Ken Burns’ film project to feature Black Alexandria historical figure

Filmmakers Ken Burns and Erika Dilday, along with a production team from Burns’ Florentine Films, have been working on a film project that tells the history of Black Americans from the Emancipation to Reconstruction to the Great Migration. One of Alexandria’s own historical figures and a local high school will have a part in that story.

The story of Alexandria’s own J.B. Lafargue, founder of Peabody High School and an advocate for the Black community, will be part of that 3-4 part documentary series, “Emancipation to Exodus” set to air on PBS in 2027.

“We’ve been thinking about this project for decades, actually. And that’s trying to tell the story of Reconstruction, which is one of the most misunderstood periods in American history,” said Burns in a phone interview.

Clark Burnett, associate producer at Florentine Films, spoke to the Rotary Club of Alexandria about the project on Tuesday and people in town like historians Michael Wynne and Charles Charrier who have been helping him.

The crew also plans to film Lafargue’s gravesite, the Red River and other locations in the area.

“I’ve been so grateful to be working with people like Charles and Michael Wynne who brought me to J.B. Lafargue’s grave this morning,” said Burnett. “Michael was so gracious as to actually find J.B. Lafargue’s grave. This wasn’t something that we actually knew where it was. We knew it was likely somewhere in Pineville or Alexandria. We didn’t have an exact location. So with the help of many people here on the ground – Michael namely – we actually found the location.

While they are here, they are looking to do more research about Lafargue.

A production crew will arrive Thursday in Central Louisiana to line up interviews with people who have stories or mementoes of their family’s history from this period in U.S. history. Those interested in sharing stories can email exodus@florentinefilms.com. They will also be focusing on Peabody Magnet High School and talking to those connected to the school and filming homecoming events this weekend.

“In just about every film that Ken does, along with the history and the research that we do about what happened in the time of the historic events, we really like to have some stories that carry across time and let our viewers, our audiences, know about real people and who they were and what they did,” said Dilday in a phone interview. She is working on this film alongside Burns.

She said it also a more interesting way to present facts and it makes history more tangible.

“How did it affect someone? Where did they move because of this? So, that’s what we’re doing with this,” said Dilday.

“Americans are super good at sanitizing their history. They’re super good at changing it. They’re super good at just taking sort of conventional ideas about it. And this is the most misunderstood period of our history. And so we’re really obligated to tell a more complex story about it and an individual story almost paradoxically, can provide you with that entry to be able to do that,” said Burns.

Lafargue’s story caught the production team’s attention after Josie Abugov, a Harvard graduate, wrote a thesis concerning mixed-race inheritance. Abugov’s thesis advisor Tiya Miles shared the history with them.

Lafargue was the son of an enslaved woman and a Confederate soldier named Arnold D. Lafargue. The state challenged his half-siblings’ claims to his estate after his death. The case went up to the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1949 in State vs. DeLavallade. Abugov’s thesis advisor Tiya Miles shared the history with them.

Abugov is Lafargue’s great-great grandniece through her maternal side of the family. She was born and raised in Los Angeles as were her mother and grandmother. Lafargue had no children.

While writing her thesis, she learned about her roots in Alexandria and Marksville and her connection to Lafargue and the DeLavallade family.

“It’s really exciting and I think it’s such an important story to be telling,” said Abugov in a phone interview. “I think as I was doing the research, it was really astonishing and interesting to find out all of the great work and accomplishments that they had done.”

Much of what she learned wasn’t centralized in stories that she knew growing up as a member of the family and she didn’t learn it in school and telling stories like this one is important.

“We’re trying to engineer a story that backs up a little bit to the beginning of Emancipation and goes forward to the beginning of the Great Migration at the end of the 1910s – what is the beginning of a six-decade-long migration of African Americans out of the South for the obvious reasons of Jim Crow and other indignities,” said Burns.

They like to tell a bottom-up history and not just a top-down history, said Burns. Being drawn to the story of Abugov and her ancestors and also to other stories gives people a sense of being there and of real lives being engaged.

“That gives people, I think, a place to find common ground. And the stories that, we’re very early in our process, that we’re just unearthing and discovering are really great. And not the least is finding out just the unbelievable story of Josie you know finding the extent to which her family was deeply involved in this extremely complicated story,” said Burns.

Abugov came to Alexandria to do research last year. Since her family moved to Los Angeles back in the 1920s, she doesn’t know who she might be related to around here. Lafargue’s half-sister Mary moved to Los Angeles in 1921 as part of the Great Migration, said Burnett.

Abugov is hopeful that on this trip she will be able to speak to more people who might have known of some of her ancestors. The production crew plans to follow her and her as she participates in Peabody’s events in sort of a full circle moment connecting the Reconstruction period to the existence of Peabody as a high school today, said Burnett. Others related to Lafargue will be in the film as well.

“On a more personal note, returning in more of a community this time, and being with the group of people and speaking to people more about this history, I think it feels full circle in the sense that it’s showing the interconnectedness of this story,” said Abugov who now lives in Louisiana.

“I think often we think of history as something, ‘Oh, that happened a long time ago. It has nothing to do with that today,’” said Dilday. “Which of course it does.”

People are forced to look at those connections in the present day that were foraged a long time ago because history connects us all, said Dilday.

This article originally appeared on Alexandria Town Talk: Ken Burns’ film project to feature Black Alexandria historical figure