Eason

Another testimony of migration and violence is Kevin Jerome Everson’s Eason (2016), a film devoted to preacher James Walker Hood Eason, who was the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), assassinated during New Year’s Eve. In Eason, among new footage shot by the filmmaker, we can hear a coach’s words against a background of young black students. Suddenly, the dramatic tone of the words of a coach, finds a new context between the gazes of this community of young athletes, as if Eason’s ghostly presence spun and began manifesting itself, expelling words of courage in this pre-game talk, that links the memory of the preacher in the midst of the Great Migration and the new struggles of this New Orleans black community.
Everson’s gaze is significant because it manages to transmit an spirit which can still be sensed through his lenses, an atmosphere of a race that hasn’t been vindicated yet, massively displaced from its origins to escape inhumanity and injustice, and in this sense, it makes a great conversation with Saparzadeh’s film as well: testimonies of resilience and a shared human spirit that resists decay.