“The Search for Anna and Levi: A Lost History of Black Homesteaders in Leelanau County” will show at Leland School on May 31—not at the hamstrung Sleeping Bear Dunes headquarters, as originally scheduled. The Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay initially screened the film in February. Northern Michigan has begun to feel like a second home for Philadelphia resident Carmen Hopson. Ever since she received a life-changing Facebook message in September 2022 from Kevin Brooks, an amateur genealogist based in Grand Rapids, who shared photos to show that their ancestors—hers Black, his White—were neighboring farm owners and pioneering homesteaders more than 100 years ago along Little Glen Lake. “It feels like we’re coming home. This is a place where we will be welcomed home,” said Hopson. The National Lakeshore decided that it could no longer host the screening following the Trump administration’s March 27 executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that cast this nation’s collective reexamination of historical racism as a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
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In September 2022, two Black women from Philadelphia opened a life-changing Facebook message from a White man in Grand Rapids. Kevin Brooks reached out to cousins Carmen Hopson and Coleen Burton with his discovery that their families were inextricably linked more than 100 years ago in Empire Township. The relationship was not born of freed slaves still economically dependent on their former owners, nor were they hired live-in employees. Rather, the respective families of Joseph Payment and Anna and Levi Johnson were neighboring farm owners and pioneering homesteaders along Little Glen Lake who forged a friendship born of necessity and steeped in mutual respect. What transpired from that visit and a subsequent one evolved into the documentary The Search for Anna and Levi. Subtitled “A Lost History of Black Homesteaders in Leelanau County” it was written and directed by Joe VanderMeulen, a local science journalist and documentary filmmaker. In honor of Black History Month, a special preview screening of the film The Search for Anna and Levi will take place on Sunday, Feb. 23, at 2 pm at The Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay.
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