Hands that Picked Cotton: The Story of Black Politics in Today's Rural South (1985)

This was my very first film that started with a chance meeting with Alan Bell, a KLRU New Orleans producer, in February 1982. I made up a film idea, basically a film version of my then unfinished Harvard PhD dissertation on African-American politics in the South. Alan signed on to produce, direct, write and edit with me, bringing along cinematographer Artis Mebane. I drove around the Mississippi delta that summer my hometown friend Jim Gilmore, later a Frontline producer, then an NYU film student, debating what go shoot, while he took photographs. This documentary examines documentary film examining the political legacy of the civil rights movement for blacks in the Mississippi Delta.  Almost twenty years after Mississippi’s Freedom Summer and the passage of the Voting Rights Bill, African-Americans were still trying to get out the vote and claim some of the political power over their own majority black communities.  This film follows three stories.  Robert Clarke, the first black state representative in the rural deep South since Reconstruction runs for Congress in the Delta.  African-American candidates attempt to win a majority on the Humphreys County commission.  Finally, the town of Tallulah, Louisiana, just over the Mississippi River, with a black mayor, splits along racial lines on the issue of keeping the local bars open on Christmas.

Gabriel Award, American Film Festival, finalist for best documentary feature.  The New York Times wrote “the first-rate documentary… isn’t necessarily trying to be inspiring here, but in its celebration of the political process, it really is.”  National PBS broadcast, February 1985.

Produced & Directed by Alan Bell and Paul Stekler Cinematography by Artis Mebane

Edited and Sound by Alan Bell Narrated by Lea Lawson Still Photography by Jim Gilmore

Funding from the Louisiana Committee for the Humanities

Photos by Jim Gilmore, Mississippi & Louisiana 1982-3