Tomorrow night at 9 p.m. EST, MSNBC will broadcast the documentary Meeting David Wilson. It's a film by David Wilson, a journalist of African descent from New Jersey who spent some time researching his family's history. In the course of his investigation he traced his lineage to a tobacco plantation in Caswell County, North Carolina. And that led him to an encounter with another David Wilson - this one a white man from Reidsville (where I live) - whose great-great grandfather had owned the great-great grandfather of New Jersey's David Wilson in the years before the Civil War.Since posting about it a few days ago I have heard nothing but astounding things about Meeting David Wilson. One person who has seen the film has told me that it is "INCREDIBLY powerful!" Having known Reidsville, North Carolina's David Wilson for many years, I am certainly looking forward to watching this: he's a very smart fella, and as articulate a speaker as he is a thinker. That's something that comes across even in the trailer for Meeting David Wilson...
Izzy Forman of MSNBC also sent me the film's page on the network's website. You can also find out more about Meeting David Wilson from the film's official website and its Myspace page.
2 comments:
May I second what your friend said about the documentary being powerful. I got an early bird preview of the film while writing a story about the two David Wilsons. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And I don't even like documentaries. =) I hope lots of folks watch it.
I just watched this trailer. Moving my spirit to tears. A friend of mine in Oklahoma suggested I watch it. So I did. I come from a long history of white Southerners who arrived in the Carolinas in 1726. My dad was from Mississippi. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee., but raised here in Los Angeles.
The most beautiful part of this trailer is when the two David Wilsons walked toward each other and clasped their hands. They shook hands. The fact that the African American David had the courage to make the documentary was mesmerizing; then he went to Africa. The white David Wilson was a gentleman. He did not necessarily have to invite anyone to his home. He chose to do so, rightly so, in the case of David Wilson seeking his ancestry in the specifically in North Carolina.
God bless.
Sunny Murchison
Pasadena, California
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