The Changing Same

Broadcast Premiere on POV Shorts, Monday, July 22nd!

Dir. Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson

In the Florida Panhandle, lies the town of Marianna, Florida where one resident runs a particular marathon in hopes to lift the veil of racial terror caused by the towns buried history.

Lamar Wilson discovers a book, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal, intrigued he starts to read it and finds that his hometown of Marianna is the scene where this horrific event took place. On October 26, 1934, Claude Neal was brutally lynched by a mob of white men who stormed the county jail where Neal was held after being accused of the murder of a 20-year-old white woman, Lola Cannady. The spectacle lynching was the worst act of torture and execution of 20th century America, yet there are no physical markers to remind anyone of this.

In The Changing Same, we follow Lamar as he runs 13 miles to retrace the same route Claude Neal took that fateful night. His sense of duty to shine a light on this past and love for his town motivates him to do this every year. With the help of three other residents, he works towards trying to heal a community that has paid a price for silence and denial.

This project was developed with the support and collaboration of the Sundance Skoll Stories of Change