Kopkind Colony

Be there tonight, Saturday, July 22, as Kopkind features the fascinating, moving, funny, profound and all-around wonderful work of Belden Hill Movie Makers, people who live and work in the immediate vicinity of the Kopkind Colony. We will screen little- or never-before-seen short work from five terrific filmmakers: Chuck Light, Mac Christopher, Olivia Wiggins, David (“Cubby”) Hall and John Scagliotti. A Home Movie Night of vast dimension!

Time: 7:30 pm

Place: The Organ Barn at Guilford, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301

This is a free public event, which concludes the Kopkind/Center for Independent Documentary Film Camp.

Back in March we announced here the death of our friend and tender comrade Kevin Alexander Gray. We said we might write more but never could summon the words. Kevin died suddenly on March 7, a shock. July 1 is his birthday. He would have been 66 today. He loved his birthday, and would sometimes send his friends presents of songs to mark the occasion. “The politics begins in the music,” he once said. That sums up the experience of a lot of people growing up his age in the Sixties. So here are some songs for him, in memory; and for everyone out there, with pleasure, because, to borrow a word he used to characterize one great, formative political experience, they are “glorious.”

Kevin was talking by Zoom to journalists and activists at Kopkind last year about what it was like to be part of a class-conscious, black-led, multi-racial, anti-imperialist, social-movement-based, barnstorming national electoral campaign. He’d been a founding member of the Rainbow Coalition, had worked for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign, and was South Carolina coordinator for the ’88 campaign. “It was glorious,” he said. It was. Andy Kopkind covered it for The Nation. Some of the magazine’s staff volunteered. Steve Cobble, Frank Watkins, Jack O’Dell, Anne Braden, Gwen Patton, Ron Walters, Kevin — people who had worked in the background — became important interlocutors for anyone, journalists especially, who was thinking about the relationship between left movements and electoral politics. An all-star band, all gone now.

He died raking leaves. Working. Outdoors, free. His heart, we think. It had been a good day, an ordinary day. He’d opened a barbecue restaurant in 2020, which he wrote about here, in “Scenes From a Pandemic,” but March 7 was a Tuesday, and the restaurant is closed on Tuesdays. He drove to a garden nursery that morning. There was a joyful ease in his voice then. He was thinking about plants. He was only a little irritated with other people. A couple of hours before he died he talked about preparing for his next phase, the next book to write, a stretch in DC. He always thought he had time. 

Sade may not have been on Kevin’s twitter page singing this particular song, but like music videos of Aretha and Prince and all the artists here, hers would pop up in his tweets, amid news of the black and left world. Anyone who died after contributing to the sweet or just side of life, especially if obscure or unsung, Kevin would recognize. Who died today? you could ask yourself. What happened on this day in (often black Southern) history? Likely, Kevin would have a tweet about that. NASA names a mountain on the moon for Melba Mouton, the mathematician at the center of Hidden Figures: Mons Mouton. Nikki Haley is being credited (or reviled) for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds; let’s remember the decades of people’s agitation and action against the flag. Jeff Beck dies; here’s his great live version of “People Get Ready,” with Rod Stewart. It’s Christmas and the anniversary of James Brown’s death; here again is Kevin’s terrific essay, “The Soul Will Find a Way,” vividly capturing the texture of life in the segregated South in which Kevin and James both grew up, the roots of the music. The scroll of his old tweets is like raw footage for a documentary of his personality and his work. “I write about what I see and experience,” Kevin states in the preface to his collection, Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. It’s what made his best writing and public talks so rich — the threads of history, personal stories, political analysis/reporting, cultural references, the mood of the streets, all interconnected. And of course, South Carolina: “You know James Jamerson came from Edisto Island, right?” (The great bass guitarist appears in the video below at 1:24 and throughout.)

Any road trip with Kevin was a musical extravaganza. He had binders of CDs, with music of all genres, which he’d curate while driving, knowing the exact location of every disk and smoothly popping it into the player. He’d been a radio deejay in his youth, and never lost the touch. He knew the words to the most obscure songs. And he was a marvelous storyteller. He seemed to know the backstory of every inch of South Carolina. His own account of burning the Confederate flag in front of the statehouse was many times told, and always landed with effect. He’d had the flag stitched to a Nazi flag, which went up dramatically. Meanwhile, the battle flag resisted the lighter fluid and the flames from mechanical clickers, as counterprotestors joyfully sang, “Our flag won’t burn, our flag won’t burn…” to the tune of “Dixie.” Finally, the hated polyester rag melted. Kevin always ended this story with a piece of advice: “If you’re going to burn a flag, make sure it’s cotton.” He moved through life as a wildly original combination of anger and optimism. A beautiful soul. Rest in power, brother.