The Mystery of August 28

There is a mystery in the calendar. A single day that echoes across centuries. August 28.

Colin Kaepernick chose August 28 to take a knee, a protest that still unsettles the powerful.

On that day in 2008, Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in a landmark, never before experienced global moment. A son of Africa and America rising to the nation’s highest stage.

On that day in 1963, hundreds of thousands stood on the National Mall and listened as Dr. King dreamed aloud.

On that day in 1955, Emmett Till was taken from his bed in Mississippi and brutalized, his death igniting a movement.

On that day in 1833, Britain abolished slavery in its colonies, sending ripples that reached the enslaved in America, a glimmer of what might come.

Different years, different people, but the same day. August 28. A date that refuses to lie still. It was this mystery that stirred in my imagination through a call from Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III. He was the Founding Director of the soon to be launched National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. A long anticipated, highly acclaimed venue for the celebration and excavation of the African-American experience. Dr. Bunch told me I’d been selected as the filmmaker to make the museum’s introductory film for all visitors. And that it would play daily in the museum for the next decade. Would I accept this unsolicited and auspicious invitation? Um, whoa.

He gave me no restrictions, only freedom. “Whatever you want it to be about. I trust you,” he said. It was not an assignment. It was a gift. To distill four centuries into one cinematic breath. To make a film that could stand at the threshold of our people’s house. It is the most personally meaningful job offer I’ve ever had.

I knew almost immediately that I’d try to make something about this anomaly of a day: August 28. As long as I’ve known about it, I’ve felt it was a seam that stitches our joys and devastations together in a way that is almost magical. So I made a film that walks the audience through this single day, told across multiple years, across shifting circumstances, through ordinary people who found themselves living in extraordinary moments.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman trying to survive Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on August 28. David Oyelowo and Don Cheadle as men building a casket for Emmett Till who was murdered on August 28. Regina King as a mother spinning Motown into memory with her daughter as the company’s first record hits #1 on the charts on August 28. Angela Bassett and André Holland on the National Mall, not as civil rights icons on the stage with Dr. King, but as the people whose presence made history matter. Because history doesn’t live in the mouths of leaders alone. It lives in the eyes that witness and the ears that hear and in the spirits within each of us that carry memory forward.

That has always been the mystery to me! The way that moments only become historic when people choose to remember them! A speech unheard is just words. A film unseen is just images. A museum without visitors? Just a building. The audience. The audience is all of us. We are the ones who carry what matters into the future.

Dr. Bunch and his team built NMAAHC with the audience in mind. He knew millions would come, and they have, each person walking in with their own memories and walking out with something they can never forget. After he opened the doors of what some lovingly call the “Blacksonian” in 2016, Dr. Bunch went on to become the first historian to lead the all 21 museums within the Smithsonian, carrying that same commitment across the whole institution. Today, the museum he birthed is led with care and brilliance by a good sister named Shanita Brackett, who continues the charge. And yet, we must remember: there were long decades when there was no museum at all. Our history survived anyway. Because the audience… our families, our churches, our teachers, our storytellers, ourselves… refused to let it die.

As we pass another August 28, that survival is under threat. Those in “power” want to strip the truth from the record as they falsely claim that slavery was “not so bad” and demand that only the “good parts” be remembered. Their goal is erasure and silence. But they underestimate the audience. They underestimate us.

I think about the mystery of this day. How it keeps finding us each year. And somehow keeps asking us to be great like it is. It dares us to remember, to chronicle, to speak out.

Because the mystery is not that history repeats itself. The mystery is how we repeat ourselves into history. How we arrive, again and again. And how, by our mighty presence and good intention, we make the record whole.

Sharing our film with you here in celebration of August 28, in all its magic and mystery. Onward…

Ava