Arts
In 2015, the New Orleans City Council voted to remove four Confederate monuments from public grounds. Death threats, protests, lawsuits, and rallies ensued, and writer and comedian CJ Hunt thought the situation ripe for a short satirical YouTube video. He was curious “why a losing army from 1865 still holds so much power in America.” He covered the hearings and protests, and a bigger story began to emerge—one with profound implications. The result of Hunt’s exploration is a documentary called The Neutral Ground—a personal, disturbing, sometimes-funny, and informative exploration of the struggle over the monuments in New Orleans. But more broadly, the film, an official selection of the both the Tribeca Film Festival and AFI Docs, is an examination of collective memory, the myths of the Confederacy, how history was rewritten and reaffirmed, and the price paid, especially by Black people, to keep the story of “Lost Cause” alive. In this podcast, Hunt talks about the film’s journey from short funny video to a timely and scholarly documentary, his decision to insert himself as a central character in the film, the conversations Black people have been having about these monuments since Frederick Douglass, and how humor can be a great method to get people to examine uncomfortable truths.