Page 50 - BusinessWest October 28, 2024

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In More Than One Way,
She Draws on History to Help People Heal
By Joseph Bednar
hen a patient walks into my room, they expect to have a seat and for me to talk with them about their history, about their journey. I take that information,
and I use it to help them heal. I need to look at history. And sometimes patients come in and tell you horror sto- ries, but I can’t discard it because I need it all to help that patient to live.”
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toward the beginning of Ashes to Ashes, a documentary she produced in 2019. And they are apt when juxtaposed against the story she goes on to tell.
The film is actually two intertwined stories, both incredibly powerful. One is related by Winfred Rembert, an avid Star Wars fan and master leatherwork artist.
Clear-eyed but haunted, he relates a life-changing experience in 1967, when he drew the ire of law enforcement in Cuthbert, Ga. because of his work advocating for civil rights. They tossed him in a car trunk, and he emerged to see a noose hanging from a tree. They stripped him, hung him upside down, stabbed him, and made it clear they intended to castrate him, hang him, then burn his body. When one of the men suggested they stop, they moved on, and Rembert, bleeding and deeply traumatized, lived.
The other story in Ashes to Ashes concerns the 4,000 people lynched in the U.S. during the Jim Crow era, which, as Rembert painfully reminds us, didn’t end all that long ago. In 2017, Whitaker, a friend of Rembert’s who also grew up in Georgia, organized a funeral in Springfield to honor the many lynching victims who were never buried. As Whitaker explains in the film:
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“Sometimes they would lynch people, then put them in the water with weights, so the family would never see them again. Sometimes they would take the bodies and cut them
Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker, a nephrologist by trade
— that’s a kidney specialist — shares those thoughts A PROGRAM OF BUSINESSWEST
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up and sell the pieces. Sometimes they would take the body
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after they lynched it and burn it up, so the families would
not have anything. A lot of these people never got a funeral.
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It was often too dangerous for the families to retrieve
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In this
country, no one really, genuinely talks about the people who were lynched.”
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Dr. Shirley
Jackson Whitaker
Nephrologist, Artist, and Filmmaker
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