Screening notes by Candace Ming and Ina Archer
The selection of films we will screen at the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration comes from the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) collection. Zora Lathan and the Mayor of Highland Beach, William Sanders, brought them to the museum, which scanned them over the course of several Great Migration Home Movie Project (GMHMP) appointments. The movies of the incorporated beach community were shot between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s by the Pinson and Sewell families.
Here’s a sample. https://vimeo.com/420099929/7c66bedb22
Highland Beach was established over 125 years ago by Major Charles Douglass, the youngest son of Frederick Douglass, and his wife Laura in response to racially segregated amusement facilities and vacation communities in the Chesapeake Bay. Incorporated in 1922, Highland Beach was the first African American municipality in the state. According to the community’s website <highlandbeachmd.org> it is believed to be the first black summer resort in the U.S.
This historical beach community is a place of pride for African Americans whose migration stories embrace the gaining of social mobility for educated and financially-independent working, middle, and upper-middle class families. These less widely seen home movies are images of African Americans with the means to document and share their leisure activities using high-end home movie cameras shot on 16mm, 8mm, and super8 film formats.
Many of the residents and visitors were professionals; cultural and political leaders; and celebrities including: Paul Robeson, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Dr. Mary Church Terrell, known nationally as an activist for civil rights and women’s suffrage.
Highland Beach remains both a private beach resort and a year-round residence. Many of the homes are now owned by the grown children shown in these lovely Kodachrome films. Mayor Sanders and Ms. Lathan met as coworkers at the Environmental Protection Agency. The community actively works on environmental stewardship, with green design and building, and a Rainscaping Park. The Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center is housed in “Twin Oaks,” the summer cottage built for Douglass in 1895.
The amateur films screening at the online Orphan Film Symposium will focus on beach and waterside activities and will include a voiceover recorded by resident Margot Pinson.
The Great Migration Home Movie Project, begun in 2015, is a unique initiative to digitize and present African American home movies. Visitors can make an appointment at the museum and have their film, video, or audio in almost any format — digitized and returned on USB drives. The digitized films are made available through the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives for use by researchers, scholars, and ordinary people. GMHMP also goes on the road through the Community Curation initiative funded by the Robert Frederick Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History. A digitization truck provides local residents with all the digitization services available in the museum. Most recently, GMHMP was in Chicago where over 200 film, audio, and video items were digitized. GMHMP currently has the largest archive of African American home movies, now a major resource to collect and present quotidian life of African Americans in the mid-to-late twentieth century.
