Loyalties

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Description

This is the poignant story of two women who discover they share two halves of a common past in the painful lineage of slave and slave holder. Carmelita Robertson, a black graduate student who worked at a museum of natural history and her co-worker, Dr. Ruth Holmes Whitehead, a white ethnologist, met for a professional lunch. First they discovered their joint interest in genealogy, then their roots in South Carolina, and then, to their dismay, a strange common thread. Almost certainly, one of Ruth's ancestors owned one of Carmelita's as a slave. As a result of this discovery, the pair decide to travel to South Carolina to unravel their linked heritage. We witness their journey through pain, resentment, embarrassment and ultimately acceptance, as each woman, in her own way, comes to terms with their shared history. A landmark film for African-American studies, women's history, and Southern history.