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At one point in PBS’ “America Framed” documentary “The Cost of Inheritance,” Martin Luther King, Jr. promises, “Now, when we come to Washington…we are coming to get our check.” These words spoken in 1968 — the year of King’s assassination — harkened back to the “promissory note” metaphor of his famed “I Have a Dream” speech five years earlier. Fifty-six years later, the check continues to “come back marked ‘insufficient funds.”
A burgeoning grassroots movement works every day to bring Americans together to right that wrong, as detailed in Yoruba Richen’s richly informative and thought-provoking film. A special screening and Q&A event on March 12 at The Guild Theatre in Menlo Park will allow a local audience not only to see Richen’s film — with its concise look at the pernicious legacy of slavery and today’s efforts for truth, reconciliation and reparations — but to hear from two of the film’s subjects: Atherton resident Sarah Eisner and her partner in the Quarterman & Keller Foundation, Randy Quarterman. Quarterman will fly out from his home in Georgia to participate in the conversation moderated by Christopher McAuley, Black Studies professor at University of California at Santa Barbara.
The story of how Eisner, who is white, and Quarterman, who is Black, came to meet and work together on racial healing forms one of four personal stories in the film. Eisner has family roots in the Hilton Head area of Savannah, Georgia, where her great-great-great-grandfather George Adam Keller enslaved tens of individuals, including Quarterman’s great-great-great-grandfather Zeike. Eisner’s walks through the family cemetery — which includes the lonely headstone of a Black woman named Rachel Butler — began a thought process about racial reckoning that led Eisner to Quarterman.
Keller gave Zeike Quarterman 10 acres in 1890, but when Eisner learned that the Quarterman family was under threat of losing some of that land, an idea took shape: by way of personal reparations, Eisner could lend a hand in helping the family to clear title on the 10 acres once and for all. Legal bureaucracy continues to pose a challenge, but the new friendship between Eisner and Quarterman paved the way for founding what became an educational foundation and its Reparations Project, funding scholarships and land grants along with raising awareness.
In a conversation ahead of the Guild event, Eisner explained, “Our ultimate goal is to work on a personal level and try to open minds and change hearts toward supporting federal reparations, realizing that that’s going to take quite a while to work and to happen if it ever does. And even if it does, if tomorrow the federal government made everything that anyone would ask for and changed systems, made payments, offered apology, acknowledged the harm, it still would not change interpersonal relationships across the country. And so we really felt like we can’t wait for the federal government to act.”
Eisner and Quarterman agreed that they wanted to go beyond their own personal reparations, leading them to educate others about what’s possible. “It can be purely based on racial repair and healing and education,” Eisner says. “It can have money as a component, but it doesn’t have to. It’s really an interpersonal journey toward understanding our history and how we can work together to really admit to what happened and look at how we can change going forward.”
Asked about reaching the hearts and minds of those white Americans eager to divest themselves of personal responsibility, Eisner paints the bigger picture of “what happened in the 140-something years after enslavement: with Jim Crow, with redlining, with mass incarceration, with all of these things that have continued the legacy of slavery and the privilege of not feeling, as a white person, in danger just walking down the street, (of) being able to get loans, being the recipient of things like the GI Bill — where Black soldiers were not — (and) white land grants. All of these things are completely distanced from whether or not your great-great-great-grandfather enslaved others.
“It’s really interesting how many times I hear, well, my ancestors didn’t enslave anyone. And the thing is like, well, are you sure? Because a lot of people really don’t know. And it was pretty prevalent if your family was in the country back then, to find that actually they did. And if not, there’s still all these advantages that were taken by white folks that were offered to white families from the government that Black families didn’t get … You know, you’ve got West Menlo Park and East Menlo Park and Palo Alto as well. And it’s divided by that highway. And there’s a reason they built the highway where they did, and there’s a reason they took land from the families they did and not from others.”
Eisner holds out hope that projects like “America Reframed: The Cost of Inheritance” — which also looks at reparative work being done in Jesuit institutions like Georgetown University and by groups like The Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, African American Redress Network, Reparations4Slavery, and the National Black Farmers Association — can lead to more personal reparations and community organizing. For Eisner the complicated history begs a simple question: “How are we all in this together?”
“America Reframed: The Cost of Inheritance” shows March 12, 7 p.m. at The Guild Theatre, 949 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. Tickets are $30. For tickets to the film screening and conversation, visit guildtheatre.com. To learn more about the Reparations Project, visit reparationsproject.org.
