PBS Books, in partnership with GPB and POV, is thrilled to host Filmmaker Talk: A discussion about the national fight over confederate monuments with Neutral Ground Filmmaker CJ Hunt, Author Karen Cox, Reporter Tyler Estep, and Chairman of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association Rev. Abraham Mosley on Monday, July 12 at 8pm ET. The conversation will be moderated Josie Duffy Rice, former President of The Appeal. This event can be streamed on Facebook (www.facebook.com/pbsbooks1/live), in addition to this site pbsbooks.org/neutralground.
About the Film
An official selection of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, The Neutral Ground documents New Orleans’ fight over monuments and America’s troubled romance with the Lost Cause. In 2015, director CJ Hunt was filming the New Orleans City Council’s vote to remove four Confederate monuments. But when that removal is halted by death threats, CJ sets out to understand why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America. As the national monument controversy expands, Hunt’s journey includes visits with historians, activists and his own father. At times darkly hilarious and at others soberingly serious, The Neutral Ground is a poignant exploration of the legacy of slavery which much of America has yet to face.
Watch The Neutral Ground on PBS on July 5 at 9:30pm ET (check local listings) or online at pov.org. Join us for excerpts from the film and live conversation discussing the fight over monuments nationally and the ongoing debate about Georgia’s Stone Mountain, America’s largest Confederate memorial.
About the Panel
Karen Cox, author of No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
Tyler Estep, AJC Reporter
CJ Hunt, director of The Neutral Ground
Rev. Abraham Mosley, Chairman of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association
Moderated by Josie Duffy Rice, former President of The Appeal
About the Book
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century – but they’ve never been as intense as they are today.
In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.
