Truth Tellers

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Truth Tellers is provided in part by: The Government Accountability Project.

Focused on empowering citizens, promoting government and corporate accountability, and defending whistleblowers since 1977.

With additional support by: Annie & Chuck Holland, Prior Family Foundation, The Stone Family Fair Tide Fund of the Maine Community Foundation, Mary Clough via the Trillium Fund of the Maine Community Foundation Colin Baker and Elaine Cinciva, Broad Reach Foundation, Ann K. Luskey, Stuart Family Foundation, Megan LeBoutillier, Chantal Dukette, Doug & Posie Cowan, and the Deborah Pulliam Social Justice Fund.

A complete list of funders is available at APTOnline.org.

(Dramatic piano music).

(Dramatic piano music).

ROBERT SHETTERLY: In the "Americans Who Tell the Truth" portrait series, I was thinking about using art as therapy.

So, I'd never painted a portrait in my life and I believed entirely in ambiguity and mystery.

(Music continues and builds in intensity).

Years ago I thought if I ever paint didactic art, that's just the last thing I want to do.

However, you don't choose the times you live in.

You know, each painting is not just a painting.

It's got a quote from that person scratched into the surface of the painting.

I almost always begin a conversation talking about Sojourner Truth.

Sojourner Truth's quote says: "Now I hears talking about the Constitution and the rights of man, and I comes up and I takes hold of this Constitution and it's mighty big and I feels for my rights, but there ain't any there.

And then I says, 'God, what ails this Constitution?'

And he says to me, 'Sojourner, there is a little weasel in it.

' [talking to children].

So, you might be wondering what it is about telling the truth that I'm interested in.

So, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about why I'm painting these pictures, and then why I think these people who are in these portraits are so important in all of your lives, as well as my life.

Let's go over and look at Sojourner.

I'll tell you why, as an example.

'Cause it said we're gonna make justice, but it allowed slavery to continue.

It said we're gonna have justice, but it didn't give any rights to women, or Native Americans, or freed Black people.

The chasing of that weasel has been the work of activists ever since the Constitution was written.

That to me is essential in understanding uh, the nature of power, and then the nature of how important it is for those who were marginalized, like Sojourner Truth, then to do the work that makes the country honest.

[talking to children again].

"And then I says, 'God, what ails this Constitution?'

And he says to me..." GROUP: 'Sojourner, there's a little weasel in it.'"

(Dramatic piano music under program title).

ARAN SHETTERLY: I remember how angry Dad was back when the Iraq war was imminent.

I remember how hard Dad was to talk to during that point because it was all he could talk about.

And then I remember him painting Walt Whitman.

[reading quote from Walt Whitman].

ROBERT: "Love the earth, the sun, and the animals.

Despise riches.

Hate tyrants.

Take off your hat to nothing."

ARAN: And it was as if the clouds had parted.

ROBERT: When I painted the first portrait in "The Americans Who Tell the Truth" portrait series, I was thinking one thing I could do is try to do something positive rather than just keep telling people how angry I am or how sad I am.

Uh, why don't I try to actually do something that makes a difference?

You know, what I was was very angry about where this country was going as we were being led into another war that didn't need to be fought.

(Sound of helicopter blades whirring).

ROBERT: The first step was to begin to surround myself with people who have made a difference in the past.

I had to find some way to take that energy and turn it to doing something positive.

Well, here it is.

(Soft contemplative music with vocals) [reading quote from Bayard Rustin].

ROBERT: "If we want human dignity, we cannot get it on our knees."

I am about to begin painting the portrait of Bayard Rustin, one of this country's most important and least-known Civil Rights activists.

Bayard Rustin, he was the organizer of the March on Washington.

(Female singer "Odetta" singing from stage of The March on Washington in 1963).

I'm on my way And I won't turn back And I won't turn back I'm on my way ROBERT: And if you watch the documentary film work of the March on Washington, the last speaker of the day was Bayard Rustin.

(Crowd singing).

OSSIE DAVIS: The executive director of the March on Washington, the man who organized this whole thing, Mr. Bayard Rustin.

(Crowd cheers and applauds).

BAYARD RUSTIN: The first demand is that we have effective Civil Rights legislation, no compromise, no filibuster and that it includes public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, and the right to vote, what do you say?

(Crowd cheers).

ROBERT: Bayard Rustin, he had been involved with all kinds of issues that made him pretty unpopular in the mainstream culture.

You know, he was a peace activist.

He went to jail for two years too, when he refused the draft in World War II.

He was in favor of economic justice and equity, you know, paying people a decent wage for their jobs, and so he worked a lot with the labor movement.

He worked a lot with the Civil Rights movement.

So, he was involved in all the major movements in this country and one of the interesting things about that time and those movements, and it's still true today, is that people involved in these various things, you know, economic fairness, Civil Rights and peace work, don't always work with each other.

And he spent a huge part of his life trying to bring all those issues and people together, like Martin Luther King did.

These are all related issues.

The thing about him though, which made his life much more difficult than just balancing issues was that he was gay at a time when being gay was, in most circles you were considered perverse.

I mean he made no secret of it, but the leaders were afraid of him because if their movement got identified with Bayard Rustin, it might bring the whole movement down.

(Sound of people chanting and singing as part of March).

ROBERT: It was Rustin who said, "This is a March about jobs and freedom."

The March wasn't really so much about Civil Rights as it was about economic rights.

Rustin was making the case to King all along that "we're not gonna have Civil Rights until we have economic rights.

Black people have to get decent jobs, and unless that happens, Civil Rights really aren't gonna matter."

The other thing that's so important about Rustin and behind the scenes with the Civil Rights movement was he was the one who taught King about militant, peaceful non-violent civil disobedience.

He was a huge advocate of using non-violent civil disobedience to change people's behavior, to appeal to the conscience of the power structure.

Here he was, one of Martin Luther King's most trusted advisors, the person they tried to keep in the background quite a bit, but was actually, you know, the brains behind many of the things that happened.

Rustin, who was trying to fight for peace, for economic justice, for Civil Rights, and then later for gender rights, at a time when it wasn't popular.

It's important to know is that a lot of these rights that we have was delivered to us by gay men, by people who had been in the communist party, by socialists, by pacifists, you know, people who believed in economic equality.

People, you know, who in terms of the, the founding fathers were anathema.

You know, that's what's so incredible is that it took, you know, this deep, deep courage by the people who were the marginalized at the beginning.

You know, the people who were left out, to actually make the ideals, the promise, and the language of those founding fathers come to life.

(Gentle music).

JANE FONDA: I'm gonna give you Bill McKibben, who is currently occupying the Chase Bank.

(Crowd cheers).

ROBERT: Bill McKibben said, "Climate change is the greatest challenge humans have ever faced."

Bill McKibben became the kind of popular face of this movement before most people even knew it was a problem.

30 years ago wrote, "The End of Nature," and he was already foreseeing that this is where we're going, and he was seeing it in terms of pollution and habitat loss and extinctions of species and climate.

[talking into cellphone] BILL MCKIBBEN: Hey everybody, there's about 25 of us inside the Chase Bank, the single biggest funder of fossil fuels on planet Earth.

They've put $196 billion into oil and gas over the last three years.

That's why we're here today, uh, doing civil disobedience about the financial system that's focused on the oil companies, and now bring it to bear on the banks and the insurance companies and the asset managers.

If banks like Chase Bank stopped funding the fossil fuel industry, they could not go on building pipelines.

Uh, the police have just arrived here, and we wanna send a big message out from here, everybody.

(Crowd cheers and applauds).

REVEREND LENNOX YEARWOOD: We fight not only for ourselves but for future generations.

Power to the People!

Literally 100 years from now, it'll be 2120.

None of us who are in this room will be here, that's for sure.

Um, but what will be here will be our fighting for justice.

This is not about Republican or Democrat or rich or poor.

This is about humanity.

ROBERT: You know I painted you with that hat that said "Resist" on it.

REVEREND YEARWOOD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And now you've got this one with 10 years, and to see you in all these incarnations, every time I see you.

REVEREND YEARWOOD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You see, you see, oh you know, what's on the Rev.

's mind today?

REVEREND YEARWOOD: Oh yeah, no the hat.

ROBERT: You see, it's right there.

REVEREND YEARWOOD: Yes, it is and the hat, this one is actually probably one of the, also one of the saddest ones because it's obviously from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, you know, when they made their findings, we have 12 years.

Um, so actually this is now the third version of this hat.

So now you have 12 years, 11, this is now 10 years.

So it's actually like a walking countdown so that when you see me again, I have nine years.

Let me first say to the employees of this branch, we are here, not as adversaries.

I'm here because I'm originally from Louisiana and 14 and a half years ago, almost 1,900 beautiful Americans, predominantly Black people, drowned in the richest country in the world.

And I would hope that post-Katrina, that we would be doing things better than what we did 15 years ago, that we would use that time to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy.

Listen... there are other ways to make money.

You can do better than this.

This is not only about equality, it's about existence, but if you continue to fund projects that are literally putting our existence on the line then you have left us no choice; that we must put our bodies against the gears of the machine and bring it to a grinding halt.

(Sound of iceberg crashing into ocean).

REVEREND YEARWOOD: We can't win as a siloed, even segregated, progressive movement.

How is this movement going to win when, if they're dealing with the antiwar and it's all white, and if I go to immigration, it's all brown.

I go to something regarding "Black Lives," it's all Black.

You go to the gay rights movement, it's most of the people are gay?

I want a movement that breaks down those silos, that brings together a movement that is all of us together because I think you just realize that you just can't live with yourself if you don't act.

And I would tell anybody that if you're in a position to be a truth teller, um, man, tell that truth, and speak truth to power.

(Reflective music).

KELSEY JULIANA: "Youth are standing up for our fundamental right to inherit a stable and survivable planet."

ROBERT: Kelsey Juliana started being involved in the environmental and climate movement when she was in middle school.

Teamed up with a bunch of people who are all under 20 years old, and sued the U.S. government under the Public Trust Doctrine, in other words, saying the common good.

KELSEY: I feel old.

I'm 23 years old.

I've been doing this for more than half my lifetime.

And as an older plaintiff, I certainly feel a responsibility to look out for their lives because that is truly what is at stake.

GRETA THUNBERG: I am submitting this report as my testimony, because I don't want you to listen to me.

I want you to listen to the scientists.

KELSEY: So it's time to move aside and let young people write the story of the future, since we're gonna be the ones most impacted by that story.

You know, we're all on this case because in our lifetimes, again, the youngest is 11, I'm the oldest at 22.

And yet, we're coming in testifying that the government's actions in perpetrating climate change have personally done harm to our lives.

I think that it is important for all of us to be able to sink into those feelings of shock and, and anger, and devastation because, in a lot of ways, I think that does propel us to act.

SENATOR ED MARKEY: Your case, the Juliana vs. United States case calls upon our government to do something about it.

This is the national security, healthcare, economic, environmental, and moral issue of our time and these young people are the moral leaders of our time.

We have your back, we will be in this fight with you all the way.

Thank you all so much.

(Crowd applauds).

(Soft thoughtful music).

ROBERT: We are going from my home in Brooksville to the Deer Isle High School.

The main thing is to talk with a bunch of uh, ninth-grade art students who have made artwork about climate change.

You know, Deer Isle is a predominantly fishing community and their lives and culture are being affected directly by climate change, particularly by the warming of the Gulf of Maine and what's gonna happen to the lobster population, which is the primary thing that is fished here.

[talking to student].

So, tell me about your feeling about that.

STUDENT ARTIST: I painted the lobster "Goin' My Way."

I feel like uh, we've been seeing a decline in the catch here because of warming waters.

I think they're moving more up the coast.

ROBERT: So, what's going on that's causing this?

STUDENT: Lobsters thrive in cold waters, and that's why we had such good lobster fishing here in the first place.

ROBERT: How does this make you feel about your own future in this, in this community?

STUDENT: Uh, I think no one wants to see lobsters really crash here because it's such a big uh, industry here.

ROBERT: As a community you've said something about almost everything that's important.

And I find that really impressive, that this is a, the wisdom of you guys as a class is way beyond what any one of us could do alone.

(Soft thoughtful music continues).

(Cricket chirping).

ROBERT: And because of the work I do as an artist and as an activist, I spend a lot of time actually being disappointed, being upset, being angry, being sad about things that are happening which I can't control.

Wishing I could do more.

And when I get really wrought up about that kind of thing, where I come, to take care of myself is here.

I come to the garden, I get my hands in the dirt.

I dig my potatoes, I harvest my tomatoes and I feel better.

Not only to make a statement to the world but to heal myself at the same time.

Maybe my favorite thing about gardening is, digging potatoes.

To me, it's like I'm three years old again on a treasure hunt.

I love just spreading the soil out and seeing what's there.

Do you have enough potatoes?

MAN: No.

ROBERT: Well, take some potatoes.

[Laughs] ARAN SHETTERLY: I remember when there were 10 portraits and then there were 20 portraits and then there were 50 portraits and you kept thinking, when's this going to end?

And it took a long time for people other than Dad to realize that this wasn't about ending.

(Waves crashing and splashing).

ROBERT: Our relationship with, with nature is based in the reality of who's in charge here.

The Earth is in charge.

The cosmos is in charge.

Nature's in charge, we aren't.

Thank goodness, our attempts at genocide of Native people were not successful.

That enough have survived and enough have survived with their traditional values, that they can still be our teachers.

(Reflective music).

ROBERT: Their survival now hinges on ours, because we're the ones with the power and the dominant ones, and our decisions are destroying the planet.

(Music continues).

SHERRI MITCHELL: "We cannot legitimately make a demand unless we are willing to take responsibility for creating a world where that demand can be met."

ROBERT: We're at a moment now though when the climate movement has a different kind of urgency to it, it can't really be put off.

SHERRI: It's the galvanizing moment for human history that we, um, have arrived at a place where all of our individualized rights are colliding with environmental justice, you know, climate change, and survival on the planet.

Water is life and life is water.

Uh, that's uh, a clear warning that if we do not protect the water, that we're not gonna survive on the planet.

And so if we can't survive for more than a few days without water, and we have one or two companies around the world who own all the water, they get to decide who lives and who dies.

You know, this whole concept of rugged individualism, um, this mythology that's been driven into the minds of people in the Western world, um, is one of the, the greatest lies that we've ever been told, where everybody believes that what they're doing is only about the amplification and the elevation of themselves.

And so, if we can't have that solid foundation of this universal principle of equality, um, that I, I only have enough when everyone else has enough.

And so, what I wanna challenge people to do is to find the fire within their own gut and to ignite their power to be part of the solution.

Because if we're gonna wait for somebody else to solve these problems, we're all gonna die.

(Native American -inspired music).

MAULIAN DANA: "We were all painfully aware that the name of the holiday, Columbus Day, was glorifying the idea that our people were supposed to be wiped out."

ROBERT: These are Native earrings and they symbolize the four directions of the compass.

What's remarkable is that people like Maulian or Sherri Mitchell, or, you know, a lot of their great Native leaders have learned to get beyond their own anger, realizing that there's a larger significance here.

(Crowd applauds).

[talking to crowd].

MAULIAN: The first kind of imagery that I had from the dominant society, I guess of, of how my people were seen was the Disney movie "Peter Pan."

They find like an Indian camp in Neverland, and the Indians are all very red and they have big noses.

They're very much the caricature.

You see the classic stereotypes of the promiscuous woman, "Tiger Lily" princess type thing.

(Clip from "Peter Pan" plays).

INDIAN: Red!

MAULIAN: There was a proclamation written by the government that set bounties on the scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children.

"Hunt them all, kill as many as you can, bring them in."

The plan was to wipe us out.

And they had trading posts where you would bring your furs for different animals and Penobscot people.

And these were people, these were colonists that were out starving in the winter.

And this probably, you know, they, they may have been very desperate people and this seemed like a good um, answer.

So when you see people as less than human, it makes it easy to treat them as less than human.

And what we don't talk about as much; is kind of the second wave of genocide.

C.L.

WALKER: Through the agencies of the government, they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization.

MAULIAN: So they had government-run boarding schools that would come and remove children from families as young as five years old, and these children were picked up from their houses.

They were beaten for speaking their language.

Their hair was cut short, it's just traumatic.

So what we are left with are people who are still victims of genocide.

They're still living with those traumatic effects.

They've had something killed in them, even if it's not their physical body.

And when you see us as equals and as humans, we can better advocate for our rights to clean air and water.

(Audience applauds).

ROBERT: Think of the amazing resilience of people who've been treated like that to go on living, to go on hoping.

I mean, just look at what people have gone through and, and hope has survived.

Oren Lyons, who I painted years ago, was a faith keeper of the Onondaga tribe.

He says that your spirituality has to be in relationship and an outgrowth of your deepest reality.

And your deepest reality is nature, and that's where your spirituality has to come from.

And I think that we need to understand that.

That's what the Native people offer us now.

They offer us a way to actually live spiritually in relationship to the Earth and mean it, you know, and really mean it, 'cause we've got to mean it.

(Native American music continues).

ROBERT: Long before I was even conscious of anything to do with White privilege, I was a product of White privilege.

And you know, like most people who are; you're totally unaware of it until, you know, years later, when you look back and say, oh you know, "Oh my God," you know, "almost everything that happened in my life was based on that kind of privilege."

Um, but rather than thinking about it as something to be ashamed of, or you know, something you wanna tiptoe around and not talk about, instead I have for many years thought about it as a call to responsibility.

(Native American music continues).

BILL BIGELOW: "Our job is to excite students about the world, to help them see the role that they can play in making society more equal and more just."

[talking through computer screen].

It was Columbus in February of 1494, who sent the first enslaved Tainos back to Spain.

And then a year later, a massive round-up of 1,600 Tainos, and Columbus ordered his men to choose the 500 or the 550 best, best specimens, to send back to Spain and told his men that, that they could help themselves to the rest.

And then in 1501, the King and Queen gave the first permit to Columbus to bring enslaved Africans to the Caribbean.

So it's the original sin insofar as it's the beginning of European colonialism.

It's the appropriation of indigenous peoples' land, but it's also the beginning of the slave trade.

Those are paired and you cannot separate those.

And so if we wanna talk about Columbus, we have to talk about slavery at the same time.

ROBERT: Well it seems to me that also woven into that.

You know, that nature was to be exploited just like these people were to be exploited, and... BILL: Well that's a great point, Rob that, he introduced sugar cane.

There were entire forests cut down for this crop, and so the destruction of nature and the destruction of culture, go hand in hand.

The destruction of Taino culture, but also the destruction of African culture because ultimately it will be Africans who will be enslaved to come and work in the crops that Columbus brought from Europe to plant in the Americas.

ROBERT: If we have or want to have a democratic society, what is the role of education in, you know, maintaining democracy?

BILL: If we have a curriculum that is singing the praises of generals and industrialists and Presidents and the accomplishment through war and through capitalism.

That is, you know, implicitly sending a message to students about what matters in the world.

PROTESTOR: Today we make a change!

(Crowd of protestors cheer and chant).

BILL: The enormity of what's unfolding, and they're not encouraged to see themselves as acting on that unless millions of students are not coming to see themselves as activists for climate justice, then we're doomed.

ROBERT: I'm at very early stages of this painting of Zyahna Bryant from Charlottesville, a liberal Southern city with a great university, that all over town, these figures who fought against the North in the Civil War fought for state's rights, but it was for the right to own slaves and, and everything that follows from, you know, what that means when you justify owning other people and being able to do whatever you want with them and extract whatever you want from them for your own benefit.

(Pensive piano music).

ZYAHNA BRYANT: In the spring of 2016, I did something that scared me but something that I knew needed to be done.

I wrote the petition, a letter to the editor and City Council calling for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue and the renaming of the park, formerly known as Robert E. Lee Park.

When I was 15, it was recommended that I turn my paper into a letter to City Council asking them to remove the statue.

When we learn about the Civil War, we just don't learn the full history.

And so for me, there's like this tension because we see statues like this, but we don't see any statues of any Black figures, right?

I was just ready for our public spaces to be more inclusive.

ROBERT: You must've gotten an enormous response to the petition.

ZYAHNA: We did, it went, it went viral.

ROBERT: The quote that's gonna be on your portrait is that you were actually quite scared.

ZYAHNA: Mm-hmmm.

(Protestors yelling from riots in Charlottesville, VA).

ROBERT: Why was that so scary?

ZYAHNA: It was scary because at first, again, I didn't realize just how big the issue was.

So I thought that we could remove it.

I thought that this was something that localities controlled, and so I didn't think that this would turn into a larger national conversation.

It was really just me trying to change something in my own backyard, right?

If this goes to a museum, the story of cross-burnings and Anglo-Saxon clubs have to also be told.

So for me, it's really a conversation about agency and who has the power to tell their own story.

ROBERT: This was an earlier version of "Americans Who Tell the Truth."

It's just a very different truth than the one I wanna tell.

A few years ago Zyahna did the same thing that many of the young people that we've honored in "Americans Who Tell the Truth" have done, they're pointing out that we're living in-in a society that allows these messages to continue to be washed over us, you know... [chuckles].

Again and again and again, and often, you know it's, it's up to a young person.

Somebody has to finally say, "Enough, this has got to change."

If we ever wanna be the society we claim to be, and of course this, this is right in the hometown of Thomas Jefferson.

You know, just up on the hill there is Monticello.

And it's a, it just reinforces the, the hypocrisy that's been there forever.

There have been certainly lots of people who objected to the fact of those statues, but it took a petition of a 15-year-old girl to suddenly crystallize the moment.

One thing I really liked to do is get to a point towards completing the eyes more.

I mean, already you can see the strength of her gaze looking at you with deep seriousness.

I mean, in order to do what she's done and take the heat that she's had, she has to have that demeanor.

She has to have that quality in her of toughness and fierceness.

[talking to crowd].

ROBERT: You know, there's something incredible about young people, the clarity of what they are saying and asking and demanding and their failure to feel compromised by a lot of the compromises that a lot of adults feel.

And then the way that can all spur us to action.

When I was growing up in the '60s, I was very much under the sway of the words of Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who was the pastor at Yale, and you know, a great Civil Rights and antiwar activist for uh, many, many years, and was prosecuted, you know, by this country for doing those things.

And he said one time, "Without courage, there are no other virtues."

All the things that we say we believe in, you know, compassion, integrity, honesty, democracy, and even spirituality, without courage they do not exist.

It's the foundational thing that makes all other things of value possible.

And we have with us today uh, Zyahna Bryant, whose petition uh, several years ago to take down these monuments started an ongoing discussion.

So Zyahna and I are going to stand on either side of her portrait, we're gonna unveil it and then, I mean, hopefully, she's gonna like it.

[laughs] (Audience laughs and applauds).

ROBERT: One of the major goals of this project is just to tell a simple truth about our history.

We're never gonna be the country we wanna be unless we tell the truth about what we've done.

And this doesn't mean that you teach children to hate the United States, quite the opposite.

You teach children to love the ideals of the United States, so much that they won't allow themselves to go on perpetrating the crimes that the country's been committing in defiance of those ideals.

You know, we have to be teaching the truth.

ARAN: He has a lot to give back to the world and has had to find his voice and his way of giving back.

And I think that's what's so powerful about "Americans Who Tell the Truth," and where all that energy comes from and why it keeps going is because he's found his most authentic way for doing that.

So I think that's a huge part of his search for meaning in the world, and then his ability to articulate that meaning is in those paintings.

ROBERT: In, um, 1787, there should have been a moment there when a whole lot of people said, "Whoa, whoa, we've got something wrong here.

"We said equality and justice and freedom, and we only gave it to, you know, rich White men."

I mean, if Jefferson and Madison and you know, Washington had said, you know, "If we're gonna be honest, we've got to give up our slaves," whoa, think how different, you know, the picture of this country would appear, if they'd had that courage.

(Pensive music).

BREE NEWSOME BASS: "I removed the flag, not only in defiance of those who enslaved my ancestors but also in defiance of the oppression that continues against Black people globally."

The turning point for me was really 2013.

One: the Supreme Court pretty much gutted the Voting Rights Act, um, and my home state of North Carolina went to work right away trying to pass new laws to suppress the vote.

And um, then of course we had the Trayvon Martin case.

We had the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and those two events happening as they did at that same time, it felt to me like all of a sudden we were back in 1954.

And then of course, in 2015, we had this incident where a young White supremacist went from Columbia, South Carolina, where the state had been flying the Confederate flag at its Capitol since 1961, and shot and killed nine Black parishioners during a prayer meeting, including the pastor of the church who was also a state Senator, who just days before being gunned down in his own church, had succeeded in getting body camera legislation passed in response to the Walter Scott Case, another high profile case of an unarmed Black man being shot and killed by police.

So there we were in the summer of 2015, in the context of all of this that was happening, the United States flag was lowered to half-staff, but the Confederate flag in South Carolina was still at the top of its pole.

And so we had this whole visual of Clementa Pinckney having his casket process through the Capitol, and there's the, you know, United States flag lowered and there's the Confederate flag at the top of the pole.

All of that was just so deeply offensive for me, but that, I decided if we can figure out a way to take that down, I'm willing to go to jail for that.

[climbing the pole].

BREE: You feel it?

POLICE OFFICER: Ma'am, come down off the pole, ma'am, ma'am.

No.

BREE: We are not waiting on the state of South Carolina to tell us that our lives matter, and to regard us with a measure of human dignity.

[yelling from pole].

BREE: You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence.

I come against you in the name of God.

This flag comes down today.

(Police officer continues to yell, sound of sirens), BREE: Courage is really not about the absence of fear.

I can attest to that, right?

Courage is about the belief that there is something greater than your fear.

It is about staring down fear and having faith that we can make a better world.

(Crowd applauds and cheers).

BREE: And we also definitely did it in the same spirit of civil disobedience that Martin Luther King argued through Letter in a Birmingham Jail, that there are times when we have to take action to create a tension that forces a community that has refused to confront an issue to confront it.

(Sound of cheering).

BREE: I just don't think that anything that I have done up to this point in time can be as dangerous as the type of situation that a Fannie Lou Hamer faced.

FANNIE LOU HAMER: This little light of mine [quoting Hamer].

ROBERT: "To tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed.

I'm not backing off."

This little light of mine I'm gonna let it shine (Singing continues).

[talking to students].

ROBERT: It was in the early 1960s, was when the great Civil Rights movement in this country really got going.

She became one of the leaders of that movement.

After she'd registered to vote in 1962, she was arrested by some White cops and taken to a jail cell and they beat her and beat her and beat her.

And she was so sore from the beatings and so swollen that she couldn't lie down or she couldn't even sit down, she had to stand up.

After she'd stood like that for almost 12 hours she started to sing.

and when she started to sing, there were women, who had also been beaten by these cops, in the other jail cells.

And when she started to sing, the other women sang with her.

ROBERT: At that moment, she said, she knew that they couldn't scare her, that she was stronger than they were.

And if they were gonna get rid of her, they were gonna have to kill her.

And that, yeah, I guess one of the toughest times for me about her is when they organized the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi, and then were denied at the 1964 convention.

FANNIE LOU: Mr. Chairman, and to the credentials committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America, is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?

(Fannie Lou Hamer continues singing).

All in the jailhouse I'm gonna let it shine ROBERT: I'm fully conscious of the betrayal of the ideals of the country, and it's the people of color who have embraced those ideals.

And instead, you know, insisted that they become real for them.

And in doing so, they're the people who keep those ideals alive.

(Pensive and dramatic piano music).

ROBERT: It's a very exciting thing to see portraits of John Lewis, Frederick Douglass, and Fannie Lou Hamer at Monticello.

When you take the words of Jefferson literally, and uh, ignore for a moment his hypocrisy, these are the people who should be there, 'cause these are the people who were really fighting the real American Revolution, which is to fight and stand up for our real ideals.

To see them there, at Monticello, is very exciting.

GAYLE JESSUP WHITE: I wonder where so many of the people represented in your series found such courage?

They took risks; they risked their lives.

ROBERT: Every one of them was beaten unmercifully.

I love the irony of the fact that a, a White kid like me from Ohio gets his courage from Frederick Douglass or gets his courage from Fannie Lou Hamer or John Lewis, you know that's, that's important for me.

And if you consider democracy a virtue, it's completely appropriate to say, without courage there is not democracy.

GAYLE: There is no democracy, I agree with that.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

(Uplifting music with vocals "We Shall Overcome").

JOHN LEWIS: I tasted the bitter fruits of segregation and racial discrimination and I didn't like it...

I got in trouble.

It was good trouble.

Necessary trouble.

ROBERT: When John Lewis in 1955 was 15 years old and growing up on a sharecropper's farm in Alabama, the Montgomery bus boycott was going on, and his family had a radio.

And when the first broadcasts were coming out of Montgomery and Martin Luther King's voice from the Dexter Avenue Church was being broadcast, young John Lewis was listening.

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: We're here... Because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action, is the greatest form of government on Earth.

ROBERT: And he was just thrilled, and they could see what was happening to him.

And they said, "John," you know, "don't listen to this," in a way.

"Don't stand up against the man, it'll only bring trouble."

Inside he was thinking, "I've got to do this.

I understand now what trouble is, but this is gonna be good trouble, and I've gotta dedicate my life to getting into good trouble."

(Archival footage from March on Washington, 1963).

A. PHILLIP RANDOLPH: Brother John Lewis.

(Crowd applauding).

JOHN: We'll march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.

(Cheering from crowd).

But we will march with the spirit of love, and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.

So wake up America, wake up, for we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient.

(Crowd cheers and applauds).

(Footage of protestors in Bloody Sunday march, 1965).

MAN: It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march and I'm saying that this is an unlawful assembly.

You're ordered to disperse.

Go home or go to your church.

(Shouting and screams from protestors) (Sound of police whistles) ROBERT: Every one of them was beaten unmercifully to teach them to be subservient, to teach them that they were wrong for standing up for the legitimacy of their own humanity.

PROTESTOR: Can we have somebody take her back to a doctor?

(More sounds of crowd shouting).

ROBERT: If you really believe in justice, if you really believe in equality, you've got to then admire enormously the people who have tried the hardest to make them real for everybody.

So if you love those values, you've got to love and admire the people who stood up for them, who sacrificed, who gave their lives at times for those values.

They become your heroes.

I mean, that's why, you know, when I'm painting these portraits, they're the people I've got to paint.

They become my heroes because they have made those values real.

They, they are the ones who have answered the curse of this country.

(Joan Baez singing "We Shall Overcome").

JOHN: "Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love, and non-violence is the more excellent way.

So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers, and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide."

We shall overcome Some day We shall overcome We shall overcome DR. KING: "Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon that cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

It is a sword that heals."

I have a dream... That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

(Audience cheers and claps).

We'll be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we're free at last.

(Crowd cheering and claps).

(Mahalia Jackson singing).

Deep in my heart I will be free We shall overcome some day (Up-tempo acoustic guitar music).

REGGIE HARRIS: All you have to do is sing back to me what I sing to you.

"Many times the weight of the world crashes in.

If we hope to heal our planet, we must stand in the shelter of each other."

(Reggie sings and plays guitar).

In the shelter (Audience responds back and repeats).

(In the shelter) Of each other (Of each other) In the shelter (In the shelter) Of our lives (Of our lives) Yeah we are open (We are open) We are dreaming (We are dreaming) We are hopeful (We are hopeful) We are wise (We are wise) We are wise (We are wise) [talking to crowd].

REGGIE: As James Baldwin once said, "The role of the artist is to show their society what needs to be seen."

And then he said, "Often what you see is painful.

Often what you will see is devastation.

You will often see things in your society that need to be fixed, that need to be healed.

And that is what you need to show.

You need to also show joy, but many of the things that you show your audience, they will not love you for it, and the room got very quiet.

And then he said, "They will not love you, but it is not their love you're after if you are truly an artist.

It is your responsibility to show what you see."

ROBERT: I've kinda take it as a motto, something that Arthur Miller said, as a matter of fact, it's the quote that I put on his picture where he says, "I think the job of the artist is to remind people what they have chosen to forget."

Do you take that as your job in a way?

REGGIE: Yeah, I do.

Um, there's a combination of telling people what they've chosen to forget and what others have chosen for them not to know.

ROBERT: Ah.

All these stories about Woody Guthrie and that great song you were singing, "Roll On Woody."

REGGIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: Um, I go into a lot of schools, as you all know, just like Reggie does, and you say to kids all over this country really, doesn't matter what age, anything.

You say, "Who's Woody Guthrie?"

And I show them the painting, "Do you know who this is?"

And everybody says, there's silence, total silence.

And then you say, "Oh, can you sing "This Land is Your Land?""

And of course, they can all sing it.

REGGIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: They can sing the first three verses.

REGGIE: That's right.

ROBERT: That's it.

And I say, "Well, okay, come on, sing the rest."

"What do you mean the rest, there is any more?"

And of course those first three verses are the setup to the last verses.

[quotes Woody Guthrie] "One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple by The Relief Office, I saw my people.

As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering IF this land was made for you and me?"

That's what the song was about, that "if," you know?

And who is the country really for?

Is it for you, or is it for me?

You know, is it for both of us?

Maybe not, you know, and that's, you know, this guy had just come out of the Dust Bowl of the Depression.

REGGIE: Right, and when you see the films of those people in the Dust Bowl and in, in that time, and they're holding on with all that they have; while others have so much.

And that is a reality that is uh, not conveyed to students.

ROBERT: When you were talking about the Depression though, I was thinking of Dorothea Lange, and then also thinking about how art can do so much.

You know she was, of course, you all know, the great photographer of the Depression, and that photograph she took of the, in the pea pickers' camp of the migrant mother.

I mean, she was on the way somewhere else.

Passed this road that said, "Pea Pickers' Camp", went down there, you know, and it was raining, it was cold, and these people were starving to death.

And she started taking pictures as she approached this one woman and there were, these kids were unsure about what to do.

And they came up and hugged their mother, and then boom; she had her picture.

And she sent it out back to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration and then he got it published.

That camp was flooded with blankets, food.

A image, one image, you know, it makes, can make such a difference.

That's what the arts can do, you know they, and that's, you know, in my little way, just, you know, painting these pictures was a necessity to save myself, you know, and then the rest just happened, you know?

And, and I know from talking to you that the singing does the same thing for you.

(Reggie sings again).

This joy that I have The world didn't give it to me This joy that I have The world didn't give it to me Oh this joy that I have The world didn't give it to me Oh the world didn't give it So the world can't take it away (Robert chuckles) (Audience applauds) (Mellow acoustic guitar music).

Almost every morning we would walk up the road and we'd walk around the cemetery.

I would read the, the inscriptions and the, and the markers there.

But there was one that always perplexed me.

All it said on the stone besides his dates was, "He tried."

And I remember thinking, "Well that's kinda sad."

And then more recently as I think about my own mortality, I've thought differently about that.

I mean, I would like to leave behind the thought that I tried.

Every one of the people I painted is, is like a, a life buoy being tossed to me.

Periodically I get close to despair.

I wonder, you know what I'm doing, why I'm doing it if it's making any difference.

What I do at that point is find somebody else to paint, and I hang on to that person.

I ride their courage and carry myself back to the surface.

JOHN: But we will march with the spirit of love.

FANNIE LOU: The land of the free and the home of the brave.

DR. KING: To go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together.

(Crowd cheers).

ROBERT: What to leave behind, I don't know.

The victory is in the struggle.

You don't have to get there, you know, and I'm not gonna get there, we're not gonna get there.

But the fact that we're trying, the victory is in the struggle.

I mean, if we give up, what can be said about us?

What can we say if we give up?

We can't.

We don't have that right, we just don't have the right to give up, you know?

We don't have that privilege, no.

We've got to face the truth, but there's also, in a sense there's, there's real hope in facing that truth because the story is full of models of such courage, such persistence, such idealism, that if we can only live like that, tell ourselves that's how we know who we are, by reading this history, knowing these stories, identifying with these people, because that's where the best of this country is.

(Mellow acoustic guitar music with Reggie singing over end credits).

Five years now gone and here we stand In ruins on this troubled land Young hearts lie dead in fields of shame Their loved ones weep, yet nothing's gained Some say this is a right we choose One God decrees we should not lose So as we fight to make a stand The blood pours out across the land So sing it loudly as you go The sad refrain we've come to know Our hearts remind us once again Violence is a bitter friend (Applause).

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Truth Tellers is provided in part by: The Government Accountability Project.

Focused on empowering citizens, promoting government and corporate accountability, and defending whistleblowers since 1977.

With additional support by: Annie & Chuck Holland, Prior Family Foundation, The Stone Family Fair Tide Fund of the Maine Community Foundation, Mary Clough via the Trillium Fund of the Maine Community Foundation, Colin Baker and Elaine Cinciva, Broad Reach Foundation, Ann K. Luskey, Stuart Family Foundation, Megan LeBoutillier, Chantal Dukette, Doug & Posie Cowan and the Deborah Pulliam Social Justice Fund.

A complete list of funders is available at APTOnline.org.

For more information about Americans Who Tell the Truth and this film visit TruthTellersFilm.com.