[act-ma] 2/21 Film: FAIR GAME: Surviving a 1960 Georgia Lynching

[Charlie Welch]

Fair Game
NCAAA Museum screening and discussion
FAIR GAME: Surviving a 1960 Georgia Lynching
By Clennon L. King
Thursday, February 21, 2019
7:00pm
Free to the public

This Locally-Produced Documentary About a Black New Jersey Man Sentenced 
To Death in A Town Notorious for Lynching Recalls a Tragedy Too Common 
in Our History.
A new locally-produced documentary about a Black New Jersey veteran 
sentenced to death in a Georgia town notorious for lynching will help 
mark Black History Month in Boston.
The film entitled “Fair Game: Surviving A 1960 Georgia Lynching”, 
directed by Boston-based filmmaker Clennon L. King, tells the story of 
James Fair, Jr. who, in 1960, was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted and 
sentenced to Georgia’s electric chair in less than three days, for a 
rape and murder he didn’t commit.
“These were the kinds of stories I grew up hearing as a native 
Southerner,” said the Roxbury-based filmmaker, who researched, wrote and 
edited the project in Boston. “And to think this happened while JFK was 
making a White House run.”
King will introduce his 65-minute documentary Thursday, February 21, 
2019 at the Museum of the National Center of Afro American Artists 
(NCAAA), 300 Walnut Ave, Roxbury, MA 02119. King will lead a 
post-screening discussion, followed by audience Q&A. The program is free 
and open to the public.

“Fair Game: Surviving A 1960 Georgia Lynching” Trailer from 
AugustineMonica Films on Vimeo.
An award-winning Boston-based journalist and filmmaker, King dedicated 
the documentary to the 24 known Black men who were lynched in Early 
County, Georgia between 1881 and 1941, and to his father, Georgia’s 
legendary civil rights attorney C.B. King, who tried to prevent Fair 
from becoming the 25th victim.
The mother of James Fair Jr. of Bayonne, NJ visits her son on death row 
in Blakely, Georgia in 1960.

In the mid-1940s, the family of James Fair, Jr. joined the second wave 
of the Great Migration, leaving Tampa, Florida, and resettling in 
Bayonne, New Jersey, where he grew up. In May 1960, the 24-year-old Navy 
vet joined a friend from nearby Newark on a road trip home to Blakely, 
Georgia. Their arrival, however, in Early County could not have been 
more ill-timed. It coincided with the alleged rape and murder of an 
8-year-old girl, prompting local authorities to finger Fair as the fall 
guy. Less than three days later, a local judge sentenced him to 
Georgia’s electric chair, prompting Fair’s mother, Alice, to mount an 
18-month campaign that captured national headlines to save the life of 
her son.
The film features multiple national luminaries, including the 
presidential advisor Vernon Jordan, who was a young law clerk on the 
case, and White House cabinet secretary Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, who 
hailed from the town where the case unfolded.  Also featured is former 
Blakely chief of police, Charles Middleton, who offers an unvarnished 
and candid look into his own family’s suggested role in that lynching 
that took place in Early County.

“Fair Game” marks King’s second documentary. His first, the 
award-winning “Passage at St. Augustine: The 1964 Black Lives Matter 
Movement That Transformed America”, won the Henry Hampton Award of 
Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2015 Roxbury International 
Film Festival.
NCAAA Museum
300 Walnut Avenue
Roxbury MA 02119
(617) 442-8614
themuseum at ncaaa.org
Tuesday-Sunday 1:00 pm-5:00 pm

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