[For each
of the last
few holiday seasons, I’ve made some
requests to the AmericanStudies
Elves. This year, I thought I’d highlight some amazing American stories that
are ripe for telling in historical fiction films, novels, TV shows, you name
it. Share the stories you’d like to see told, or any other wishes for the AS
Elves, ahead of a wish-full crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the turning
point moment that embodies both the worst and best of American history.
In yesterday’s
post I wished for one version of a historical biopic, the kind that tells the full
life story (or at least a narrative version of it) of an amazing figure. Lives
like Ely Parker’s, those of Renaissance Americans who moved through so many
roles and worlds, demand storytelling that includes at least many of those
stages and traces the evolution of their focal figures as well as their
communities and nation through that lens. Yet some of the best historical biopics,
as exemplified by last year’s phenomenal
Selma (2014), focus instead on
one specific, crucial moment in an individual’s life, a turning point moment
that helps illuminate not only that life but also some of the period’s and
nation’s issues and histories to which it connects.
In 1892,
journalist, editor, and anti-lynching activist Ida
B. Wells experienced precisely such a turning point. Three of her Memphis
friends, successful storeowner Thomas
Moss and two fellow African Americans (Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart), were
lynched after defending Moss’s store from a white mob; when Wells covered the
lynching and its many contexts in her newspaper the Memphis Free Speech, rampaging
whites destroyed the newspaper’s offices while she was on an overseas speaking
tour and warned her not to return to Memphis or continue her efforts. No one
could have blamed Wells if she backed down or at least took a break from her
activism, but instead she did precisely the opposite: upon returning to New
York CIty from abroad, she published her first book, Southern
Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), with a New York press and
set about distributing it as widely as possible. This darkest moment in Wells’
life marked, to put it simply, the starting point for her moves toward a fully
national presence and voice, one that would never be silenced.
Can you imagine
a better moment on which to focus a historical biopic? C’mon, AmericanStudies
Elves, let’s make it happen!
Next wishing
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other wishes you’d share?
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