This Black History Month, I’m sharing art, songs, movies, and other creative expressions from and about Black women that spark joy for me. Because Black women are often not remembered for their contributions, I thought this would be one way to give flowers to those who inspire me.
For Day 20, I’m giving flowers to the director of the movie Harriet, Kasi Lemmons.
Born in St. Louis, Kasi Lemmons's career started as an actress when she was 16. Seeing her face immediately takes me back to Black movies in the '80s and '90s because she was in movies like School Daze, Candyman, and The Five Heartbeats.
She made her major directorial debut with the movie Eve’s Bayou, for which she wrote the screenplay. That movie was the highest-grossing independent film in 1997. Inspired by the work of Toni Morrison, the movie focuses the story on a “Complete Black World.” She was pressured to add White characters to the movie, but she refused.
“We have perfectly full lives without thinking about y’all. We don’t spend our whole lives thinking about y’all.”
Much like Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance, nary a White person - not even an extra, is in Eve’s Bayou. It was incredibly important to Kasi to show the complexity and fullness of Blackness,.
Kasi Lemmons went on to direct five other movies, including the 2019 biopic Harriet, about the life of Harriet Tubman.
In the movie Harriet, Kasi thought it was important to focus on the violence of family separation when people were treated like chattels to rehumanize the stories.
“I wanted to talk about enslaved people as they are PEOPLE… we lose the sense that people lived and loved and had relatives and had lives.”
Thank you, Kasi Lemmons, for sharing stories about Black people that embrace our full humanity unapologetically.
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