Are there many negroes where we’re going?
Of course. You remember your cousin Hazel, don't you?
Cousin Hazel and a whole mess of our folks out here. Live in Watts.
What’s Watts?
Not as nice as where we’re going.
-Not as white as where we’re going. -Hey.
The first season of our anthology series follows the Emory family.
Takes place in 1953.
And in the wake of a rather devastating tragedy,
this family moves from North Carolina to Compton, California,
when Compton was really lily-white.
Obviously, things don’t go well from there.
They’re treated with the ire and the sort of suspicion and the hatred,
bald-faced hatred, of their neighbors.
Though as that sort of tension outside begins to build,
what we see inside the house
is that each family member is dealing with immense trauma.
And it’s created cracks and fissures within each of them
for something malevolent to enter.
So it’s really about a family battling forces both outside and inside their home,
and inside themselves.
How did this show come to be?
Honestly I started writing it about three summers ago.
During a summer where I felt like I would never stop waking up
to cell phone footage of Black folks-- men, women, children, families--
being terrorized, frankly, in some fashion.
Watched, surveilled, followed.
It could be a UPS driver just doing his job
and, "why are you here? I’m calling the police."
Black family having a cookout,
"Why are you here, I’m calling the police!"
And I wanted to explore terror.
And I wanted to give an audience member
the feeling of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that gaze, 24/7.
That was one half of it.
The other half is, I wanted to explore the “American Dream”.
Who has gotten the keys to it, who has not gotten the keys to it and why.
And there’s no more American dream than the dream of home ownership, right?
The land of one’s own, a home of one’s own,
it’s a part of the American dream.
But that dream has been anything but for those of us who look like me.
It’s been a nightmare.
There is something wrong with this place, Henry.
I can feel it.
Something rotten.
Tell me you believe me.
I’ve always loved 1960's and 1970's
domestic horror, domestic thriller, psychological and supernatural horror.
Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie,
The Shining-- well that’s 1980.
Straw Dogs, Deliverance.
Movies that just push the audience to the limits.
And what was really emotional for me about this experience was,
all of those movies I just mentioned... Folks who look like me? Never.
Never populate the center of the frame.
We’re the driver, we’re the nanny, we’re the housekeeper, we’re the maid.
We’re always at the margins of those frames.
And so what’s incredibly cathartic for me,
was in a frame, classic frame, here was Deborah Ayorinde
and Ashley, just the center of the frame!
Black and beautiful and dazzling!
The young kid who used to watch these movies
never knew that he was actually being erased.
'Cause he never saw himself.
He never saw people who looked like him.
So how cathartic, like, this many years later
to create a story and have this Black family
at the heart of the kinds of domestic thrillers
I’ve loved since I was a kid.
Why Compton?
Truly because I was the first person on the show
to have the, "Wow, I never knew" factor
that you look for when you’re a storyteller.
You look to actually be surprised first
and then you hope to surprise others.
So the sad fact about it was,
I could’ve put this anywhere across the Southland:
Pacoima, Glendale, Hancock Park.
When Nat King Cole and his family moved into Hancock Park in 1948,
he and his family were subjected
to many of the same terrors that the Emory’s experience.
So I could’ve put it anywhere.
I could’ve put it in Chicago; Lansing;
Levittown, Pennsylvania; Rosedale, New York.
It would’ve been the same story.
Because anywhere Black folks tried to integrate
what had formerly been white communities,
they were treated to some of these same sorts of behaviors and tactics.
Compton was really, sort of, a light bulb moment for me,
because it does represent a very sort of iconically Black place
in the imagination.
We think of it musically, culturally, pop-culturally.
So as I was digging in and just beginning my research,
I went okay, not only has it not always been iconically Black,
but sixty, seventy years ago it was really lily-white
and oh, my God-- actually East Compton was not only white
but virulently white,
like, they were super protective of their whiteness and of their block.
So as I discovered all of this about Compton,
I realized it was sort of like a microcosm
for post-war race and real estate across the US.
And I knew we'd found our home.
Go and show 'em how we do.
What I would like people to be curious about when they watch this show
is that segregation is not a word from the past.
I think there's a tendency to think of it as something from another era,
and the truth is we're living it now every single day.
At the federal level, at the state level, at the local level.
And this began way, way, way back.
In the 1930's
the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration,
has color coded maps.
And these maps determine where they're gonna put funding,
where they won't.
Who gets low interest mortgages,
who gets longer payout periods, who does not.
And it was always green-coded neighborhoods: white,
red-coded neighborhoods, or redlined: Black, right?
Or Brown, or anybody else who wasn't white.
And what happens as a result of that,
you don't-- You're not allowed into a system
where you benefit from any kind of intergenerational wealth.
A house in 1950 that cost ten thousand dollars,
it accrues over time, right?
So you're looking at a house today
that's three, four, five hundred thousand dollars.
But if you've been shut out of those systems from the beginning,
it creates a massive deficit.
As we see with the intergenerational wealth gap
that happens in this country.
You also have covenantry.
Now even though covenants, which were racially restricted codes
that allowed for people to just openly discriminate.
We will not have Black folks here, we will not have Jewish folks here,
we will not have Mexican folks here,
it will only be white.
It starts on the page,
and in 1948 in the Shelley vs. Kraemer case,
it was a big civil rights case, they struck down covenants.
It's like I told you, Mr. Emory,
covenants are no longer legally enforceable.
You knew.
It doesn't mean anything.
A little red ink and those words disappear.
But guess what it didn't strike down,
was people doing it under the table, right?
So it never really went away.
What was really fascinating to me to discover
was this cabal of forces
that create a discriminatory atmosphere.
It's real estate brokers who are creating sort of blockbusting scenarios.
Move just one Black family into a decent white neighborhood,
and the other homeowners will throw money at you faster than you can count it.
The city would approve
any new Southland Trust development in East Compton
once all the original owners have sold.
They create this atmosphere of a panic selling environment.
White folks are like, "I gotta get out of here."
They sell it at any cost they can get,
they move, which is called white flight.
Black family moves in and then the price goes up.
You're charging Negroes more than twenty percent?
There's no way anyone can get out from under that.
I think it's time that we actually have a real conversation
about what these things have been.
As a person who loves America,
I have to be able to hold two conflicting ideas in my head at once, right?
So there's the idea of America, which we all love.
The idea of a place where true democracy--
Where we can all come together,
no matter of race and creed and build another way.
There is nothing more beautiful and noble than that.
At the same time I have to be able to hold the truth of America.
And the fact of the matter is, it has not been that.
Who said Compton's theirs, huh?
They think everything's theirs.
Yeah, well that shit stops here.
I'm tired of running when they want us to run.
They will never take from us again.