Two Cemeteries, One Legacy
Clip: 10/1/2025 | 1m 38sVideo has Closed Captions
De Kirkpatrick confronts the unequal care of Black and white cemeteries.
As De Kirkpatrick walks through the well-kept cemetery where his white relatives rest, he confronts the painful contrast with the neglected Black cemetery just behind it.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Two Cemeteries, One Legacy
Clip: 10/1/2025 | 1m 38sVideo has Closed Captions
As De Kirkpatrick walks through the well-kept cemetery where his white relatives rest, he confronts the painful contrast with the neglected Black cemetery just behind it.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch A Binding Truth
A Binding Truth is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipThe first time we got together, Jimmy said, "Would you like to go see your ancestors' gravesites built on my great-great-great-great- grandfather's plantation?"
I did not know this existed.
The original cemetery is still on that land.
Time and history had not been kind.
Both of us, a black man and a white man, walked through the oldest section of the church graveyard.
It was the whites-only section.
I know my friends' people were buried in unmarked sites in the woods behind us.
There would be no headstones or slabs for them.
Even if we went looking, we wouldn't find anything to honor their place.
I stood at the edge of that fence and stared into those woods, filled with brambles, rotted trees, and a pronounced air of negligence, imagining their history, imagining their burials as my family's slaves.
Profound neglect was their headstone.
It broke my heart.
(gentle music)
Reckoning with a Painful Legacy of Enslavement
Video has Closed Captions
Clip: 10/1/2025 | 1m 49s | Jimmie Kirkpatrick confronts his family’s history of enslavement and his path to healing. (1m 49s)
Video has Closed Captions
Preview: 10/1/2025 | 30s | Former classmates reconnect after a discovery linking their ancestry. (30s)
Walking Through Charlotte’s Past
Video has Closed Captions
Clip: 10/1/2025 | 1m 45s | Jimmie Kirkpatrick recalls Charlotte’s Black community of the 1960s. (1m 45s)
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship
Support for PBS provided by: