You Belong to Me

Accurate portrayal of southern life in the 50s and 60s. Although I was a child, the only black person I saw in 5 yrs in small town Georgia was the janitor at Rexall drug store. No one outside the situation can imagine what life was like. My "small experience" was nothing except to make me a spectator.

Wow, the comments for this films are as divided as the opinions of the people interviewed in the film. The majority of blacks interviewed saw Ruby as being a victim of the racial system in a KKK dominated Florida, where as many of the whites simply saw Dr Adams as their good ol' family doctor.

This turned out not to be what I was expecting. From its description I thought this was a dramatized version of an incident that happened in the 1950's, but it turned out to be a documentary about the incident. It tells the story of a black woman named Ruby McCollum, who killed her family doctor who had been sexually abusing her. As a documentary I thought it was a bit dry, probably because I had no real personal connection to the story and had never heard of Ruby McCollum before I watched this. Its description over-hypes this a bit. There's a reference to former jurors being "haunted" by the case, but really only one former juror (and an alternate juror at that) was featured as far as I can remember and while he certainly remembered the case he also didn't seem "haunted" by it. The nature of the relationship between Ruby and the doctor wasn't entirely clear - was it abuse or was it consensual, and there wasn't a sufficiently in depth consideration of whether consent would even have been possible between two people who were in very different positions. Ruby was - relatively speaking - a well to do black woman, although her money came from her husband's gambling operations, while the doctor had powerful political friends and a potentially promising political career. To be honest a lot of the story seemed rather muddled, although one point that was made disturbingly clear was that in the South during the Jim Crow era (which lasted up until the 1960's) black women had no power vis a vis white men. If a white man wanted a black woman, he could take her without consequences even if she was married. The powerlessness of black women (and of black men) was made starkly clear. Still, with that strong point aside, I found this to be rather disappointing and somewhat lacking in real depth. (4/10)

Many of the talking heads in the documentary provide sweeping generalizations and biased views so it is hard to trust the narrative, viewpoints or conclusions. The story they clearly want to tell is that an african american woman in the south was nothing but a victim and the person who had a relationship with her and was shot dead was nothing but a predator. In the end, the only clear truth is that the doctor and black women had a sexual relationship and she shot him dead in the back. In addition, she tried to pay off the sheriff after the fact. Those substantial facts are too significant to ignore.