"Meeting David Wilson" Review - Written by Mathius Mack Gertz

Title: Meeting David Wilson
Genre/Year: Documentary: 2008, USA
Director: Daniel J. Woolsey, David A. Wilson
Producer: Barion L. Grant
Writer: David A. Wilson
Starring: David A. Wilson, David B. Wilson
Running Time: 82 Minutes


Meeting David Wilson is a feature length documentary about the enduring legacy of slavery in today’s young Black society. David Wilson, a 28-year-old African-American journalist who grew up in post-riot Newark, NJ and was the first in his family to graduate from college, travels into his family’s past to find answers to America’s racial divide. Along the way, he learns of a tobacco plantation in North Carolina where his family was enslaved for three generations. David discovers that the plantation is owned by a 62-year-old white man, who is a direct descendant of his family’s slave master and is also named David Wilson. This discovery leads to an enlightening encounter between these two men who share a name and a history on opposite sides of freedom, but on the same side of the American experience. Eventually, David’s discoveries take him back further in his journey of self-discovery to Ghana, on Africa’s west coast. There he symbolically reunites his family with their ancestral homeland and discovers his own inner strength and self worth.

Using talking heads, voice-over and reenactment as well as slightly staged, reality –television-style documentary footage, Meeting David Wilson confronts the greater issue of negative self image in the African American community today; especially as it applies to young Black men. Poignantly and at times uncomfortably, the film addresses the challenge set forth by artist Paul Gaugan in his 1897 masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Music is used very effectively to weave together disparate elements and maintain a continuity between subjects and locations, present and past. Strong editing and cinematography add to the quality and continuity of the story.

Hidden from most non-African-Americans, the issue of self-loathing in the Black communities of America is the mostly unspoken foundation that has crippled their ability for advancement. The re-enactment in the film of the ‘black-doll-white doll experiment’ is eye-opening. Almost as if they suffer from a cultural and multi-generational form of post –traumatic-stress-disorder, African-Americans are still coming to grips with their history, heritage, and place in the world that is America. The only immigrant group to have been forcibly brought to North and South America, their experience is compounded by a larger society which is only just beginning to come to historical terms with its own culpability.

Meeting David Wilson is a powerful attempt to address the larger issues of identity and self-worth of immigrant minorities in a larger alien society. How to become part and parcel of that society and yet maintain ones own identity and dignity is an issue that all minority groups struggle with. Because the ‘American Experience’ is one of immigrants, there is universality to this documentaries issues and themes. Yet, it is specific to the Black Urban American experience as well. While I can see this film shown in homes of all ethnicities with a family discussion afterward, it is probably most likely to be shown in classrooms as part of MLK month or as part of a lesson on self discovery and family oral history traditions. Like The Boys of Baraka (2005) and Prom Night in Mississippi (2009), Meeting David Wilson is destined to become a staple in the arsenal of social-justice educators and progressive families. A must see. Four stars.