Review: ‘Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?’ Reckons With White Supremacy

In “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin wrote that “to accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it.” He knew that the superstitious fear of being swallowed up, the dread of giving up a fantasy of innocence, is precisely what keeps so many white Americans from confronting the uglier aspects of the nation’s legacy.

Travis Wilkerson, a documentary filmmaker whose roots are in small-town Alabama, attempts just such a reckoning in “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” The movie, a scorching and rigorous essay on memory and accountability, is neither a profession of guilt nor a performance of virtue. Though his inquiry is intensely, at times painfully personal, Wilkinson is above all concerned with unpacking the mechanisms of racial domination. The procedure is akin to performing surgery on a half-conscious subject, or digging up a buried land mine that has lost little of its explosive power.

The focus of his excavation is a killing that took place in Dothan, Alabama, in 1946, when S.E. Branch, a white shopkeeper, shot Bill Spann, a black man who was in his store. Branch, Wilkerson’s great-grandfather, was charged with first-degree murder, but no trial was ever held, and the crime faded from memory. Or rather, the memory of it was quietly and systematically suppressed. All that remains are a short newspaper article and a few photographs and home movies of the killer.

“Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” proceeds on several parallel tracks. Wilkerson returns to Alabama and tries to discover both how Bill Spann died and how he was forgotten. His investigation, accompanied by haunting images of Southern back roads and quiet houses, is punctuated by reminders that Bill Spann’s death is hardly a unique or anomalous event. The names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and other recent victims of racist violence appear on-screen, and two songs of protest loop into the soundtrack: Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout” and Phil Ochs’ “William Moore.”

That song, about a white postal worker and civil rights activist murdered on an Alabama highway in 1963, is the source of the film’s title and a part of its wider cultural context. “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” is a passionately political film, aflame with rage in spite of its director’s measured, ruminative tone of voice. It is also a horror movie, full of specters and silences and a terror that is pervasive, intimate and elusive.

Wilkerson, whose previous films include “An Injury to One” and “Far From Afghanistan,” dispenses with many of the usual techniques of historical documentary. There are a few on-camera interviews, with neighbors and relatives, but more frequently Wilkerson narrates encounters that took place off camera. And his sleuthing often leads not to moments of revelation but to dead ends and deeper mysteries. The insertion of clips from “To Kill a Mockingbird” provides a chilling and ironic counterpoint to the grim story this movie is telling. S.E. Branch is the opposite of Gregory Peck’s brave and decent Atticus Finch, and the truth about what happened to Bill Spann resists the kind of redemptive, healing conclusion that remains a cornerstone of American racial fantasy.

Instead of consolation, Wilkerson offers commitment. Instead of idealism, honesty. He doesn’t suppose that his film will solve anything, but there is nonetheless something profoundly useful about the way he confronts past and present manifestations of white supremacy. He links his great-grandfather’s crime to the contemporaneous gang rape of Recy Taylor (the subject of an excellent recent documentary by Nancy Buirski), and uncovers patterns of abuse within his family. He corresponds with a relative who is part of a white nationalist, “Southern secessionist” group. He notes the way racial injustice dwells in apparently mundane facts. The killer is immortalized in pictures and a well-kept tombstone. His victim has been almost entirely erased from memory, a kind of second death beyond the reach of redress or revenge.

The bitterness of “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” is hard to swallow, but also bracing, like a shot of strong liquor that leaves you with a clearer head and sharper senses. The movie is an antidote to the lethal innocence that, as Baldwin and others have pointed out, allows the crimes of racism to remain unpunished and often unacknowledged.

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‘Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?’

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.