Look Away, Look Away

This powerful documentary on the years-long fight over the Mississippi state flag takes the nowadays rare journalistic approach to treat people with a wide variety of viewpoints as fully human.

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There’s a sickness in our politics, which is a reflection of our culture and therefore this malady shows up in other places — including the documentary film genre.

Once the model of journalistic enterprise and a search for a diaspora of stories, too often our documentaries have become one-sided political screeds advocating for particular causes or parties. Our past election year saw films so brazenly devoted to this mold they should have been straight-up counted as campaign contributions.

So it’s refreshing to encounter “Look Away, Look Away,” a documentary that looks at an extremely volatile subject — the fight over Confederate symbols, in particular the Mississippi state flag — while approaching people with a wide variety of viewpoints as fully human.

Writer/director Patrick O’Connor, who launched the project after the horrific Charleston church shootings in 2015, makes no pretense at disguising his own biases. He’s a Mississippi transplant from Illinois after marrying his wife and recalls blanching when he saw his new neighbors flying the state flag, which includes a version of the Confederate “Stars & Bars” battle flag.

Still, he’s able to talk to people from all sides of the battle, from Black activists who speak movingly about how their community sees the state flag as a symbol of hatred entrenched in the power of state government, to rural advocates and historians who insists that while the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery, the individual soldiers were simply defending their homes against invaders.

There’s Sharon Brown, leader of the A Flag for All organization, who spearheaded the fight against the flag. We start with her at the beginning of her campaign, largely ignored by government officials and the average constituent, to the culmination of her dream when the flag was finally removed in the protests following the murder of George Floyd.

But we also meet George Johnson, a Sons of Confederate Veterans member who’s proud of his heritage as a longtime child of Mississippi — even while he acknowledges the evils of slavery. He’s an engineer and hardly a backwoods peckerwood, and speaks convincingly about how the media and outsiders automatically portray every redneck like him as racist.

We talk to Clay Moss, a school teacher and vexillologist — someone who studies flags — who enlightens about the history of the Mississippi flag, which was adopted in 1894 during the KKK-led backlash against Reconstruction. It was affirmed by voters in 2001 when the first big push came to remove it.

Lea Campbell is a white woman leading as an ally against the flag as part of the group Mississippi Rising. We observe as she becomes more hardened and sharper-elbowed as they incur repeated setbacks.

I was particularly moved by the testimony of Michael Putnam, another SCV member, who dutifully tends to a tiny graveyard of unknown Confederate soldiers, pulling out weeds and cleaning headstones. He talks about how these were poor farmers’ sons whose families didn’t own slaves and their lives weren’t much different from that of one. They simply did their duty when the call to arms came.

One of the most unexpected voices we hear from is Laurin Stennis, a graphic artist who came up with an idea for a new flag — very clean and eye-pleasing with 19 stars around a 20th, denoting Mississippi’s entry into the union. It garnered attention not just because it was a beautiful design but because her grandfather was a U.S. senator who fought to preserve segregation.

It’s a salient story of the circle of history coming full around — but later developments bend a different way than we expect. Stennis, a self-professed introvert who just wanted to bring people together, makes a difficult choice that you can’t help respect.

I should acknowledge my own biases about the Confederate flag. I grew up seeing it fairly often, without affinity or disdain, and just viewed it as part of the background noise of Southern culture. I remember covering Civil War reenactments as a young reporter, in a place where people had to take turns playing the blues because there were so many grays.

It wasn’t until later in life that I began to understand how one person’s heritage is seen by another as a symbol of oppression. As fringe white supremacist groups have become more emboldened, it’s becoming increasingly difficult — impossible, I’d argue — to disassociate the Confederate flag from those who wield it to intimate and spread hate.

“Look Away, Look Away” is not just the story of a state flag, but a probing look at how our nation’s conversation about race has changed in recent years — in some ways better, but in other ways much worse. Lines have become hardened and somewhere along the way people lost the ability or willingness to persuade.

If you want a glimpse of how the red/blue, MAGA/BLM divides first opened and became chasms, this documentary provides as good a road map as I’ve seen.