From Slavery to Freedom Film Series: Always in Season

Find an online screening of “Always In Season” on October 20, as part of the 2021 From Slavery to Freedom Film Series presented by the African American Program of the Heinz History Center in partnership with the Frick Environmental Center of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy.

After 17 year-old Lennon Lacy is found hanging in North Carolina in 2014, his mother’s search for justice and reconciliation begins – centuries of trauma and lynching bleed into the present. The film explores the lingering impact of more than a century of lynching African Americans and connects this form of historic racial terrorism to racial violence today. The film centers on the case of Lennon Lacy, an African American teen who was found hanging from a swing set in Bladenboro, North Carolina, on August 29, 2014. Despite inconsistencies in the case, local officials quickly ruled Lennon’s death a suicide, but his mother, Claudia, believes Lennon was lynched. Determined to find answers about what happened to her son, Claudia moves from paralyzing grief to leading the fight for justice.

As the film unfolds, Lennon’s case, and the suspicions surrounding it, intersect with stories of other communities seeking justice and reconciliation. A few hundred miles away in Monroe, Georgia, a diverse group of reenactors, including the adult daughter of a former Ku Klux Klan leader, annually dramatize a 1946 quadruple lynching to ensure the victims are never forgotten and encourage the community to come forward with information that might bring the perpetrators to justice. As the terrorism of the past bleeds into the present, the film asks: what will it take for Americans to begin building a national movement for racial justice and reconciliation?