Far better than I had anticipated.
I was expecting another "feel good" story - not that I dislike such stories. To the contrary, I love them.
It was clearly a "feel good" story about the little school that could, but so much more. The film conveys the utter cruelty of the Jim Crow laws and life in the south when an African American lived with the fear of lynching.
Rather than just a "feel good" story, we learn about the world in which greatness emerges, a world of terror and intimidation. My only caveat about the film occurs here - the interface between the story of racism in the deep south and the "feel good" part of them is a little ragged in places, but aside from this minor detraction, hats off to the folks who made the film.
The story of racism in American and in the deep south is a painful one, a story we're still living, a story not yet fully resolved.
Part of it's persistence is the simple convenience of having a cast system: "For even for the lowest white man, the most destitute and beaten down, there was always someone a little lower, someone on whom they could pick, someone to terrorize, someone to lynch and burn."
Here's a piece alluded to in the movie:
Lynching is the illegal execution of an accused person by a mob. The term lynching probably derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736-96), a justice of the peace who administered rough justice in Virginia. Lynching was originally a system of punishment used by whites against African American slaves. However, whites who protested against this were also in danger of being lynched. On Novembe 7, 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer was killed by a white mob after he had published articles criticizing lynching and advocating the abolition of slavery. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1920, an average of two African Americans a week were lynched.
A fine film, a dramatic story, a "feel good" film with a whole lot more.
