Smartphone witnessing becomes synonymous with Black patriotism after George Floyd’s death
A flashbulb emits a high-pitched hum. A photograph of the legendary 19th-century abolitionist and newspaperman Frederick Douglass fades in on-screen.
We hear the “Hamilton” alumnus actor Daveed Diggs before we see him.
“What, to my people, is the Fourth of July?” Diggs asks in a plaintive voiceover, as a police siren and the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” clash aurally.
‘What, to my people, is the Fourth of July?’
In just two minutes and 19 seconds, the new Movement for Black Lives short film provides a highlight reel of African American oppression that spans 400 years.
The juxtapositions are jarring in the Independence Day-themed video. A historic image of a Black toddler picking cotton slams into a modern picture of a masked Black boy marching...