Right as Rain: Start With the Smallest Communities

Last weekend I went to Graham to film a march to the polls.

My friend and colleague Anna Norwood is working on a new documentary about the current struggle surrounding a Confederate statue in front of the Alamance County courthouse.

This issue is not unique to Graham, as we’ve seen cities all across the country debate the removal of similar monuments. What is unique, perhaps, is that the statue stands in a very specific spot — one where Wyatt Outlaw, Graham’s first Black town commissioner, was publicly lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870.

In 1914 at the unveiling ceremony of the statue, Jacob Long, who founded Alamance County’s KKK branch, told the audience that they “have a common interest: to recall the achievements of the great and good of our own race and blood.”

So, Court Square has always been a place that evoked deep emotions in the community and lately it has garnered national press due to protests and the push back by county officials.

That continued last Saturday.

I was flying my drone from the Wayman Chapel AME Church to Court Square, following the group of almost 200 marchers and being escorted by several units of the State Highway Patrol.

The crowd stopped briefly in front of the monument to hold a rally and then afterwards planned to continue on to the polls. Permits had been granted, the road was blocked off ahead of time, and both the Alamance County Sheriff’s Department and Graham Police Department secured the borders.

Yet after a beautiful 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence for George Floyd (and countless others), the police started demanding that people get out of the road. When the crowd (who believed that they could remain there for an hour) was confused, they were immediately pepper-sprayed.

It was tough to watch.

Older women were pulled away from the area, struggling to breath. Children were vomiting. And everyone, myself included, was coughing.

I left early, just after the crowd had de-escalated the situation themselves, but I heard that they were pepper-sprayed again later.

I spent much of the day being interviewed for national news outlets having to explain the incident after a thread of my tweets about it went viral.

But I spent the rest of the night at a Halloween party — the reason I left early from the march — with my wife and daughter and a small group of friends.

It quickly grounded me and brought me back to the reality of what I could control.

My daughter didn’t need an explanation of the events. She didn’t care that Daddy was being interviewed by CNN and she certainly wouldn’t even understand what that meant.

What she was focusing on was learning how to play nicely with others, how to share toys, and how to talk to strangers and possibly make new friends.

It reminded me of how big change starts with those small changes.

And what we need on a large scale, really reflects those small lessons she was learning.

At the time I am writing this, the election results have still not been decided. What is clear, however, is that our country is very divided and many, if not most, of us are hurting.

To make real, positive, and lasting change, we have to start with family. We have to raise our children to be strong and stand up for what’s right. I know my daughter will. She is already bold.

Then, we can move on to our communities, including local systems and politics and the issues that impact the societies closest to us.

Then, those ripples will eventually lead to state sizes and even as big as the country.

Whatever happens with the election won’t solve the systemic injustices we face together.

It’s a long road of hard, empathic work that we face ahead of us.

And it starts at home.

But we got work to do, America.

 

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Rain Bennett is a two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker, writer, and competitive storyteller with over a decade of experience producing documentary films that focus on health and wellness. His mission is simple: to make the world happier and healthier by sharing stories of change.

You can read the rest of “Right as Rain” here, and check back every Wednesday on Chapelboro for a new column! 

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