Overview of the film:

On October 19th, 1934, 23-year old Mr. Claude Neal was arrested and accused of raping and killing a 19-year old white woman named Lola Cannady, in Marianna, Florida. As the news began to spread throughout the town, a mob of angry white citizens kidnapped Mr. Neal from the local authorities, and then dragged his body fourteen miles to the center of town. Finally, after being mutilated and tortured publicly, the mob murdered him through a violent historical practice called spectacle lynching and hanged Mr. Neal from an Oak tree on the courthouse lawn.

The Changing Same is the documented journey of Dr. Lamar Wilson’s attempt to reconcile the silence surrounding Mr. Neal’s lynching and the community that was responsible for it—a community which he calls home. Seventy years later, Dr. Wilson publicly confronts this history of racial terror in his hometown by running the same 14-mile route that the mob carried and dragged Mr. Neal along to his lynching.

This film explores the following themes:

• Racism
• Historical Memory & Memorialization
• Racial Violence and spectacle lynching
• Intergenerational Trauma
• Accountability
• Protest
• Notions of “Justice”

GRADE LEVELS: 9-12

SUBJECT AREAS:

African American Studies Courses

Civics & Government

Current Events

English Language Arts

Global Studies

History

Human Rights

Humanities

ESTIMATED TIME NEEDED:

Approximately TWO 90-minute class periods (including 30 minutes to screen The Changing Same)