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MEDIA REVIEWS
| THE INTOLERABLE BURDEN. Directed by Chea Price and produced by Constance Curry. New York: West Glen Films, 2002.
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In Intolerable Burden citizens of Drew, Mississippi, both black and white, tell the story of the desegregation and resegregation of the local public schools. This documentary, by dispensing with the omniscient narrator and taking the story past the movement years into the present, makes important contributions both to the use of oral history in film and to the scholarship on, and public policy discussions about, school desegregation and its impact on education. |
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Intolerable Burden is divided into four approximately equal sections, each marked off with a pause and introductory text over music. The first section is on segregation in Drew. This piece sets the context for the story by establishing the nature of racial separation and oppression in the community. Topics covered here include white racial attitudes, the nature of sharecropping, and the differences between white and black schools. Following that, in part two Mae Bertha Carter, her children, and other local whites and blacks tell the story of the Carter family's experience integrating the public schools in 1965 under Mississippi's Freedom of Choice plan. The Carter children were the only blacks to attend the public schools that year and they describe the harassment they suffered as a result. The filmmakers interviewed white former classmates and school staff. These interviews are notable for their unflinching acknowledgement of their role in the isolation of the Carters. In 1969 local schools were forced by the courts to abandon the Freedom of Choice plan and initiate full desegregation. Section three of the film portrays the near immediate resegregation of the schools as whites fled to private academies, and the decline in public schools' resources and facilities as a result. Finally, in the fourth and most innovative section, interviewees make the connection between the decline in public education, increased drop out rate among black youth, and rise in incarceration rates in the community. |
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This film is almost entirely constructed from video oral histories with the Carter family and local white and black residents. The interviews are edited together to tell the story, with period and modern photographs and film accompanying the stories. The lack of a voice-over narrator requires the viewer to make some connections in the story him/herself. But that is made up for by the immediacy of the drama and the way the film thus leaves the story in the hands of the people who experienced it. The exception to the oral histories is a few short clips of film footage from the segregation era. This archival film scene, in which a group of white men cajole an older African-American man into saying for a reporter how well-cared for he is by his southern white friends is, however, worth the departure from the interviews. |
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The content of Intolerable Burden contributes to the scholarship on school integration by taking the story past the 1960s crisis over desegregation into contemporary resegregation and its consequences. Many monographs, memoirs, and films deal with the experience of African-American children as they entered the white schools. This film is almost unique in examining not just white flight, but the decline in support for the schools, conflict over the make-up of the school board, difficulty in attracting teachers, and increase in drop-out rate that followed as well. Most creatively, the filmmakers go a step further and connect the school crisis to other social ills. As a result, this film becomes not just another story of a civil rights struggle in the '60s, but an examination of the place of equal education in the broader question of social justice. |
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In the interest of covering this later material, the filmmakers made the decision to minimize the stories of the immediate consequences for the Carter family's choice to send the children to the white schools in 1965. The children describe their experience, but Mae Bertha Carter only briefly mentions the problems she and her husband encountered. There is far more dramatic detail about the violence the family encountered in Curry's book, Silver Rights, which is referenced at the end of the film. Without a fuller picture of the harassment endured outside of the school, a viewer unfamiliar with the Carter's experience might not understand the extent to which school integration was seen as a threat to the broader structure of white supremacy. But that point is made in other works, and the inclusion of the later material more than makes up for the slight lack of detail here. |
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As a work of oral history this film succeeds by artfully weaving interviews together to tell the story. The structure of the film—the four discrete sections—moreover lends itself to use in the classroom or in public forums as the basis for discussion on educational inequality. |
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| Tracy E. K'Meyer |
| University of Louisville |
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