“Everything I do is for my community,” said Resita Cox, an independent film documentarian born and raised in Kinston, a town of less than 20,000 people in eastern North Carolina. Cox’s forthcoming film, “Freedom Hill,” will air on PBS on April 22 at 8 p.m. ET and tells the story of Princeville, which in 1865 became the first town chartered by Black people in America. Princeville sits in the Tar River’s floodplain, and its residents are threatened by repeated flooding.
Shortly after the Civil War, white people owned and controlled the land, often settling in upland areas protected from flooding because of their elevation. Meanwhile, emancipated Black people could only build homes in low-lying areas that flooded frequently. That legacy lives on in Princeville, forcing flood survivors to move away from their homes or repeatedly struggle to rebuild in place.
In February, Prism spoke with Cox by phone about her approach to storytelling, racialized topography, and the importance of documenting your own story. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Ray Levy Uyeda: You’ve called “Freedom Hill” a “poetic love story to Black folks in the country.” Tell us more about that.
Resita Cox: All of my films are love letters to the South. I came to filmmaking through writing. I had many years of writing poems as well. When I think about my relationship to eastern North Carolina and my lovely hometown—there’s beauty there, and there’s so much heartbreak. There are so many things in the film that make you laugh, but then you’re angry because you see it in the framework of all of our oppressions. If that’s not a love story, I don’t know what is.
It was important for me to tell this story as a love story because without it being a love story, it’s just a story of trauma and tragedy. That’s not my lived experience either. I have some of that in my upbringing in eastern North Carolina but also have a whole lot of happiness and joyful moments—like just being in the country and being in the South. It’s a love story because for eastern North Carolina, including my hometown of Kinston that struggles with flooding, the only thing that has, in my opinion, kept our communities and helped us to survive is that love. Without that communal love, we literally will be washed away. Princeville still exists because there’s that love there.
Levy Uyeda: What makes Princeville so beautiful?
Cox: I think the moment that really captures the community of Princeville is probably the [106th] birthday party of Miss Irene. When we go to the drone shot and you see just how many people were at this old lady’s birthday party! But when I think about our small communities in eastern North Carolina, there are so many small Black historical towns that are no more than 10,000 people; my hometown is less than 20,000. And in the small towns, there are moments of this integral communal support system that hold these small towns up.
I’m always trying to find ways to bring people glimpses into that feeling. I think what makes Princeville and eastern North Carolina special is that support. It’s the people. It’s the fact that we have been disenfranchised in every way, and yet a place like Princeville still has the capacity to get everybody in town together to celebrate their oldest elder, you know what I’m saying? That’s the beauty.
Levy Uyeda: You learned about Princeville through covering Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Can you talk about the differences between journalistic storytelling and documentary work? What does documentary allow for that journalism constricts?
Cox: I learned how not to tell a story by being a broadcast television reporter. As a journalist, you’re on deadline every doggone day. I was given a different story every day. I was the nightside reporter, so I had to have the story done by 11 p.m. The system just didn’t allow for me to be a good person to the people I was covering. I had to go report on something very terrible that happened to them, and then they wouldn’t ever see me again because I had a deadline the next day on something totally different. I explain it this way to people because this is what I mean when I say the container or the institution of broadcast news and journalism—how I learned how to tell the story in journalism school is also flawed because it’s not from a community lens. And so when I transitioned into this film, it was because I wanted more say in how I did stories.
Broadcast was in conflict with my politics and how I wanted to show up in the world. I was sent to Princeville and thought the container of news was not the right way to tell this story. This is a nuanced, complex story. I’m Black, from right up the road. I grew up here, and I was sitting here as a news reporter, and that was the day I discovered that this was the first town chartered by Black folks in the entire country. And y’all didn’t teach me about this? It just floored me. Then on top of that, the first town chartered by Black people was now completely underwater. I started thinking, “Well, why is that?” This is far more than a one-minute news story. I need people to understand what’s happening. I can’t do that in one minute. Like I said, the container was just wrong.
I’m not interested in being the only filmmaker in eastern North Carolina. I have a dream of returning Black stories back to Black people.
Resita Cox
Levy Uyeda: Media is complicit in scaffolding a white property scheme in America. If Black families’ and Black people’s homes in Princeville are repeatedly flooded and the media isn’t reporting on it, there’s no public record or consolidated pressure on people in formal positions of power. Media then shields politicians or officials from having to contend with or fund anything they don’t want to.
Cox: We’re taught in journalism school that expert opinions come from a politician or a police officer, and then everybody else is just a regular interview. What that means is I already don’t look to people who have the lived experiences to corroborate my stories; I’m going to the outside people who have the power. The reason why I’m being told to go to them is because they friends who got the power over here in the academic world is the ones telling me that they the experts. It’s a scam.
They don’t want us to question the status quo. To be subjective is to form an opinion, and you start questioning things, and you start to question the people in power. You start to question the politicians that you are told are experts on the issues, and then you start to see why everything works the way it works.
Levy Uyeda: The documentary begins in the passenger seat of Marquetta Dickens’ car. She points out the land that her great-grandmother used to own. Dickens’ grandmother helped defeat a federal and state effort to relocate the town of Princeville in 1999 when she cast a vote as mayor against a planned migration proposal.
Then we follow Marquetta, the founder of a community empowerment organization, Freedom Org, to the Princeville cemetery she is working to restore, to the Freedom Org farm where we watch her harvest okra, and to a meeting with then-candidate for governor, Dan Forest. You get the sense that she felt called to help rebuild her community and can see the love that she has for the people of Princeville. How did you two meet?
Cox: When I had the idea, I told some folks in the community, and I think I posted a Facebook status—because that’s where the elders are—and no matter who I talked to, people would say, “Have you met Marquetta? Do you know about Freedom Org?” I found her on Facebook. I sent her a message. I told her about how I was connecting the dots that our flooding here is racist and that I wanted to do a film about it. She said she got chills reading the message because she was just sitting there thinking the work we’re doing should be documented.
We had a couple of meetings, and I did a couple of research trips to Princeville, and because of COVID, a lot of our relationship-building was on the phone and on Zoom. When you can meet somebody at their lived experience with your same lived experience, it makes that relationship-building process a lot more gentle and smooth. Marquetta and I—it just felt very aligned.
Levy Uyeda: In “Freedom Hill,” we hear the voice of professor Kofi Boone explaining “racialized topography,” which is how we can predict the demography of landscapes based on elevation. Often low-lying areas are where Black people live, and higher elevations are where white people live. Even if you might not know the term, you may have the feeling that something is unjust or wrong. This is why language is powerful; once you have a way to name something, you can talk about it. You can cut through the silence.
Cox: Yes. Even “environmental racism” was not in my vocabulary as a young person growing up in eastern North Carolina experiencing flooding. When I heard the word environmental racism at the age of 22, that was the moment where I kind of had a jaw drop, like, “Oh, my effing God.” Doing research for this film, I had so many moments like that where I was discovering history for the first time. History that I felt like people should have taught me.
I had to make a whole movie to learn this. No one connected those dots for me in K through 12, even though we were growing up in the middle of it—I’m talking about the hotbed of environmental racism to the point where the environmental justice movement was coined here. I did not learn about the environmental justice movement starting in Warren County in eastern North Carolina.
There were moments throughout this film journey that affirmed the work that I feel called to do, which is to unbury these Black histories, to give language to the screwed-up stuff around us, and to give people the language to describe what’s happening. When you don’t have that, it’s easy to have shame. While it can be affirming to have the charge to hold these stories, it’s so much grief I hold.
Marquetta did not grow up knowing she was growing up in the first town chartered by Black folks in the country. The community had to organize and get together and demand that a historical marker go somewhere. It is not on the National Registry of Historic Places. They had to fight to get their sign. Until that point, it wasn’t common knowledge. But that’s what we’re working with. You can grow up in a place, and the South has erased your history and all footprints of the work your ancestors did so well that you have no clue where you are. That was Marquetta’s whole journey back home. And that was my journey back home. I often say “Freedom Hill” literally brought me back home.
The powers that be understand the connection to your ancestors through your history, knowing what you stand on, knowing where you come from, yet they teach us that we stand on nothing. I believe that they bury our history because they know that once we figure it out, it’s a call back home. It’s a deeper connection point to community, and community is power. Community is the antithesis of capitalism, the antithesis of climate change. It is how we will survive; it’s how we have managed to survive. It’s the only way.
Levy Uyeda: You’ve said, true storytelling involves “leaving that community in a better place.” Can you talk about what you’re building with the community of Princeville?
Cox: I had the impact campaign for this film before I even had the full film idea. I designed it after thinking about what I needed growing up poor as a young kid in the South. I was creative. Baby Resita, growing up, needed somebody to throw some money for playing with a camera. So we created the Freedom Hill Youth Media Camp. It’s teaching young people the Black history in eastern North Carolina, but it’s also teaching them how to be keepers of these stories and how to make a film.
We are developing a community documentaries program, where we’ll train the community how to cover local happenings, council meetings, things like that, and create a community-driven report database. We’ll be doing that through documentary film; teaching people how to use cameras and how to use audio equipment. Hopefully, from this program, they can go off and become reporters in the community or filmmakers.
In Kinston, I’m going to create another youth program, which will be housed at my old high school, Kinston High. It will be a four-year media program, and students will graduate with a credit on a major film. With all of my films, I hope that they leave a pathway for people to follow.
I’m not interested in being the only filmmaker in eastern North Carolina. I have a dream of returning Black stories back to Black people.
