I dont think the school took precedence over the right to vote. I think that was the deal that Coleman and Pierce were making. I think oftentimes we dont realize, as a populace, that your vote is your voice in terms of policy. Those who you send to state legislatures, to the U.S. Senate, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and to local offices enact the laws that ultimately become policy. I think Coleman and Pierce understood that, and I think they were looking at potential policy. They knew that if they wanted a school and a state department of child welfare, that had to come through a legislative process. So Pierce was telling white women what [she and Dr. Coleman] wanted. We will help you [gain the right to vote] if you will help us do that.

Black women were so critical to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but their stories have been largely forgotten. Why is it important, 100 years later, that people fully understand their role?

When you look at those who were doing the writing about the suffrage movement, especially from an academic point of view, it was basically white writers. And Im going to say what I say to my students sometimes: White folks dont have to stop and think about you. They dont think about whether somebody else was involved. Theyre busy trying to narrate their story from their perspective, and their perspective is very narrow. They dont know the conversation Black parents have to have with their children about what to do if the police stop you. Whites dont say to their children, If you go in the store, dont put your hands on anything that youre not going to buy, because the floor walker will say youre stealing. Thats what I mean when I say they dont think about you. They have the privilege of not thinking about you. So I think its important to know about the involvement of Black women simply because Black women were involved.

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Black Women Played a Pivotal Role in the Suffrage Movement - Nashville Scene

This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.

The white men stand, immortalized in metal and stone, in parks, public squares and the halls of government.

Statues of prominent figures in the Confederacy are a common sight in the South. But the visibility of their monuments often belie the way their lives and legacies are obscured by myth.

Like other symbols of the Confederacy, such memorials have been defended for generations as pieces of Southern heritage, or simply uncontroversial artifacts of history. But for many people, they are ever-present reminders of racial discrimination and violent oppression that has never gone away.

The removal of statues of Confederate leaders as well as those of others who promoted or profited from slavery and racism has become a focal point of calls for a true confrontation with racial inequality in the United States. As part of that conversation,USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South are taking a critical look at several such figures to understand who they were and what they believed.

***

For more than four decades, a bronzesculpture of thebust of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has been featured prominently in the Tennessee state Capitol.

A statue portraying Forrest was one of three removed in Memphis in late 2017 afterthe city found a loopholeto legally take down the monument that residents widely agreed should not stand in a public park.

But as the fate of the Capitol bust hangs in the balance pending a state commission meeting later this year and after years of debate among Black and white lawmakers, and Democratsand Republicans who was Forrest and why is he so controversial more than 150 years after the Civil War?

Among the most notorious parts of Forrest's legacy is his reported involvement leading Confederate soldiers in the West Tennessee Battle of Fort Pillow in April 1864, which has commonly become known as a massacre of surrendered Union troops, many of whom were Black.

Primary documents from a variety of sources refute argumentsmade by some Forrest apologists including some who have raised the possibility during conversations at the legislature about the bronze bust and Forrest's legacy that he was not responsible for the mass killings at Fort Pillow.

"We've been going through these excuses for Bedford Forrest for the longest while, and none of them are holding up under scrutiny," said Richard Blackett, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.

In 1868, Forrest gave an interview with a Cincinnati Commercial reporter that was widely published in newspapers around the country. In the interview, he said the Ku Klux Klan had "no doubt" been a benefit in Tennessee. While he denied being an official member, he said he was part of the organization "in sympathy," and later when Forrest testified before Congress about the KKK he eventually disclosed that he was familiar with rituals and practices.

Repeatedly in the 1868 interview, Forrest tried to suggest that he had more disdain for white Radical Republicans and Northerners trying to infiltrate Southern politics than he did African Americans, but he still remained fiercely opposed at that point to Blacks gaining the right to vote or having equal standing in society.

"I am opposed to it under any and all circumstances," Forrest said.

"And here I want you to understand distinctly I am not an enemy to the negro.We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."

***

Jefferson Davis was a man of many words. He literally wrote volumes during his lifetime and spent the last decade of his life writing about the history of the Confederacyandan in-depth analysis of the Civil War.

But Davis (1808-1889) most notably is known for his role withthe Confederate States of America, of which he was named its first and only president.

Susannah Ural,professor of history and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, said Davis seemed to be a natural choice for president of the Confederacy.

Although he did not support secession, he felt duty-bound to represent his state, which voted to secede, and the new government to which he was appointed president. However, he also believed secession was a right afforded tothe states.

Davis wrote in his book,"The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," that slavery "was not the cause of the war, but an incident."

In his preface to the bookhe said,"the States had never surrendered their sovereignty," and that states should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding slavery.

Davis saidthe federal government was usurping its authority by forcing unwanted laws on the states, first and foremost the abolition of slavery, which was an integral part of the Southern states' agricultural economy.

"(Slavery is) the primary cause, but it's not the only cause," Ural said. "When you talk about states' rights, when you talk about what powers the federal government should have versus state authority, one of the centralissues to states' rightswas the right to slavery."

However, she said, determining the Civil War happened because of slavery isn't entirely accurate.

"There's never one cause ofa war, and things thatmotivatepeople to fight in a war change over the course of time," she said. "To boil the Civil War down to slavery is problematic, but the bigger problem was that for decades, we just kind of pushed slavery aside and didn't really talk about it."

***

Even in his last days, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, had already become a myth a myth that gave a defeated South something to cling to; a means of understanding its defeat.

In 1865, Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. His exploits during the war and his canonization by defeated Southerners have rendered him among the most famous losers in military history.

To Emory Thomas, who wrote "Robert E. Lee: A Biography,"published in 1995, historical evidence shows Lee was a man who lived by a strict moral code, a sense of honor and duty; a great soldier and engineer who rose to the challenges he faced.

He was also a slave-owner and a white supremacist. While Lee believed slavery was morally wrong, he did not believe the abolition of it should come through the works of man, but, instead, the will of God.

In an interview, Thomas referenced a famous letter Lee wrote about slavery in 1857. In it, Lee distilled his views as a slave owner on race.

"In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race," Lee wrote. "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."

In that letter, and other moments throughout his life, including testimony before Congress after the Civil War, Lee displayed views on race that Thomas described as compatible with social Darwinism a worldview that arose later in the 19th century and early 20th that Western governments, particularly that of the U.S., used to justify colonization, war and imperialism.

In 1862, he wouldfree his father-in-law's slaves, as required by the man's will, a matter of weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

"He anticipated social Darwinism In the evolutionary pyramid of human beings, I think he saw white folks like himself at the top. And African Americans somewhere down the ranks, above American Indians whom he really thought were dreadful," Thomas said.

***

Known as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy," Sam Davis' story was resurrected from obscurity in the late 1800s by journalist Archibald Cunningham, founder of the Confederate Veteran magazine. There are monuments erected in Sam Davis'honor. His boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a museum.

Barely 21 in 1863, Davis was hanged for his refusal to give Union Army Gen. Grenville Dodge the names of Confederate spies. "I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend," Davis said moments before he was hanged on the Public Square in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Davis wasnt a boy, but a young man whose bravery is immortalized as a symbol of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, said Brenden Martin, a Middle Tennessee State University history professor. The underpinning of the Lost Cause was that the Confederacy was "right all along" and had a right to secede from the United States.

"All youve got to do is look at the (Confederate) Articles of Secession. The people who brought about the secession (from the United States) made it clear it was about preserving the institution of slavery," Martin said.

Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy, Martin said.

And the Davisfamily plantation was steeped in that economy.

Data from the American Battlefield Trust notes that Charles and Jane Davis, Sam Davis' parents, originally owned a830-acre plantation located in Smyrna. By 1860, there were 51 enslaved people owned by the Davis family. Sam Davis also had his own slave, named Coleman Davis,who was gifted to him when he was a boy.

***

Anarcha was at least 17 when the doctor started experimenting on her. The year before, she suffered terrible complications during a 72-hour labor that opened a hole between her bladder and vagina and left her incontinent.

The man who held Anarcha in bondage outside Montgomery sent her to Dr. J. Marion Sims sometime in 1845. She was one of at least seven enslaved women sent to Sims by white slaveholders. They had the same condition as Anarcha, known as a vesicovaginal fistula.

Sims wanted to find a way to address it. From 1845 to 1849, the enslaved women became experiments.

By Sims own account, Anarcha underwent 30 operations as Sims tried different approaches to repairing the fistula.

These women could not say no. Neither Sims nor the white men who held them against their will showed interest in their opinions. Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of medical history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology," said if the women protested, they "could get beaten, or they could get ignored."

Anesthesia, Cooper Owens said, was not in wide use at this time.

Despite that, a statue of Sims unveiled in 1939 remains on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery. A bust of Sims also stands in Columbia, South Carolina. New York City officials removed a statue of Sims in Manhattan in 2018.

***

Andrew Johnson considered himselfa champion of the common man but only when those common men were white.

The 17th president of the United Stateswas a common man himself. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolinabefore moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor,owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.

When President Abraham Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet just six weeks after Johnson took office, a fractured countryfound its stubborn new president lacked Lincoln's ability to navigate theend of the Civil War with nuance and sensitivity.

Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he nowclashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. He soon grew widelyunpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.

Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should beabove the highest Black man, said Aaron Astor, ahistory professor at Maryville College who researches the Civil War-era South.

In 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out, Johnson said white Southernersfelt so threatened by the prospectof Black freedom that poor men would unite withslave ownersto exterminateslaves rather than see them freed.

***

Albert Pike is a name well-known in Arkansas history as both a Civil War general of Native American troops and a newspaper editor.

Although Pike was known nationally after the Civil War for his involvement with the Freemasons, he gained national attention again on June 19, 2020, when a statue dedicated to him in Washington, D.C.,was toppled by a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. The monument to Pike was the only one of a Confederate Civil War general in the District of Columbia.

Pike was a Boston transplant to Arkansas who initially resisted secession, but followed the lead of his fellow Arkansans in fully supporting the Confederacy and even servedas an appointed brigadier general in at least one battle in Arkansas.

By the end of his life, Pike had risen among the highest ranks of the Freemasons.

Before the Civil War, he had moved from the Fort Smith area to Little Rock to pursue a career as a journalist. He eventually became editor and owner of The Advocate where he reported on the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Pike was called up to be a brigadier general over a troop made up of several Native American Tribes. He was cited as being an advocate for Native Americans and the wrongs they suffered at the hands of the white man.

When it came to African Americans, however, Pikes view of slavery was one that claimed it was a "necessary evil." He claimed that slaves would not be able to hold any other job and that they were treated well by their masters. He even admitted to having his own slave for "necessary" work.

***

Gen. Alfred Mouton has become one of Acadianas most polarizing historical figures. His statue, standing on city property in the heart of downtown Lafayette, has been the focus of public outcry, protest and legal battles for decades.

As support is increasing to remove the statue, most of the controversy over Mouton has focused on the fact that he owned Black peopleas slaves and fought for white supremacy during the Deep South's most oppressive era.

While Mouton is hailed by some as a hero from Lafayette's oldest family who fought to defend his hometown from Union forces during the Civil War, the famous son of former Gov. Alexandre Mouton helped wage another civil war here.

Mouton, along with his father, trained the "Vigilante Committee" in Lafayette Parish, a group that would carry out their own form of violent justice against Black residentsthrough whippings, expulsions and lynchings.

From the late 1850s to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Mouton-backed vigilantes fought against other groups in Lafayette Parish's own civil war.

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed

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Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed - Gadsden Times

August 1 marks the abolition of the enslavement in British colonies, including Canada. Here, three Canadians explain what the day means to them

Marking Emancipation Day 2020 will be a very different experience from years past. With the backdrop of simultaneous public health crisesthe COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing police violencewere forced to recognize this momentous occasion without whining our waists in the Caribana parade, and the many other celebrations were used to attending have all gone virtual. But August 1 is crucial to understanding Canadian history, particularly at a moment when so many Black people are pushing to fully experience the freedom our ancestors fought for.

Emancipation Day marks the abolishment of the enslavement of African peoples in all British colonies worldwide. Countries such as Barbados, Jamaica and Grenada have been marking it for decades, but in Canada it was only formally recognizedin Ontario in 2008.It took another decade for it to bemarked across the country.

The legacies of slaveryand resistancein Canada are often forgotten. Three Black youth and community organizers describe what Emancipation Day means to them and how they are continuing the legacy of Black liberation resistance.

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I think the most important part to remember is, this history, this fight thats been occurring, is not one thats so far away. We may not think about this day and the significance in our daily lives, but Emancipation Day is a reminder of everything we have done and everything we can do. Back home in Jamaica, we celebrate by rocking our flag colours. You cant go out in the streets without seeing everyone head-to-toe in green, yellow and black. Here in Canada, typically, I honour this day this year by participating with Sing Our Own Song, an intergenerational singing group. Thats not possible this year, but Im still going to find time to connect with the land and celebrate our past [as well as] the future we want.

I would have to sayMary Bibb.Not only was she an educator and one of the first Black journalists in Canada, she was also a fierce abolitionist. She was actively involved in ensuring Black people escaping slavery in the 1850s had protection and safety free from enslavement: she ran both a school and a publication,The Voice of the Fugitive.She is one of the prime examples that Black women in particular have been doing this work. She really paved the way for me and you as journalists and organizers.

I honour this legacy every day by existing in my queerness, in my Blackness, unapologetically. Just being in those intersections I know honours all they have fought for. My work both at the University of Waterloo campus and off is centred around making sure Black students and the community feel safe and know that someone has their back. My liberatory work has included campaigns against white supremacy on our campus and opening up RAISE, the first space for Black, racialized and Indigenous students.

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I only learned about Emancipation Day recently. It speaks to the erasure Black people face within this country. Ive always known aboutJuneteenthand what abolition of slavery in the U.S looked like, but never even known about my people here. And this is so important for us to know about these things, its vital for me as someone in the diaspora to understand Black Canadian resistance.

For me, it has to be Viola Desmond [the civil rights-era businesswoman on the $10 bill]. Though we knowher story and what she overcame,what sticks with me the most, she had no intention of being an activist or freedom fighter. The sheer nature of just existing as a Black person, a Black woman particularly, means shes thrown into fighting for civil rights to demand the dignity shes not receiving for herself and her communities. Thats the story for so many of us: We may not have intentions to dive into activism but feel there is no other choice.

Its such an honour to organize in this country and follow the footsteps of those whove come before me. Though, there are still moments I do feel pessimistic in thinking, I cant believe we still have to fight, but I know this fight has to continue. People before me have done their part and I have to as well.

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Its so important for us to recognize how far weve come and how far we still have to go. Black people have been fighting for so long and we will continue to do so until we see Black liberation. We fight within the boardrooms, the classrooms, in hospitals and in the streets.

Lynn Jones,an African Nova Scotian powerhouse [and leader, union activist and community organizer]. The most impactful thing about her is truly her heart. As a young person in Halifax, she validates me so much and the work I do. She sees me and other young Black organizers and that is the most beautiful part, she sees us.

By living my best life, my authentic self fulfills the dreams of ancestors that fought for me. I could not be here without the love and activism of so many unsung and unknown heroes and queer Black women in particular who have held it down. Years from now, even if I transcend to one of those unknown heroes as well, if Black people are able to live their best life as well, I know Ive done my part.

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Emancipation Day 2020: Three Black Youth on Their Canadian Heroes - FLARE

On Monday July 26 2010, the UK film industry was taken by surprise when the abolition of the UK Film Council (UKFC) which had come into existence 10 years earlier was announced by government minister Jeremy Hunt, with no explanation of what might replace this New Labour-created film body. That evening happened to be the night of the party for the 2010 edition of Screens Stars Of Tomorrow and there was one topic of conversation that dominated.

The May 2010 UK general election had led to the forming of the coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with the Conservatives David Cameron as prime minister, Jeremy Hunt appointed secretary of state for culture, Olympics, media and sport, and Ed Vaizey as minister for culture, communications and creative industries. The 2008 financial collapse had dented the public treasury, and chancellor George Osborne initiated a brutal round of cost-cutting, with quangos that had proliferated under the preceding Labour government first in the firing line.

Following his announcement, Hunt pinpointed the high salaries of senior UKFC executives but was that mere justification for a decision taken for political reasons?

To mark the 10-year anniversary of this highly controversial event in the history of UK film policy, Screen is presenting an oral history spread over two features. In Part Two Legacy which will be published on July 30, we will look at the achievements of an organisation that distributed 160m to more than 900 films, backing commercial hits and award winners such as Tom Hoopers The Kings Speech, Lynne Ramsays We Need To Talk About Kevin,Mike Leighs Vera Drake, Jane Campions Bright Star,Paul Greengrass Bloody Sunday, Gurinder Chadhas Bend It Like Beckham,Andrea Arnolds Fish Tank, James Marshs Man On Wire, Shane Meadows This Is England, Kevin Macdonalds Touching The Void, Phyllida Lloyds The Iron Lady,and Robert Altmans Gosford Park.

But first, we focus on the abolition itself, speaking to many of the main players for the inside story of how it unfolded, and also ask: with the benefit of 10 years hindsight, what impact did the closureof the UKFC ultimately have, if any?

Pete Buckingham (head of distribution and exhibition, UK Film Council, 2002-2011): You could probably say that with the financial collapse of 2008, which precipitated the destruction of the Film Council, this was a response by the establishment that it was the public sectors fault. That the public sector had got too rich, the public sector was insulated from the collapse, the private sector was suffering all over the place, and so on. That was the context. It was an easy target.

Sally Caplan (head of UK Film Council Premiere Fund, 2005-2010): It was a complete shock, not least because the UKFC and its CEO John Woodward were generally well-respected, and the rumours were that the UKFC would absorb and run the BFI [British Film Institute].

Rebecca OBrien (UK Film Council board member, 2006-2011; producer): I think the thought was, well, there seem to be two organisations [the UKFC and the British Film Institute] to do with film, and one is a charity that we cant get rid of very easily, and the other is an organisation which is absolutely the personification of New Labour.

Tim Bevan (chair of UK Film Council, 2009-2011): They handled it appallingly. They broadsided us. I was in LA, and Ed Vaizey phoned me up, saying, There is going to be this announcement tomorrow.

Ed Vaizey (minister for culture, communications and creative industries, 2010-2016): I had a very good relationship with John Woodward (CEO of the UKFC), and also with Tim Bevan. And I had a very high regard for the UK Film Council. I didnt have any particular animus against it. I didnt come into office thinking, Weve got to deal with the UK Film Council. It was the last Labour government and Sion Simon, who was then the creative industries minister that had announced the merger between the BFI and the UK Film Council in 2009, and there had been this ongoing debate about merging the two. The Labour government had taken this in-principle decision, but nothing had been done about it.

Jeremy Hunt had come into office determined to be teachers pet. The noise from the Treasury to all departments was: cut your budget, and cut your quangos. Jeremy was first into the Star Chamber, which is where you get your spending set, and he managed to get us a whopping, I think, 30% cut. Other people actually got a better deal for their department, so he was teachers pet number one because he managed to negotiate deep cuts to his own department.

In July, we had one of those meetings where you just sit around the table and say, Right, what quangos can we abolish? So I said, Well, potentially we could abolish the UK Film Council because people have been talking about it being folded into the BFI, and that could be one of the things we offer up. And before I knew it, Jeremy stands up at the despatch box and announces all these quangos hes abolishing, including the UK Film Council. At which point all fucking hell breaks loose, because there had been no kind of rolling of the pitch in terms of preparing anyone for it.

The other thing is you had strong personalities involved. You had Tim Bevan, who doesnt take many prisoners, and you also had [BFI chair] Greg Dyke, who comes from the same stable, although Greg likes to stand on a soapbox more than Tim does. So you had this clash of the titans.

Stewart Till (chairman of UK Film Council, 2004-2009): It was a shambles. Jeremy Hunt wanted a headline. It was decided, with no discussion with the industry. Then they said, Well, we dont want to turn our back on the industry, so what can we do? And they gave it to the BFI. But the BFI, its DNA is about culture, and theres nothing wrong with that. It was the best of a bad job: okay, at least give it to the BFI who have knowledge about film, rather than the Arts Council at the time, God help us.

Sally Caplan: Salaries were consistent with what had been paid since the start, so its strange after 10 years to come to the conclusion they were too high. Whilst a lot of folks working at the UKFC were absolutely passionate about the industry, in order to attract good people, salaries have to be reasonably in line with the commercial world, though I think they were generally still below.

Vince Holden (head of production finance, UK Film Council, 2000-2011): Lottery money comes with a condition you can only spend 10% of it on overhead. The day that Jeremy Hunt was spouting about the Film Council being too expensive, I spent most of my evening on the phone to an audit company finishing off an audit that had discovered a couple of Far Eastern companies had exploited a film outside of the licence. I earned two years of my salary on that one phone call, and Jeremy Hunt tells me Im paid too much? Fuck off. That made me cross.

Stewart Till: I think we were fiscally agile. We kept overheads flat for about four years. If the government had said, Look, we want to cut X percent, then I think we would have had a very rational [response], and acted like a private sector company would have done: cutting overhead, being a little more parsimonious, and strategically cutting off the branches that bear less fruit. We could have reacted. I think Jeremy Hunt [focused on costs and salaries] as a justification. He wanted a headline, and he got one.

Ed Vaizey: In retrospect, [the way we did it] was probably the right thing to do. If youd entered into an endless consultation, nothing would have happened. So by simply announcing it at the despatch box, Jeremy made it happen.

Tim Bevan obviously knows the prime minister, theyre part of that Gloucestershire set. So he rings up the prime minister and screams bloody hell. It was one of the few times in my life that David Cameron actually phoned me to ask about [something]. He said, Are you sure this is the right thing to do? And Greg Dyke, who is not the most empathetic person at the best of times, obviously crowed like anything that he had won this great victory.

But then the Film Council started this fight-back, and they started ringing all the film studios in the US. We started getting missives from the film studios, giving quotes saying, This is a disgusting, terrible decision. This government doesnt care about the film industry, and were going to have to seriously look at our investment in the UK. And we had the Australian Film Commission saying, If youre thinking about shooting a film in Britain, come to Australia instead where we care about film. So it was all going slightly pear-shaped.

I rang up a friend who was quite well-connected with US film studios. He said, Ring up this guy, who heads one of the film studios. And I rang him and I explained to him the reason behind our decision and he very kindly put me in touch with the other four studio heads. So that slightly lowered the temperature.

Oliver Foster (head of corporate affairs, UK Film Council, 2008-2010): Obviously those initial weeks were intense and fast-paced, involving a whole team of people talking to the studios. Its always worth challenging government if you think theyve got something wrong or there are unintended consequences of a policy theyre pursuing. I think most people would agree now that the end state ie, an enhanced BFI alongside a lasting and popular tax credit is probably a far better outcome than what was initially anticipated.

Tim Bevan: [After the abolition announcement], it all went batshit because obviously everyone was appalled and shouted and screamed, and the rest of it. I remember Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey getting me into their office, kicking out all their special advisors and saying, Youve got to make this stop. I said, Well, you know, sorry. But if youd gone about this in a different way, you wouldnt be getting this overreaction.

Months of uncertainty continued until the late-November 2010 confirmation that the BFI would inherit key functions from the UK Film Council, with the British Film Commission to be housed at Film London. In March 2011, it was announced that 44 posts (including a couple of vacancies) were transferring to the BFI. Key executives transferring included film fund head Tanya Seghatchian, head of distribution and exhibition Pete Buckingham and head of business affairs Will Evans. By the end of 2011, both Seghatchian and Buckingham had exited their posts.

Ed Vaizey: There was a lot of confusion for three or four months. We hadnt done any of the work. The announcement came before the work. The narrative from the Tory point of view was: we are cutting a quango. As opposed to: we are doing a very efficient and carefully thought-through merger of two bodies that overlap. I spent a lot of time firefighting, to ensure the story didnt get out of control. All the thinking about how it was actually going to work happened after the announcement rather than before.

It took Tim Bevan a very long time to ever speak to me again, which was quite painful. I dont think John Woodward has ever spoken to me again. Greg Dyke and I ended up falling out anyway because we had to keep cutting the BFI budget, so I didnt get any kudos from that. But the hero of the story is probably [BFI CEO] Amanda Nevill, who made it work. And it did work incredibly well.

I think people would find it quite hard to say, even during the period of the merger, that they could point to anything that had a direct impact on film investment and production in the UK. And the great secret was that, although the last Labour government had cocked up the film tax credit [for a period], they had just about sorted it out when we came into office. And it worked, and it has continued to work and be refined and updated. Its been an extraordinary gangbusters success. Whether the bang for buck is worth it or not, because its quite a generous subsidy to US film producers, you cant argue in terms of what its done to attract inward investment into the UK.

The merger has shown that you can put these two bodies together and not lose focus. The BFI is capable of both being an archivist and a film producer, and I do think its easier just having one body for the film industry.

Stewart Till: The irony is that the Conservative government, who were more private sector-oriented, gave it to a cultural organisation to run, and gave them similar sorts of money. I do think the BFI did an okay job, but I feel nowhere near as good a job as the Film Council was doing. Executive against executive, and board member against board member, the Film Council I felt were much stronger.

Ed Vaizey: I think Amanda [Nevill] ran an incredibly efficient organisation [at the BFI]. There was an element of friction in our relationship because Greg was never backward in coming forward, and every year we were saying to the BFI, Sorry, you cant have an increase, in fact we are asking you to take an X-percentage cut. Amanda put up with what I had to do with a zen-like calm and patience, but there was no doubt at all that we went through and continue to go through a golden age of inward investment.

Will Evans (head of business affairs, UK Film Council and BFI, 2002-2018): Certain people in the industry at the time were saying they didnt believe the BFI was an organisation that would be able to effectively handle this Lottery administration function, because at the time they were principally a film archive and cultural organisation. Having been at both organisations for a combined 16 years, I can confirm that those concerns were completely unfounded. The BFI ended up being more than capable of undertaking the Lottery administration function, and one of the key reasons is because of the 42 people that transferred over to the BFI in April 2011, who knew what they were doing, and were allowed to carry on doing what they were doing.

Prior to abolition, in 2010, the UKFC had merged its Premiere, New Cinema and Development funds into a single film fund under the leadership of Tanya Seghatchian, who had led the Development Fund since spring 2007. She then took her team over to the BFI in April 2011. (Seghatchian and John Woodward, UKFC CEO from 2000 to 2010, both declined to comment for this article.)

Vince Holden: When Tanya [took over the new combined UKFC Film Fund], she thought shed be fighting [us] she called Will Evans and I the two-headed beast of the Film Council. When she came in, she said, I want my new fund to work in a totally different way. I said, Fine, tell me what you want and well put it into action.

Jack Arbuthnott (UK Film Council Development Fund executive, 2006-2008): Compared to Tanyas streamlined single fund, there were many more people doing the same work, or tasked to cover the same responsibilities in the three-fund system. [The abolition] all seemed to be very ironic. They had considerably tightened up [costs] by having one fund.

It struck me as a little bit of a reverse takeover by the BFI, in terms of its strategy and its focus. But within the BFI, with a single fund and without this sense of, We are going to teach the industry how to become better, youre not setting yourself up to be pilloried, and you can operate much more nebulously. There is also this sense of the inherent value of cinema that the BFI is there, as a charity, to champion that gives a defence for that activity that the Film Council didnt have.

At the BFI, the film fund under Tanya Seghatchian and subsequently Ben Roberts drew praise from the industry for instituting a more producer-friendly regime.

Rebecca OBrien: With The Wind That Shakes The Barley [2006], I didnt want to go to the Film Council. I really wanted to avoid that money. It was to do with the recoupment position that they took, and the lawyers. They were into playing hardball with producers. Everybody had this sort of fear of Will [Evans] and Vince [Holden]. They were like two Rottweilers sitting there.

Vince went after the Film Council closed down. Will stayed on and changed his spots completely. To the film industry, he became Saint Will. Suddenly he started making it easy to get money out. Whereas with the Film Council, the idea was that these should be quite hard bits of money to get.

There was definitely a lot of distrust within the producing community about how the Film Council operated. And there was perceived to be a certain arrogance. It was like, We know how to run the film industry, and were really good at it. And the producers can be grateful for our beneficence. I think the very fact that the Film Council itself was so shocked when it got cancelled was a key to how out-of-touch it was with its constituency. It did think that it was the centre of the universe as far as film was concerned in Britain.

Robert Jones (head of Premiere Fund, 2000-2005): Certainly, the Premiere Fund had a high recoupment target, which I think it managed to achieve, and I dont think any public fund anywhere in the world has ever done that. We were constantly in the position of having to justify to the government that these funds were needed and they werent just being flushed away. That was a slight culture shock for people. When you bring in practitioners from the commercial world, they are going to bring in commercial practices.

If you compare the way the Film Council oversaw the financing of the films that it was involved in, and how it did expect a certain amount of rigour and discipline on the part of the people who were making them, then I can see that that was not the same as they had experienced, certainly with the Arts Council of England [which oversaw the distribution of Lottery money to film prior to the creation of the UK Film Council in April 2000].

But if you remember that what the Film Council was inheriting was a slightly dysfunctional system, to put it mildly, then I would defend it against any kind of suggestion that there was an overzealousness in terms of just trying to make sure that things were done with some eye on the real world.

Will Evans: When they set up the Film Council, they decided that Lottery film production investment would be subject to meeting certain financial recoupment targets. If it was projected that the Film Council would recoup at least 50% for a Premiere Fund film, then that project would be put forward for approval to the production finance committee. However, if after running the numbers, it showed that projected recoupment wouldnt be possible to get anywhere near that recoupment target, then, in the days of the Film Council, that project would have been rejected. That does not apply to the BFI. Projected recoupment targets are generally not a key consideration in terms of whether the BFI will invest Lottery money into a film.

The BFI now is much more able to be generous to producers than the Film Council was. It goes into a lockbox but producers generally dont seem to mind that, because these lockbox entitlements can sometimes be very valuable to producers.

Carol Comley (head of strategic development, UKFC and BFI, 2000-2020):My recollection of the aims and objectives and public policy of the Film Council was that, while it wanted to be a fair player, being generous to producers, or indeed any other player in the film ecosystem, was not in and of itself its principal objective. The BFI is probably an organisation that resists saying no, finds it easier to say yes, compared to the Film Council.

Paul Trijbits (head of UK Film Council New Cinema Fund, 2000-2006): At the New Cinema Fund, I didnt have a recoupment target per se, not like something that I had to hit or I was going to be fired. But we always said, if something works well, we should definitely benefit from it at an equal level as any other party that is part of that process. Now, were we benign enough to the producer? No, absolutely not. And people thought it was tough that both Robert and I, who were producers, were upholding that position.

In hindsight, we were too tough. Because in the end, you have to ask yourself, would the money that came back each year have been better sitting with 20 or 30 or 40 producers, doing what they were doing, versus [the UK Film Council] being able to invest in two or three more films? I think the answer is: it would have been better to be sitting in those production companies, for people to continue to take creative risks.

Jack Arbuthnott: I think the Film Council shot itself in the foot by taking an imperious tone, just in terms of presentation rather than fundamentals. The BFI, in my view, are doing it better than the Film Council did. That may not be as a result of strategy, it might be a learned evolution of how you position yourself. I think its a lot to do with the home that the BFI represents and its activities, versus the Film Council.

Its not about evading scrutiny but it is about boxing clever in a domain where youre quite rightly under scrutiny. Whenever I deal with the BFI now, they seem to be sort of run ragged. It pleases me that they dont receive the relentless abuse and attacks that the Film Council seemed to get, because as individuals they have such integrity.

Tim Bevan: Probably from the outside, it looked like [the UKFC] was trying to overstretch a little bit. But if I have any criticism for whats gone on since and I actually think whats gone on since has been perfectly satisfactory its that if the Film Council had subsumed the BFI rather than the BFI subsumed the Film Council, I think you would have seen a more robust speaking body for the greater creative industries. I think that Amanda did a brilliant job, but it is probably not as muscular a body as it should be, if you think about what goes on in the creative industries and film in particular in this country.

Its a massive growth industry and it should have a very powerful body speaking for it and dare I say it, it should be a kind of quango, which is what the Film Council was. The reason they dont like quangos and this might change, because politics is going to change gigantically is because its expertise from an industry having political muscle in decisions relating to that industry. Thats all been dispensed of in politics over the last 10 years. But the film and television business and the making of audiovisual material is massively powerful and were brilliant at it in Britain. And that needs a powerful voice.

When the Film Council closed, no one knew anything about streaming or anything like that. The Film Council would have absolutely got itself stuck in there and worked out how streaming can be turned to everybodys advantage somehow, trying to make deals with Netflix and Amazon. That is not the way that the BFI production body works. We were just a more commercial-type organisation.

I think [the UKFCs] natural evolution was to become more of a representative body for the greater creative industries. We were in talks with video games, we were in talks with all sorts of things, and Ed Vaizey quite liked that idea: looking on the Venn diagram where all of those industries join up, which is in employment law, on tax credits, skills, education, and so on. Its still a good idea, its something that, looking forward, wouldnt be bad. But I really dont want to come over in any way as sour grapes on this because it is what it is, and the BFI has gone on and done a pretty great job with public money in films.

Carol Comley: The Film Council more had the gene pool of being strategic, forward looking and innovative. And the BFI over time, since taking over many of the Film Councils functions in 2011, became more like that, but initially that wasnt part of its natural gene pool.

The UK Film Council thought that it had a specific role to lead the UK film industry, to shape the UK film industry and advocate on behalf of it it had a more 360-degree role. Whereas the BFI begins its instincts with its own organisation, and by inheriting those functions that it did in 2011, it then had to develop into a bigger role than it had had before.From my point of view, and I think from many industry players point of view, after a slow start in 2011, I think Amanda and the BFI governors, and the new governors that came into play, started to have an appetite to be far more industry-focused, far more future-focused.

Vince Holden: I cant really comment too much on what the BFI do, but I just dont think theyve got the clout, the kudos of the Film Council, and the central focus that the Film Council gave the industry. When things went wrong, everybody ran to the Film Council and shouted, which was good, because we listened and then we thought about it, and we tried to cure it. I think you would have far more clarity and visibility of proposed solutions to [Brexit and Covid] if the Film Council had still been around. I just think [the BFI] is not quite as powerful a central lobbying group. But thats just my personal view.

Pete Buckingham: I spent six months at the BFI. It didnt work out and, to be frank, I shouldnt have been moved over. The BFI was a different beast from the Film Council. It was a different organisation that had its own culture and philosophy and it wasnt really for me.

The Film Council was brilliant. The Film Council was amazing. It had faults in it, which perhaps contributed to its downfall, but it had a bunch of really, really great people, people who understood all aspects of film and were concentrating on making the British film industry better in really intelligent ways.

John [Woodward] was an amazing boss. He was ruthless, and there was a certain arrogance to the Film Council. It didnt quite see what was coming, it believed it was too indispensable or too good at what it did. They didnt work hard enough to build up a lobby of supporters at a time that they needed it.

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10 years on: The inside story of the last days of the UK Film Council - Screen International

The word "racism" has become devalued to the point it's the verbal equivalent of the Weimar Republic mark around 1922. Or the Zimbabwe dollar around 2008.

How devalued is that? Well, in 1922 thanks to hyperinflation it took 200 billion German marks to buy a loaf of bread. In Zimbabwe in 2008, the annual rate of inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent. One sextillion has 21 zeroes -- 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This is not to say there's no racism and that such racism as does persist is of minor concern. It's to say that the word has been cheapened by promiscuous overuse. The word is now the tarnished coin of petty, partisan politics.

Demagogues use the word with the same reckless abandon tin-pot tyrants run their treasury printing presses, diluting the value of their currency. The word now rolls glibly off the tongue of even the bumbling inarticulate, such as Joe Biden. Google "Trump/racism" and you'll get something approaching 40 million hits. Welcome to the mob, Joe.

The word now serves as an imprecise, crude weapon, the verbal equivalent of the hand grenade. You lob it in the general direction of your foe and hope it lands close enough to take him out.

It's a sure-fire word for shutting off dialogue and shutting down discussion. It's an ad-hominem way to avoid making a case for your own point of view, by dismissing other points of view as infected with bigotry and therefore unworthy of even addressing.

The rising use of a substitute term -- "white supremacist" -- reflects the worn-down-to-the-tread overuse of the word "racist."

Something stronger was desired, and it's hoped that "white supremacist" will fill the bill. It conjures images of South Africa's brutal segregation under authoritarian apartheid. As if anything remotely like that exists in the United States today.

No one has put more mileage and wear and tear on the word "racist" than the loosely organized Black Lives Matter movement. Allegations of racism roll off its protest assembly line like widgets coming down the conveyor belts of Chinese factories.

But BLM has broadened its horizons. According to its website, BLM no longer is concerned only with slandering police departments as the updated Schutzstaffel. BLM's website proclaims that "we work to dismantle cisgender privilege" and strive to "foster a queer-affirming network." Oookay.

In this expansive BLM mission many corporations -- literally from A to Z, from Amazon to Zoom, with such as Citibank and Microsoft in between -- espy a legitimacy worthy of big-dollar financial support.

Or perhaps, alternatively, these corporations perceive a need to keep rabble-rousing "protests" at a distance.

In any event, the mainstreaming of BLM may indicate the extent to which it has been co-opted by privileged white college snots. Or so the old-time BLMers are grumbling, anyway.

I've wondered about this myself. Watching the video of brick-and-bottle throwing "protesters," I've noted a growing presence of palefaces in their midst. Lots of prosperous-looking Antifatistas shod in pricey Birkenstocks and Nikes.

It turns out I'm not alone in the observation. In the Washington Post recently, E.D. Mondaine, president of the Portland, Ore., NAACP, complained that crackers are crashing the BLM festivities. He groused that "white privilege" is "dancing on the stage that was created to raise up the voices of my oppressed brothers and sisters."

"Oppressed" is another worn-down word that's beginning to show tread from overuse, like an old tire with 150,000 miles on it. But then, the entire rationale for BLM was thread-bare from the start.

BLM's original, asserted mission was to lament the supposed racist depravity of police, to decry the supposed "state-sanctioned open hunting season" on African Americans, all while ignoring the epidemic of black-on-black violence.

BLM came into existence protesting a fiction, chanting "Hands up, don't shoot!" -- a reference to an event that actually never happened, according to the findings of the Obama Justice Department.

As I keep saying in this space -- and it's surely a point that merits belaboring -- the plain fact is that lethal confrontations between blacks and police are statistically rare, and thankfully so.

Of about 10 million arrests a year, there are only about 1,000 lethal incidents involving blacks and whites, and more involving the latter than the former (Statista Research).

So lethal incidents constitute one ten-thousandths of a percent -- roughly 0.0001 -- of all arrests made. The 904 fatal shootings by police in 2019, including 370 whites and 235 blacks, is on the order of 0.00009 (nine hundred-thousands of a percent) of total arrests.

While blacks die in confrontations with police at a significantly greater rate than whites, such deaths are in any event rare -- 30 per million population for blacks, 28 per million for Latinos, 12 per million for whites and four per million for Asian and other minorities.

And despite the higher rate of deaths for blacks in encounters with police, violent/serious crime in black neighborhoods may be a more significant factor than race.

An astute reader -- who is sometimes in sharp disagreement with this column -- points out revealing data on the subject, from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (2018).

The UCR numbers tell of 1,243,283 white arrests for violent/serious crimes and 699,265 black arrests. The black share of the total -- 36 percent -- is, yes, disproportionate to African Americans' 13 percent of the population. But the 36 percent share of black arrests for violent/serious crime is in line with the 34 percent share of blacks killed in lethal confrontations with law enforcement.

The numbers arguably indicate, in other words, that levels of criminal activity in an area -- and not necessarily race per se -- account for the higher rate of black fatalities.

In fact a study by Joseph Cesario of Michigan State University and David Johnson of the University of Maryland, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, came to just such a conclusion. (That study is now being subjected not only to the customary scholarly debate but also to heavy politicized attack.)

Meanwhile, disruptive, obstructive and sometimes violent "protests" continue to roil the Democratic Party's one-party urban bantustans -- from Portland to Seattle to Minneapolis to Chicago to New York.

Bullhorned demands and mob chants call for the "defunding," and even the abolition of police forces. Such ruckuses draw attention away from real problems afflicting black communities -- and away from real solutions.

Blacks are indeed falling victim to gunplay -- but not nearly so much at the hands of police as at the hands of punk gangsters in their own neighborhoods. The punk gangsters, long glorified by a flourishing hip-hop industry, hold entire city blocks under their swaggering, strutting sway. And they play a key role in narcotics trafficking, poisoning the communities in which they operate.

The urban bantustan mayors and the governors politically aligned with them are content to issue bleating pleas for more "gun control."

As if there aren't already literally hundreds of laws on the books to curb criminal use of firearms. And as if the gangsters in any event would be any more inclined to heed additional gun laws than they are the existing ones.

The disturbing truth is that it's easier -- and far safer -- for the bantustan mayors and allied governors to deplore the gangbangers' hardware than to direct moral leadership and aggressive law enforcement at the gangbangers themselves.

And trashing police while making scattershot allegations of racism -- "systemic racism," "institutional racism," "cultural racism," "endemic racism," "ubiquitous racism" and on and on -- are much easier than addressing the real and complex issues that have long kept cities on the edge of fiscal disaster and their African American communities at significant disadvantage.

These issues include the familiar vicious cycle of crime, crippled city economies, social dysfunction and faltering school systems.

But near or at the very top of the list is an issue that's risky even to broach, never mind address. This is the touchy, touchy but seminal issue of single-parent households.

Let it be stipulated that there are many single parents -- mostly moms -- who do a heroic job raising their children under trying circumstances. That being said, the dreary reality remains, as study after study, right and left, has shown, children in single-parent households are at a marked disadvantage by every social, educational and economic measure.

Yet BLM openly and aggressively asserts an agenda of undermining two-parent families, and never mind that these are the families in which children are most likely to thrive. "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure," declares a defiantly obtuse BLM.

The massive disproportion of black households headed by a single parent may indeed be traced, as many say, to historic discrimination, to, yes, racism. Yet merely acknowledging the fact doesn't change the fact.

To a problematical extent, single-parent households across the board, white, black and Latino, have become the accepted social norm. (It's surely no coincidence that Asian American households have the lowest percentage of single-parent families and the highest educational achievement and top average income of all groups.)

This is a long-simmering issue. In 1965, the Harvard scholar Pat Moynihan, later a Democratic senator, voiced alarm that births to unmarried black mothers were undercutting black advancement.

When Moynihan voiced that concern, 25 percent of black births were to unwed mothers. By 2015, the figure had reached 70 percent.

Chanting slogans and waving placards in the streets while hurling charges suggesting pandemic, out-of-control racism -- despite amazing strides of progress in the last 50 years -- does more than just divert attention away from real solutions to real problems.

Politicized racial demagoguery spreads a self-defeating, cynical hopelessness, as if to say -- contrary to the early days of the Civil Rights Movement -- don't bother to keep the faith. Give up. Never mind staying the course and fighting the good fight.

The message is instead to throw a brick at a cop, topple a statue of Christopher Columbus, shatter a store window, loot a liquor store, occupy and trash a whole section of downtown -- in short, further hobble a city's already limping economy and put its African American citizens at even worse disadvantage.

Okay then. But just don't call such activities "protesting." And don't try to tell us it's all about progress for minorities. Don't profane the honorable term "civil rights" by coopting it as your cheap political slogan.

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Provocations: A word cheapened by partisan politics - The Trentonian