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Black Bus Stop (Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena Harold, 2019)
🕑 Added 2019-06-22 19:50:44 +0000 UTC
One of the reasons I so admire Kevin Everson's films is the determinedly "minor" nature of his short works. Each of them seems to represent a snapshot of one small aspect of African-American life (contemporary or historical, sometimes both), and taken together they form a kind of endless mosaic of African-American experience. But in their extreme specificity and locality, and the fact that they are a set of brief, potentially endless interventions, the films underline the essential plurality and irreducibility of black life in America. They are active gestures against totalizing narratives or stereotypes.
In one of his latest works, one of several collaborations he's undertaken with Claudrena Harold, Everson focuses on an extremely specific locale: a set of benches along a thoroughfare in the middle of the University of Virginia. In a voiceover collage, we hear students describe the area as a traditional meeting place for black students, where you could always find someone to hang with or, if you're new, find kinship and camaraderie. As cars go by, Everson and Harold show us the "black bus stop," as various students use the space around it to perform step routines related to their fraternities and sororities. Many of those routines are explicitly about the history of those black Greek organizations, so the students are positioning themselves within a lineage even as they assert their presence in the here-and-now.
The "black bus stop" itself has a history. The space became iconic in the 1980s and continued as a meeting ground through the 1990s. Folks met to listen to music, talk politics, or just hang out. In their notes about the film, Harold and Everson imply that the spot may have fallen into disuse, and the actions we see in the film represent an act of reclamation. But what they don't say (nor do they need to) is that the move to reclaim specifically African-American space on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville is an informed intervention into the contemporary crisis of rising, explicit white supremacy in our culture, a situation in which this very campus was a regrettable flashpoint.
Everson, Harold, and these students, in their aesthetically mitigated way, are sending a clear message to the racists: back the fuck up.
