Oh Freedom After While

In the cotton and corn cradle of the Southeast Missouri "Bootheel," slavery didn't end with emancipation. For the thousands of landless ex-slaves who migrated north to work these rich farmlands, the misery and hardships suffered under slavery were simply replaced by life under the yoke of another type of indenturement--sharecropping. Oh Freedom After While provides a well-crafted and moving look at the plight--crushing poverty, impossibly hard work, and almost universal exploitation by unscrupulous land owners--of sharecroppers, black and white, from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Using superb archival photographs (many reminiscent of Walker Evan's work in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), newsreels, interviews with participants and academics, a great gospel-infused score, and an effectively restrained narrative by Julian Bond, Oh Freedom chronicles the struggle of this beleaguered community to make its hardships known and its collective voice heard. Central to this story are the life and work of Owen Whitfield, an African-American sharecropper and part-time minister who took up the call of organizing sharecroppers and led them in the dead of winter of 1939 in a remarkable mass march along the highways of Missouri to protest the execrable conditions of their lives. Oh Freedom discusses the small but significant gains resulting from the activism of Whitfield and other crusaders, including the development of the federally-supported, racially-integrated cooperative farming community of La Forge, and other low-cost housing and resettlement initiatives. The real victories, however, may have been more personal. The banding together of this downtrodden, marginalized community proved to its members that change can happen, that lives can be bettered through solidarity. As one of the historians interviewed in the video points out, it's "a nice reminder that common people aren't common...[that] they can do incredible things." Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (G. Handman)