Trouble Behind

Trouble Behind is a chillingly relevant documentary that unpacks how the present and past are tied in a fearful knot as it searches for the origins of modern systemic  racism through the historical brutality of a seemingly typical American town - Corbin, Kentucky, famously known as the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Like many industrial centers, Corbin attracted African American sharecroppers looking for better paying jobs during World War I. But when white veterans returned from the war, they found their close-knit community changed, and economic competition rapidly intensified. One October night in 1919, an armed white mob rounded up 200 Black railroad workers, locked them into boxcars, beat many of them, and literally railroaded them out of town.

Interviews with eyewitnesses, scholars, newsreel clips and photos reconstruct the events in Corbin, placing that night in the national context of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the triumph of Jim Crow segregation, and 28 major race riots.

For decades following the incident, Corbin remained an effectively all-white town.  This film captures how residents denied the town's "whites only" reputation,evading the town's history through a haunting ritual of selective memory and collective forgetting. “Blacks, have chosen to live elsewhere,” says one white resident.

Trouble Behind evokes attitudes commonly found today in many all-white towns and suburbs, demonstrating how racism is passed down from generation to generation. Most of all, it shows that our refusal to confront the past cripples our ability to build an inclusive future.