The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Culture Corner:
From Ground Zero and The Barn

Jan 20, 2025

Film: From Ground Zero, directed by Rashid Masharawi, 2023, showing at AMC Theaters

This 2025 Oscar-nominated documentary presents 22 short montages made by Gazans since October 7, 2023 about life in a war zone. Constant bombardment, living in a tent city, the struggle to find food and water, not to mention the need for clothing, bedding and healthcare.

Each short clip documents life under war with different points of view, some horrifying, some beautiful and hopeful, even in the face of incredible odds. “They cannot destroy us!” The film describes everyday life under these horrific conditions. A very well-done film which demands action.

Book: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, 2024, by Wright Thompson

This book focuses on the brutal racist murder of Emmett Till in 1955 in a barn in Drew, Mississippi. His “crime”? The young 13-year-old boy was visiting from Chicago, and was accused of violating a taboo he wasn’t aware of: accused of whistling at a white woman in a small Mississippi town’s general store. For that, he was beaten and tortured for hours by multiple white men, finally killed, and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a cotton gin fan and barbed wire around his neck.

This book explores how the history of this region built up to this murder. It talks about the corrupt land sales, what happened to Native Americans, how slavery developed, and after the civil war, the role of sharecropping. How racism and cheap forced labor was the basis of the cotton industry. And how Emmett Till’s mother’s courage to expose the world to his brutal murder with his casket open for all to see shocked the world, moving the fight for civil rights ahead.

But the author returns again and again to the site of the barn where Emmett died, the site of it all, to the state of Mississippi and the need for us all to understand and know the depth of our history, a history which affects us all to this day.