Where do you fit along The Long Black Line?

The Wright, Coleman, & Shankle families are just a few that have a prominent place along the longblackline and the history of East Texas. We are looking for your stories, your genealogy, in order to help continue this narrative of African American history.

The Long Black Line Trilogy explores this history through a small lens. Instead of looking at the life and exploits of famous people, the film examines famous people and events through the oral and written history of ordinary people who lived through and were transformed by extraordinary times.

Today, the documentary is the modern equivalent of the pyramid produced for a mass audience. Events in history are moving rapidly and the amount of information that is being collected and archived is overwhelming with the advent of the internet.. We still exist within the context of our times. It is still important to us that our loved ones and those who come after us understand the scope and scale of our lives to be a lesson for those who come after us.

Within the context of our lives events unfold in the media, in our community and in our families. It is still important to us to understand and record our place in this history in order to memorialize our time in this world and explain what we did that resulted in a quality of life we would like those who come after us to be able to have. We want our lives to have a point.