A great career awaits the young man from the southern states, who attended All White College in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1961. He has good grades, he can basically choose the university: Harvard, maybe Princeton too. The world is open to people like him, because he has three advantageous properties for time and place that his roommate lists when he goes to the bar: He is “free, white and of legal age”. And that in a segregated world in which the black population is systematically discriminated against.
But things have long since started to move. Six years earlier, Rosa Parks, also in Montgomery, had refused to give her seat on the bus to a white passenger. In the course of the subsequent “Montgomery Bus Boycotts” at least this aspect of racist legislation was overturned by the black population – a great success for the emerging civil rights movement.
With this in mind, “Son of the South” by Barry Alexander Brown tells the true story of Bob Zellner (Lucas Till), one of the first white activists in the Civil Rights Movement. It starts with being a college student doing a term paper on race relations, so meeting members of the black community is obvious. Bob meets with civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy and Rosa Parks, attends church services and dinners. Even if the Ku Klux Klan plants a burning cross in front of the dorm window and marches on the street in front of the college. His own grandfather is under one of the hoods.
It doesn’t take long before Bob witnesses a white mob attacking a group of peaceful and non-violent protesters at a demonstration. As a result, he became more and more involved. In the end he gave up his studies and career and became the secretary of a black student organization. The white man from the south falls in love with a black lecturer and marches with the civil rights activists’ parades – his old friends are trying to kill him. But Zellner’s courage is only a magnifying glass for the courage of those affected: As a white man, he makes a free decision, while blacks have no choice but to risk their lives on the streets if something is to change for them.
Brown’s film may tell Zellner’s life, but the real protagonist of the film is the civil rights movement, with its historical figures, demonstrations and victims. The executive producer is, after all, Spike Lee, who in his films keeps talking about the life of black Americans and their fight against racism. “Son of the South”, directed by Lee’s film editor Brown, now adds a notable but not really central figure to the chronicle of the civil rights movement. Zellner is not a myth, not a hero, more of a decent, reserved guy who does the right thing. At most, an old reactionary like Clint Eastwood could have turned the white boy into a silent All American Hero.
Everything in this educational film has to “show” something
The modest gesture of the film corresponds to the fact that the game scenes with Zellner rather bring the numerous historical archive material to life, while his figure may serve as illustrative material for the much-discussed question of how a white person can become a good “ally”, a comrade and ally for minorities can. Flashbacks and fade-ins often illustrate the characters’ past too clearly, children’s selves appear behind window panes, memories run through door frames that have been converted into screens.
Everything in this educational film has to “show” something, even the decor. The curriculum includes learning and unlearning about racism: from the inveterate hatred of the KKK grandfather to the “color blindness” of the father, who toured with a black gospel choir through the Soviet Union and was then “lost to the clan”, to Zellner’s conversion into a good ally. At the end of the day, he doesn’t want to be seen as “White Savior” in the media, and as a white man doesn’t want to steal the show from the black activists.
And yet there is an element that gives the film’s school gesture a concrete historical and geographical reality. It is the Southern accentJulia Ormond, in the role of the white civil rights activist Virginia Durr, tries hard to get her. The nasal, drawn out, seductive of this language automatically transforms everything that is said into a rock-solid view, a sermon, whether it is about the racism of the white population or the fight for justice. Both sides are contained in it. All you have to do is choose the one that Bob Zellner chose.
Son of the South, USA 2020 – Directed and written by Barry Alexander Brown. Camera: John Rosario. With Lucas Till, Jim Klock, Michael Sirow. Busch Media, 105 minutes.