Arts & Entertainment
New Film Features Black Mother's Rescue Of Son From Near-Lynching
Boston Filmmaker To Screen 1960 Saga At Needham Free Public Library
Needham, Massachusetts>>> Boston-based filmmaker Clennon L. King will screen his latest documentary about a Black New Jersey mother, who five years after Emmett Till, mounted a 26-month fight to rescue her son from a Georgia town notorious for lynching.
The film entitled “Fair Game: Surviving A 1960 Georgia Lynching” will make its Greater Boston debut Sunday, November 18, 2018, 2 p.m.at The Needham Public Free Library, 1139 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA 02494. The filmmaker will introduce the documentary, followed by audience discussion and Q&A. The screening and discussion are free and open to the public.
The film features Clinton White House confidant Vernon Jordan, who was a law clerk on the case, and Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the sole Black cabinet secretary serving in the George H.W. Bush White House. Sullivan hails from the same Southwest Georgia town where the saga unfolds.
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“When I began shooting this film, I had no idea that Blakely, Georgia was home to the second largest number of lynchings in the state,” said the filmmaker, whose father, civil rights Atty. C.B. King, served as the lawyer of James Fair, Jr. of Bayonne, New Jersey. “It’s no wonder the families of Cissy and Whitney Houston and Dionne Warwick, left and relocated to New Jersey as part of the Great Migration.”
King will introduce his documentary, followed by a post-screening discussion and Q&A. Click here to view the film’s trailer.
The 65-minute documentary centers on the plight of 24-year-old Fair, who joined a fellow black New Jersey friend on a road trip to the friend’s hometown of Blakely, Georgia. Their arrival in May 1960, however, could not have been more ill-timed. It coincided with the discovery of the body of an 8-year-old girl, prompting local white law enforcement to finger Fair as the fall guy.
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“The film also paints a compelling portrait of Fair’s mother, who knew all-too-well what happened to Emmett Till five years before,” said King. “It prompted her to move heaven and earth in hopes of saving her son.”
“Fair Game” marks King’s second documentary. His first, the award-winning “Passage at St. Augustine: The 1964 Black Lives Matter Movement That Transformed America”, won the Henry Hampton Award of Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2015 Roxbury International Film Festival.
