Film Description

Varnado's Mississippi is a feature length documentary on my African American and French European Varnado family roots.The story begins in Limoges, France with Leonard Varnado Sr., a French immigrant who immigrates from France to the Orangeburg District of South Carolina circa the year 1735. The nine Varnado children when they become of age migrate west to the Mississippi Territory where they acquire slaves. Intimate relationships ensue and this marks the beginning of a new generation of Varnados--African American Varnados-in a place called Mississippi.

The film covers a very complex set of issues surrounding the Varnado family: American patriotism, slavery, miscegenation, lynchings; and a legacy of poverty and health disparities beyond imagination. The pre-civil rights era leads the Varnado family on a collision course into the turbulent decade known as the sixties. The country was in an uproar, President Kennedy shot dead and three civil rights workers were abducted and slain in Philadelphia Mississippi. Violence spread throughout Mississippi like wildfire. When the smoke cleared--the sixties claimed the lives of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. With no where to run and no where hide.The African American Varnados of Mississippi struggled for racial equality in the midst of state government sponsored terrorism. The saga continues into the present with a crystallized understanding of who the African American Varnado's are and where there place is in American history.