By Dwight Casimere
“You know what people say about Kentucky? You gotta be goin’ there to get there!” that bit of homespun wisdom from Taylor Coots, Charles Booker’s Senior Campaign Political Advisor starts off director Pat McGee’s award-winning documentary “From The Hood To The Holler.”
This unvarnished look at the stark realities of racial politics in one of the nation’s poorest states has won 8 awards at festivals around the country, including the Best Documentary of 2022 at the Brooklyn Film Festival and Audience Choice award at the 2022 Cleveland International Film Festival.
Released in New York, LA and select cities September 16, it will be available on all digital platforms Friday, September 30. Visit fromthehoodtothehollerfilm.com
Living in Kentucky is like being a patient on life support in the midst of a power outage in spite of the fact that it is represented by one of the most powerful men in the country; Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
The poverty and the repression are crushing. No one knows better than black activist Charles Booker. A product of Louisville’s West End, Booker was raised by a single mom. “Growing up, I remember the lights would often go out. Some nights my mom would say to me, “I’m not sitting down to eat with you, because there isn’t enough food for both of us.”
Violence in Louisville was a way of life for Charles Booker and his peers growing up. An only child, his cousins became more like siblings. The closest one to Booker was his cousin TJ, whom he loved like a brother.
One night in 2016, Booker tearfully recalls receiving a phone call from his father after hearing a news report of yet another shooting in the West End. ‘That was your cousin TJ that got shot!’ the distraught father said.
“It changed everything for me,” Booker reflected. “When I heard that he was shot and killed, I thought about everything that happened around him. Before that trigger was pulled. All the closed doors. Even for the person that killed him. All of the trauma. The heartache. The sadness. Desperation.
“When a trigger is pulled, it’s an explosion of a whole lot of issues and problems that we don’t deal with. And since then, I’ve had four cousins murdered after him.”
In any other context, Booker’s words would have sounded almost poetic were they not so tragic.
That experience and the atmosphere of violence against black people in Kentucky, from the lynchings of slavery, to the police murder of Breonna Taylor, inspired Booker to make a run for the Senate seat held by Mitch McConnell in the 2020 Democratic primary.
It was an uphill battle. Not only was he up against a well-heeled, popular, established candidate, to top it off, he would have to campaign right in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Charles Booker was the originator of the socially distanced campaign tour.
Booker’s life, like the lives so many Kentuckians, is inextricably intertwined with the life and times of Mitch McConnell. “In Kentucky,” Booker says, “Mitch McConnell is an institution.” To prove his point, Booker cites that one of the ironies of his life is that he went to law school on a scholarship provided by the Mitch McConnell institute.
For months, Booker’s political campaign struggled to find its footing. The police shooting of Breonna Taylor changed everything. Overnight, Booker was thrust into the eye of the storm.
“Suddenly, the movement for Black Lives was not something that happened somewhere else,” intoned State Rep Josie Raymond, one of the subjects interviewed in the film. “All of a sudden it was something that happened here at home.”
“Breonna Taylor was murdered on Friday, March 13th, 2020,” Kentucky State Rep. Attica Scott recalled. “One of her last tweets was that she was looking forward to being a mom. On that night, police busted into her home. Shot her multiple times. The person they were looking for had already been arrested, and they murdered Breonna Taylor. Then they spent months covering it up. Lying about it”
For Booker, it was personal. “I knew Breonna. She was a friend of my family. In fact, she was a friend of my cousin TJ. When she was gone, it felt like I was reliving the murder of my cousin all over again.”
“It also lit a fire in the city which spread across Kentucky and then grew across the country.”
When people started to rally behind Breonna Taylor, Charles Booker was at the tip of the spear, organizing protests and bringing together various forces within the community, even opposing factions within the black and progressive communities, to speak out against no-knock warrants and police violence.
The embers from the firestorm over Breonna Taylor had barely died down before there was yet another atrocity that forced Booker into the breach.
During a protest in Louisville, young David McAtee was shot and killed by the Kentucky Army National Guard. His body lay in the street in front of a gas station and convenience store on a busy thoroughfare for hours. As night turned to dawn, the crowd became more angry. When Booker arrived on the scene, a peaceful protest had become a mob.
Hannah Drake, a local Louisville author and poet described what happened next. “There was a stand-off. The people on one side of the street and the police in riot gear on the other. And Charles stood with the people. He was running back and forth from the people to the police.
“He said he came there because ‘I understand the magnitude of the situation. I understand your frustration. But if there’s another way to do this, let’s do it.’
Booker Campaign Senior Advisor Taylor Coots added additional color. “He asked the police to drop their batons in solidarity with the people and the police major said that if he could get the mayor to sign off on it, they would do it. Charles called the Mayor, and the Mayor agreed.”
“Charles had the courage to say, ‘I’m going to put myself in this position because I understand the magnitude,” Drake recounted. ‘If I hadn’t come here, it would have been a powder keg.
“Then, out of nowhere,” Drake recalled, “a woman started singing ‘Amazing Grace.’
Charles Booker had met the moment as a leader. This became what would become the first of many trials by fire.
Back on the campaign trial, he quickly realized it would take more than charisma to win the nomination. Running against an established candidate with national recognition and big dollars, he would need to find a wider constituency. That’s when he decided to go to the Appalachian “holler.”
For those not familiar with the term, a ‘holler’ is a space between two mountains.
Mostly inhabited by whites, it is dirt poor. There is little opportunity to advance and almost unbearable living conditions. Housing is substandard. There is little to no medical care. Even the drinking water is dirty.
Booker quickly realized that conditions in the holler were not unlike those in his own West End. Therein, he surmised, lay common ground. The harmonic conversion of shared experience and the heightened sense of isolation brought on by COVID created a sweet spot for his campaign that resonated far beyond the surrounding hills. Booker’s campaign suddenly had new life. There was suddenly light in one of Kentucky’s darkest corners.
“I decided to flip racism on its ear. To take those issues that are a wedge that divides us and pull out the common threads,” Brooks said eloquently in the film. Thus began his campaign to reach out and broaden the base of his campaign, ‘from the Hood to the Holler.’
Director Pat McGee and the film’s probing camera team led by Greg Taylor and diamond-sharp editing by Adam Linkenhelt and Terry Hahin make this an absorbing viewing experience.
This is an inspiring film with a much-needed message of hope. For those interested in the fight for human justice, it is a must see. Gregory Taylor, and McGhee, it is Executive Produced by Michael Shannon and Alyssa Milano. The film is now in select theatres around the country and will be available on all digital platforms September 30. For more, visit fromthehoodtothehollerfilm.com.
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