SACRAMENTO – Whether they highlight historical figures or feature fictional characters, Black films, and the filmmakers who bring them to life, have long told stories that others couldn’t, or wouldn’t.
The Black film genre gets a Sacramento audience this month as several films will be shown at local venues as a precursor to the CineSoul Festival in November. Cheryl Fabio’s film “Evolutionary Blues: West Oakland’s Music Legacy” will show at the Crocker Art Museum at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 22. Some of the films have Sacramento connections, namely “Voices for Freedom, The Hyers Sisters’ Legacy,” directed by Susheel Bibbs and “The Musician” by Tommy Ross, which will show at the Delta King in Old Sacramento beginning at 7:00 p.m. bon Wednesday, April 25. Ross also has two other films, “Erudition” and “An Evening With Marty” showing in different parts of the Sacramento International Film Festival, which CineSoul is a part of.
“Voices for Freedom, The Hyers Sisters’ Legacy,” is a biography of Anna and Emma Hyers, 19th-century opera singers and civil rights activists from Sacramento who revolutionized the way Blacks were seen in music. Ms. Bibbs, an opera singer in her own right, seemed a natural to bring their story to the big screen.
The Sacramento OBSERVER sat down with Bibbs to learn more about her film and what motivated her to produce it.
Q. When was the “Voices for Freedom” film completed?
Both the Festival and PBS versions were completed in July 2017
Q. How long did it take to film/finish?
I spent nine years researching and developing, taping and assembling this documentary film.
Q. The film was created for PBS?
A. I held the PBS audience in mind as I created both films because the films contain things that are popular among PBS audiences — opera, music theater, and other types of song and they feature well-known classical and Broadway artists as well as history. I made sure that the film was accessible to others as well.
The shorter version (26 min) was uplinked to all PBS stations Sept. 29, 2017, and the Festival version (30 min), completed at the same time, debuted at the Berkeley International Festival on Oct 4, 2017. That version won the Grand Festival Award for shorts and A Hollywood Independent Film Festival Award.
Q. How/when did you first learn about the Hyers sisters?
A. I was touring in Chatham, Ontario, Canada with my film and one-woman enactment on Mary Ellen Pleasant, Mother of Civil Rights in California. Someone told me about a “Madame Hyers,” who performed there many years back. They had photos. The Wish Center in Chatham, Ontario, gave me the name and phone number of a Hyers relative in NYC.
That lady (Mme. May C. Hyers) turned out to be the stepmother of Sacramento’s Hyers sisters, but the mention peaked my interest, and when my Mary Pleasant film, “Meet Mary Pleasant,” debuted in NYC at the NY International Film and Video Festival, I interviewed a member of the Hyers family mentioned in Canada and located a rare book by Langston Hughes that mentioned the Hyers. From there I did a lot of primary research in archives and online.
Q. Why did they have an impact on you? Why did you want to tell their story?
A. The story showed amazing daring at a time when other African Americans were having to join minstrel troupes and being terribly treated and ridiculed. As a classical singer, I wondered, how and why these girls, Anna and Emma Hyers, who had aimed for their careers since childhood and been so celebrated across the US, would suddenly leave their dreams of major operatic careers in Europe to start doing what we now call “musicals,” and would dare during that time to center them on the African american experience before their “mainstream” audiences.
No one else was doing this, and their daring in involving black leading players, positive imaging of African Americans, and integrated casts on the mainstream touring circuit in 1877 — the low point in American race relations and imaging — amazed me. I “had to” discover how and why they did this: Why do people who trained their whole lives as opera singers suddenly move into comic opera-type musical stories that have political and racial implications? -I had so many questions. (I’m happy to explain more by phone). I uncovered their family tree and many original documents as well as accounts about them. A small bibliography is below
Q. Why are they unsung?
A. Sadly, so many wonderful and inspiring stories related to African Americans go unreported and unsung. My life has involved the same kinds of things the Hyers did – opera, original musicals and stage plays, and I wanted to bring this one out.
In 1919 Delilah Beasley, the first African American reporter of the Oakland Tribune, unearthed their story and included it in her book Pioneers of Negro Origin in California, met Anna in Sacramento, when was a doctor’s wife in retirement. My film begins with that enactment.
Q. Is “Voices for Freedom” a documentary or a reenactment?
A. It is a 30-min documentary. It does contain some re-enactments. I call my films like this “performance documentaries” because they contain the regular documentary elements – montage, narration, enactment — but they also contain wonderful performances.
Q. Opera has taken you across the globe, and Black opera singers seem to get more respect/appreciation abroad than they do here in America. Can you comment on that?
A. I’d like to comment in two ways.
1) In Deutschland (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) alone there are 80 State-funded opera houses, As a recall from a report I gave some years back, These opera houses exceed our funding more than 6 to 1. European opera houses also love American opera singers, many of them black, because of their excellent training. They can offer state-funded, full time jobs and benefits. We offer no State funding, full-time jobs, or benefits. There is just no contest.
2) Secondly, for a while the number of Black opera singers and the peer support for them also declined, but no more. You need both to succeed in this tough field. In the ‘60s when I grew into my career, it was called the Golden Age of Black opera singers: Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Simon Estes, George Shirley, Rere Grist and many more dominated major opera houses and recordings. High schools and peers were supportive of their talent. My high school, (Sumner High in St. Louis, even mounted “Aida” by Verdi. But a time came for gospel to dominate, and that singing style is not compatible with opera singing style, much as tap and ballet aren’t compatible. Both the technique and peer support in high school needed to encourage opera singing declined. Again, for the last 10 or more years, we have many Black opera stars rising in the U.S. and Europe, but the continuous work is still in Europe.
Q. How would you describe your films? As history lessons?
A. No, but I hope my films let us know how hidden history has impacted us all. My documentaries are entertaining, historical, performance documentaries. The history supports and explains the unsung stories that I unveil in the film; so far they have been centered on unsung African Americans or works that have contributed to and can inspire us all.
Q. What do you want people to walk away from this film with?
A. I’d love to have viewers A, know how and why the social attitudes that developed from 1876 thru the 1890’s — which produced attitudes that resulted in Plessy vs Ferguson, Jim Crow, separate but equal — came about and how they have affected our lives today. A lot of that history is not in the history books. B, appreciate that we all can stand up for what we believe and contribute our talents to society. That’s what the Hyers did. They were not forced to change their careers in opera or to those that create a new genre of music theater or to fight the denigration of their people by Blackface minstrels. But, they did these things out of a social awareness passed to them from their Black communities in San Francisco and Sacramento. C, that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before.The film shows how one generations, in this case the California civil rights community, can pass values to the next generation, which impact us all for decades and D, that music can and always has been used to overcome fixed attitudes. It can go straight to the heart and change minds and hearts. That’s what the Hyers unique” “musicals” did.
Q. Where is home base for you?
A. I now live in Sacramento. I’m from St. Louis. I studied in Boston and then lived there, in Europe, India, and San Francisco.
Tickets to CineSoul can be purchased at Brown Paper Tickets or by calling (800) 838-3006.
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By: Genoa Barrow
Senior Staff Writer