America Against Itself: A Time for Burning (Again)

Ernie Chambers and Rev. Bill Youngdahl in “A Time for Burning” (1966). Photo: Bill Jersey.

In 1966, the legendary documentary filmmaker Bill Jersey, one of the pioneers of cinema verité, made a film about an all-white Lutheran church in Omaha, Nebraska, whose idealistic pastor was trying to arrange a visitation between his parishioners and those of a local all-black Lutheran church. Yet even that mild idea ignited a firestorm within his congregation. The visit never took place and the pastor was fired.

Jersey’s hour-long documentary A Time for Burning, shot on 16mm black & white film in the fly-on-the-wall style that he shared with other innovators like Fred Wiseman, the Maysles, the NFB, and others, was nominated for an Academy Award. It is a stunning chronicle of that affair and a searing portrait of deeply ingrained racism in America.

The tragic thing is, the events it documents are as topical today as they were 54 years ago.

(You can see the film online here. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently created a new master, which will soon be available for streaming via Lutheran Film Associates.)

Bill Jersey was the right man to make that film. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian family in Queens, he had been taught that every word of the Bible was the literal truth. After serving in the Navy in World War II and studying painting at Wheaton College and…