âSon of the Southâ Review: Tale of an Alabama Activist
Sometimes absorbing, sometimes mortifyingly tone-deaf, the film dramatizes the memoir of the white civil rights figure Bob Zellner.
Lucas Till as Bob Zellner in âSon of the South.âCredit.Vertical Entertainment
Biography, Drama
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âSon of the Southâ gets off to an appalling start, with a man being dragged by two others, and then a freeze frame, accompanied by a voice-over: âThatâs me, Bob Zellner.â As the meme goes, weâre probably wondering how he ended up in this situation â being dragged toward a noose. That Bob is white and not Black is presumably supposed to make the use of this glib and much-parodied device permissible in this context. But given that lynchings have historically been directed by whites against African-Americans, the introduction is mortifyingl