At noon on Wednesday, February 9, Talamieka Brice and Kiese Laymon will present “Duck Hill Lynchings: Local and National History” as part of the History Is Lunch series. The program will take place in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building and stream live on the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s Facebook page—https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial—and be available afterwards there as well as on the MDAH YouTube channel—https://www.youtube.com/MDAHVideo and on our History Is Lunch page.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
Brice wrote and directed the film A Mother’s Journey, which tells the story of Brice’s childhood in Duck Hill and Kilmichael and explores her family history with institutional racism and oppression.
On April 13, 1937, Robert McDaniels and Roosevelt Townes, two Black men accused of killing a white store owner months before, were murdered by a white mob in Duck Hill. A Grenada photographer took pictures of the men’s bodies, and those became the first lynching photographs to be published in the national press, running in Time and Life magazines as well as national newspapers.
“The crime was integral in the formulation of an anti-lynching bill in the United States Senate and was used internationally in Nazi propaganda as a critique of America’s treatment of its Black citizens,” said Brice. “But the violence has a personal connection for me: the torture and murders were witnessed by my grandmother and happened just yards from her home.”
After screening a clip from A Mother’s Journey about the Duck Hill murders, Brice and Laymon, executive producer of the film, will discuss the lingering effects of slavery and institutional racism.
Talamieka Brice is an award-winning artist, photographer. and visual storyteller. She earned her BA in graphic design from Jackson State University. Talamieka and her husband Charles own Brice Media, which has worked with such organizations as the USA Olympic fencing team and Parents for Public Schools. In 2018 they submitted the winning design for a mural at the newly renamed Barack H. Obama Magnet School in Jackson. A Mother’s Journey is Brice’s first film.
Jackson native Kiese Laymon is the author of a novel, collection of essays, and the memoir Heavy, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of a 2020-21 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. He earned his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA from Indiana University. Laymon is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program aimed at getting Mississippi kids and their parents more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing.
The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson.
MDAH livestreams videos of the program at noon on Wednesdays on their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/MDAHOfficial/. The videos are posted on the department’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/MDAHVideo.