100 years from Mississippi

DVD - 2022

Winner of the Best Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival 2021 and Best Documentary Feature at the National Black Film Festival 2021. Mamie Lang Kirkland was seven years old when she fled Ellisville, Mississippi in 1915 with her mother and siblings as her father and his friend, John Hartfield, escaped an approaching lynch mob. John Hartfield returned to Mississippi in 1919 and was killed in one of the most horrific lynchings of the era. Mamie had vowed for a century that she would never return to Mississippi. Yet with Tarabu's remarkable find, he urged his mother to finally confront her childhood trauma by returning to Ellisville. Mamie was 107 when they began the journey to connect her story to the larger impact of Amer...ica's legacy of racial violence, which echoes today from Ferguson to New York, Atlanta to Los Angeles. Like many of the six million African Americans who left the Deep South, Mamie's story is a testament to the courage and hope of her generation. Her indomitable will and contagious joy of living are exceeded only by her ability to tell her story now 111 years later. In a time of great social divisions, it gives us the simple wisdom of an ordinary woman's extraordinary life. more