Phil Allen

Martin Luther King used news cameras as a means of exposing anti-Black violence by white mobs in the 1950s and 60s. Darnella Frazier used her phone to record and post the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin in May 2020. These are just two of many people who have captured images of injustice for the world to see. The Prophetic Lens takes an important look at the use of the video camera as an indispensable prophetic tool for the security of Black lives and greater possibility for racial justice. Phil Allen shows how the camera can be a catalyst for cultural change, using Walter Brueggemann's Prophetic Imagination as a framework for understanding the concept of prophetic. Chronicling the use of the camera, particularly in film from J. D. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Allen's historical approach reveals how effective this technology has been in achieving the goals of its respective storytellers. The book highlights both the prophetic potential of the camera and the context of Blackness as a liminal existence amid a context dominated by whiteness.

On December 10, 1953, tragedy was visited on a family when Nathaniel Allen was murdered on the Sampit River by his white employer, who lured him into the meeting under the false promise of reconciliation. Allen's death was recorded as an accidental drowning, a deliberate cover-up of the bullet hole seen by more than one witness. Three generations later, Phil Allen Jr. revisits this harrowing story and recounts the ""baton of bitterness"" that this murder passed down in his family. Through interviews, difficult conversations, and deep theological reflection, Allen takes up the challenge of racism today, naming it for what it is and working to chart a path toward reconciliation. Open Wounds, and the documentary that accompanies it, is a transformative experience of listening and learning as a grandson looks, laments, an ultimately leads his family and his society forward toward a just and reconciled future. It's an essential part of our national reckoning with racism and injustice.

From the August 1957 VIR race program: The rolling Virginia hills have been painstakingly clad with an ultra-smooth skin of macadam to provide a course of great natural beauty. The superb spectator visibility is nicely equated to a road layout that will test the best in racing machines and men. In the late 1950s, a group of sports car enthusiasts dreamed of creating a first-class racing facility. The result was Virginia International Raceway, a challenging 3.2-mile course with 12 turns, 2 straightaways, and over 100 feet of elevation change. Located in southern Virginia, east of Danville and just across the North Carolina border, the track opened in 1957. During VIR's first 18 years of existence, races featured some of the top names in American motorsports including Carroll Shelby, Roger Penske, Walt Hansgen, and Richard Petty. The track also hosted numerous important events including SCCA Nationals, the President's Cup, a Trans-Am race in the first season of that circuit, as well as IMSA races in the early 1970s. Facing financial difficulties, the track shut down in 1974, and for the next 25 years VIR was a cow pasture. It was reopened in 2000 and the outstanding new facility is again one of the top racing venues in the country.