Jeffrey Robinson’s intention in Who We Are, a Chronicle of Racism in America, is to educate, and it succeeds mightily in this aim. Robinson, a lawyer with the ACLU, on Juneteenth 2018, gave a lecture at Town Hall in New York City to an audience eager to learn how our country evolved as a nation steeped in white supremacy.

His lecture, the basis of the movie, startles us with facts such as:

*Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution explicitly protects slavery as an institution

*The Star Spangled Banner’s third verse includes these lines:

“no refuge could save the hireling and slave

from the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave”

and Francis Scott Key wrote those words meaning it was a good thing

*Between 1873 and the 1950s over 4,000 black men were lynched

*In 1921 Tulsa experienced not a riot, but an overhead air strike intended to kill middle class black people and destroy their homes.

Even though the lecture format of Robinson’s talk at Town Hall can grow tedious and is very uncinematic, when he leaves the lecture hall and interviews survivors of lethal racist attacks, like the mother of Eric Garner, the daughter of Elmore Bolling, and the 100 plus year old survivor of the Tulsa massacre, the movie comes to life and demonstrates what is really lost when a nation cannot confront its history.

Most affecting is the personal history of Robinson himself. He visits with his school mates who remember the day they walked away from a basketball game which the opposing team refused to play as long as Robinson was on the team because he was black. He explains how his parents got to buy their house in Memphis through a realtor who sold it to a white family willing to transfer ownership. The Robinsons had put in a bid for the house at full price but were rejected. When the white people offered a lesser price it was accepted. And so we learn first hand how racist policies worked in housing markets in the 1960s.

As someone growing up in Memphis during the early 1960s, Robinson witnessed first hand confrontations between Civil Rights leaders and the police. Listening to Martin Luther King speak the week before he was assassinated makes you realize how much easier it is to galvanize a base with brilliant leaders.

Even though it is understandable for Black Lives Matter to want to let go of the model of a male spokesman/leader like King, especially since three women founded their very effective movement, sometimes you do need a person to articulate exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. Robinson has pointed out in this movie the background and continuing structural underpinnings of racism in the United States. It made me want to go out and do something about it. As an educator, I think that this movie would be very helpful in the classroom.