From The Director
In A Thousand Midnights, I explore the contemporary Black experience through my mother in law’s story. Like thousands of other Black people, Bette Parks Sacks came to Chicago in the 1950’s and lived on the city’s Southside. At the time, the city teemed with new arrivals from Mississippi and other southern states. My mother in law’s aunt, Mae Garrett , had gone north in the first wave of the Great Migration. She opened a boarding house and saved enough money to buy the building within four years. Her success eventually paved the way for other family members to join her up North, her niece Bette was among them.
Learning about my mother in law’s story, and its connection to the roughly 6 million other people who went on a similar journey, piqued my interest in exploring the connections between the past and present. I had already spent a decade following families on the Southside as they buried their children, victims of Chicago’s infamous gun violence epidemic. I began to see that the Black experience of the past and present seem to intermingle and collide. Rolling through the city, I saw remnants of formerly glorious jazz and blues venues that now lie fallow, replaced by churches and apartment buildings. I wanted to capture the landscape, artifacts, and memories of the people that made Chicago what it is today.
I began collecting portraits of family members, some who have died serving their country and others who are still with us. I stumbled upon family photos including one of the family’s patriarch, J. B. Parks, standing next to his three sons adjacent to the Mississippi field where my mother in law once picked cotton. The boys’ gazes convey the stoicism demanded of the time, when they walked more than a mile a day in threadbare shoes to arrive at a blacks-only schoolhouse where students used hand-me-down textbooks that had been discarded by whites. The children in those photos ventured north in search of something better, only to attend segregated public schools in Chicago. Almost sixty years later, I filmed the abandoned schools that were shuttered by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the largest school closing in modern American history.
A Thousand Midnights is my effort to present an individual family history in the hopes that it might speak to the stories of millions of others. I believe there is a fundamental tension at the center of the Great Migration’s hundred-year legacy—the tension between an older generation’s hope for a better life and the harsher realities of living in the northern Black metropolis today.
