Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Willmott educates KU basketball team about Juneteenth

Wednesday was a momentous day for Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Willmott, whose stirring and significant latest film, “The Heroic True-Life Adventures of Alvin Brooks,” premiered at the Screenland Armour as part of the Juneteenth Film Festival.

The documentary about the 92-year-old civil rights icon who embodies the best of us is indeed as Willmott described it in an interview with The Star earlier in the day: inspiring, sad, dramatic and amusing all at once — including by way of some terrific animation elements that reflect the comic-book vibe hinted at in the title.

While it’s technically a Kansas City tale, Brooks’ conviction, courage, compassion and charm in the throes of racial strife also very much reflect an American story about hope, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

But as consumed as Willmott is with numerous projects and as much as he was anticipating the opening in Kansas City — which he said “is responsible for me staying in this area” because of the support of the city and The Star’s Robert Butler early in his career — he still felt it vital to spend part of the day in another way conveying hope, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

“Happy Juneteenth! …” the Junction City native who teaches at the University of Kansas said as he stepped to the front of KU’s Hadl Auditorium in the Wagnon Student-Athlete Center.

His audience was the KU men’s basketball team and staff, which over the last few years has commemorated Juneteenth with visits to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Park in Topeka and Underground Railroad sites in Lawrence.

Given his intimate familiarity with KU (including through his 2014 film “Jayhawkers” largely about megastar basketball player Wilt Chamberlain’s role in the integration of Lawrence) and his scrutiny of the roots of racism in America through films such as “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” and the Academy Award-winning “BlacKkKlansman,” Willmott was a coveted guest about the meaning of the date that only became a federal holiday in 2021.

That national acknowledgment heartened Willmott on multiple levels.

“No doubt about it, especially now at a time when democracy and freedom and all these things are in jeopardy in many ways,” he said in an interview after he addressed the team.

One of the great things about America, he added, is that we have come to take freedom for granted.

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“That’s also why I think it’s in danger,” he said. “So Juneteenth becomes kind of a day to remember that you can’t take it for granted.”

Accordingly, it seemed a particular privilege to Willmott to get to make that point to KU players.

Not merely because he’s been a fan but because he wanted to impart the influence that they, and other prominent athletes, can have and why they should understand history and responsibility to their potential.

“The power and the presence they have,” he said.

From all appearances, his own powerful presence resonated. The audience appeared riveted during the approximately 20 minutes he spoke — starting with succinctly making some fundamental points that I still don’t believe are universally understood.

The very notion of Juneteenth, he said, “is kind of a new thing for the country in a lot of ways.”

For more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (and weeks after the surrender of the Confederate Army and the assassination of Lincoln), he explained, some 250,000 Black men, women and children remained enslaved near Galveston, Texas.

“They had been freed two and a half years earlier. They didn’t know it. Can you imagine?” said Willmott, equating it to sitting in a jail cell for the same span “because someone didn’t come and tell you that you’re free.”

With no internet, phones, TV or radio, Willmott pointed out, news didn’t travel so easily.

Especially if those of the most means wanted to suppress it.

“The masters,” Willmott added, “didn’t tell them because they wanted to keep them as slaves.”

So it took until June 19, 1865, when U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger of the Union Army issued in Galveston General Order No. 3 beginning thusly: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

In addition to the inhumanity and cruelty of slavery, Willmott elaborated on the vested interest of slave-owners with a jarring but effective moment. He beckoned forward Chris Hughes, a former KU football player who now is an inclusive excellence specialist at the school.

Leaning on a dynamic he uses with his classes, Willmott noted Hughes’ large frame and said, “If Chris was a slave (in 1860), he would be worth as much as a Lexus today. …

“So if you had five slaves, you had five Lexuses; if you had 20 slaves, you had 20. … The Civil War was fought over Abraham Lincoln coming in and saying, ‘You’ve got to give up your Chrises; you’ve got to give up your Lexuses.’

“That’s why it was the bloodiest war in American history.”

Speaking afterward, he added that the “money element of slavery is the thing that we never really understood. We understood the evil of it, all that stuff. But … they fought over it for a reason. It was money. It was money, money, money, money.”

(If you’re interested in hearing about how it’s been that way ever since, I’ll be speaking with my friend Ebony Reed at 7 p.m. on June 26 at Unity Temple on The Plaza about the powerful new book she co-authored with Louise Story: “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap”).

Willmott wanted them to understand something more, though.

He wanted them to appreciate that Lawrence was founded (in 1854 by the New England Emigrant Aid Society) as an abolitionist bulwark intended to keep the territory free from slavery. And that despite Lawrence and Kansas’ identity and role in the war, parts of the town had succumbed to segregation by the time Chamberlain arrived in 1955.

On Chamberlain’s drive from integrated Philadelphia to Lawrence, he had been refused service at a restaurant in Kansas City. So, per KU archives, he soon went to coach Phog Allen to voice his anger about the prospect of dealing with that treatment in an area Chamberlain determined had been “infested with segregation.”

“He says, ‘Hey, if I can’t eat at every restaurant in this town, I’m not going to play for you,’” Willmott said, smiling and adding, “What do you think happened?”

Through some combination of Allen intervening and Chamberlain sitting in some restaurants until he was granted service, Lawrence began to re-emerge as standing for the Free State.

“Everything moved forward” in Lawrence because of Chamberlain, Willmott said.

Noting other examples (such as at Alabama) of sports catalyzing integration, he wanted the players to ponder how they have the power and influence to make positive change, too.

As he began to wrap up to head over to the premiere on Wednesday, though, he had another compelling example to share prompted by KU director of basketball operations Fred Quartlebaum.

Speaking with athletes often cast as heroes for mere sports deeds, he pointed to what one man or woman can do to change the world if he or she has the truly heroic spirit of Brooks.

Referring to a chilling and infuriating story about a Kansas City policeman pulling a gun on young Brooks, calling him racial slurs and telling him to run, Willmott told of how that led Brooks to become a policeman and about a scene in the movie in which they went back to that spot 82 years later.

Bringing the past to the present to allow it to inform the future, as he put it, spoke to both what he hoped to achieve with the film and what he wanted to get across to the team on Juneteenth.

“This,” he told the team, “is a day to reflect on.”