IN 1963, Martin Luther King declared, “I have a dream that one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
Forty-five years later, a 28-year-old man who grew up in the projects of Newark made that happen. And he has the film to prove it.
And what a film it is.
David Wilson set about like many Americans to discover his roots. What he found was not just where his descendants came from, but the identity of the family that had once owned his own family in rural North Carolina before the Civil War.
Much to his surprise, Wilson found not just the former slave-owner’s descendants but a direct descendant, whose name is – incredibly – David Wilson.
David decided right there that he’d have to meet the other David Wilson.
In the drive down south to meet the other Wilson, David tells his friend Dan, who’s driving, that he expects Wilson to be “a tobacco-chewing, straw-eating, rifle-toting rocking chair-sitting, lemonade-drinking redneck!”
When Dan asks him if he’s going to ask for reparations, Wilson says: “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a black man from Newark with a white man driving me – you are my reparation.”
He begins by visiting family and friends in North Carolina, including the fantastic 97-year-old Daisy Blackwell, the oldest member of the church his great-grandfather founded and which still flourishes.
Meeting the other David Wilson is both a shock and a pleasure.
The two men, the 62-year-old white southerner and the black filmmaker, end up talking an uncomfortable truth. At first ill-at-ease, David starts asking tough questions – but in a very non-accusatory way, which allows the other Wilson to drop his defenses.
When the two Wilson clans meet on the grounds of the old plantation, you will feel good about America once again.
The film finishes with Wilson traveling to Ghana – to see the place where his ancestors lived and the embarkation point from which they sailed on slave ships.
Above the prison door that led to the slave ships is a sign reading, “Door of No Return.” Wilson, with tears in his eyes says, “To be here and come back is in defiance of what it stood for.”
Brilliant job all around.
“Meeting David Wilson”
Tomorrow night at 9 on MSNBC