Film audiences will soon get to learn about Mamie Lang Kirkland and her incredible life. According to Deadline, a documentary about the activist, directed by her son Tarabu Betserai Kirkland, has been acquired by Virgil Films. “100 Years from Mississippi” will be released in February.
“Kirkland fled Ellisville, MS, in 1915 at age seven with her mother and siblings as her father and his friend, John Hartfield, escaped an approaching lynch mob,” the source details. “Hartfield returned to Mississippi four years later and was killed in one of the most horrific lynchings of the era. The act was witnessed by 10,000 spectators and memorialized on postcards.”
Kirkland and her family resettled first in East St. Louis, Illinois, where they survived the anti-Black riots of 1917, and then Alliance, Ohio, during the Red Summer of white supremacist violence. “As her family continued to migrate North, the Ku Klux Klan followed with threats against their home and family every step of the way,” per the 100 Years from Mississippi” website. “By the time she was 11 years old, Mamie had already experienced the worst of what America had to offer to African-Americans during the Jim Crow era.”
After fleeing with her family, Kirkland vowed never to return to Mississippi. But she changed her mind when Tarabu shared the first documented evidence of Hartfield’s lynching in an Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) report. In 2015, 100 years after leaving Mississippi — during which she got married, became a mother and a grandmother, became a star Avon saleswoman, and witnessed many landmark moments in history, including the election of the first Black U.S. President — she returned to Ellisville.
“I left Mississippi a scared little girl of seven years old,” Kirkland said at an EJI event in 2016. “Now I’m 107 and I’m not frightened anymore.”
She was one of the sources of inspiration for the EJI’s Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, both Montgomery, Alabama, sites that reckon with the United States’ legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism, and memorialize their victims. Kirkland is the subject of a permanent installation at the former.
Kirkland died last year at the age of 111, after spending a decade “trying to ensure that the nation’s troubling past did not disappear from the collective memory.”
“We are extremely proud and to be releasing [‘100 Years from Mississippi’,]” Virgil CEO Joe Amodei said. “Mamie’s life experience is something that every American should see and learn from; she was a truly remarkable woman with a tremendous story.”
Kirkland’s experience “adds something unique and powerful as an authentic survivor’s story that cannot be duplicated,” said EJI founder Bryan Stevenson. “She has created a threshold of activism and courage that puts the rest of us on notice that you are never too old to do good…never too old to do justice work.”
