The scholars and activists of Roger Ross Williams and Mara Brock Akil’s Stamped from the Beginning.
Once director Roger Ross Williams decided to adapt best-seller Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America into a documentary, he utilized every storytelling device — animation, live-action recreations, visual effects — to create a unique cinematic experience.
Published in 2016, Stamped from the Beginning by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi spans the history of anti-Black ideology from the invention of race in the fifteenth century by Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara all the way to the present-day Black Lives Matter movement. “The book is so dense and enlightening,” Williams says of the 600-plus page tome. “So the artistic treatment of it has to be equally enlightening, innovative, and groundbreaking.”
Williams — who previously directed the Emmy-winning documentary The Apollo (2019) and Music By Prudence (2010), for which he became the first Black director to win an Academy Award — knew that he’d need a cohort of well-read on-air talent to help unpack the book’s exhaustive history. “One big decision that we made early on was that the scholars, the academics, were all going to be Black women,” says Williams. “I was presented with a list of people to talk to. I noticed the pattern, that there are all these Black women doing this work.”
Representative Cori Bush
Dr. Dorothy Roberts
Brittany Packnett-Cunningham
Dr. Carol Anderson
Dr. Angela Davis
Lynae Vanee
Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan
Raquel Willis
Dr. Racquel Gates
The documentary boasts an esteemed cast that includes civil rights activist and UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus Dr. Angela Davis, U.S. Representative Cori Bush, and activists and educators Brittany Packnett-Cunningham and Lynae Vanee, among others.
“Having these contributors really go to a place where they’re telling their personal stories, how they experience racism in America, and why they’re driven to do the work, that is what makes this film really different and special,” Williams says.
Mara Brock Akil, who executive-produced the documentary and was previously the creator, writer, and showrunner of the series Girlfriends, The Game, and Being Mary Jane, echoes Williams’s creative decisions in adapting the book: “It was interesting that in reading the book, there was the same pattern: Black women like Phillis Wheatley were on record as the ones that were actively fighting against racism.”
