Speaking to Oprah Winfrey about the Black Lives Matter protests, the 'Selma' director recalls witnessing her father falling victim to police aggression when she was a child.
- Jun 11, 2020
AceShowbiz - Filmmaker Ava DuVernay grew up wary and fearful of police officers, because no one in her community thought they made bad things better.
The "Selma" director has been a loud voice amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of cops in Minnesota, and now she's opening up about one scary encounter with police officials when she was a kid, growing up in Los Angeles' southern cities.
"Police came into our backyard... and I remember coming out of the house and seeing my father - my proud, beautiful father - on the ground in our own backyard, wrestled to the ground by police," DuVernay told pal Oprah Winfrey during the first of two "OWN Spotlight: Where Do We Go From Here?" TV specials on Tuesday night (June 09), adding the cops explained her father "fit the description of someone who was running in through the neighbourhood."
"Seeing that was traumatizing me as a young person, but it fit in with all of the police aggression that I grew up with, living in Compton and Long Beach and Lynwood, just a continuous presence always around."
That incident and many others made her realise that police officers were not her friends: "I do not think they are here to protect me," the filmmaker said during the one-hour special. "As I grew up, we did not call the police if there was an issue. We called each other and we dealt with it... Calling police is the sure way for something to go wrong more often than not for a lot of black people in this country."
Oprah's special, which will continue on Wednesday, also featured appearances by Atlanta, Georgia Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, author Jennifer Eberhardt, and actor David Oyelowo, who starred in DuVernay's "Selma", alongside Winfrey.
Meanwhile, DuVernay has launched the Law Enforcement Accountability Project initiative, which will help bankroll 25 projects over the next two years that aim to focus on issues of police violence and misconduct.
