“Fair Game: Surviving A 1960 Georgia Lynching” – Documentary Film & Discussion

Directed by Clennon King (USA, 2018, 63 min.). Digital.

Five years after Emmett Till, a Black New Jersey mother moved heaven and earth to rescue her son from a town notorious for lynching. Fair Game tells the story of 24-year-old Navy vet James Fair Jr. of New Jersey joined a friend on a road trip home. But their arrival in segregated Early County, Georgia, could not have been more ill-timed. It coincided with the alleged rape and murder of an 8-year-old Black girl, prompting authorities to finger Fair as the fall guy. Less than three days later, with no jury present or lawyer to defend him — no physical evidence, autopsy, or court transcript — a judge set a date for Fair with Georgia’s electric chair. That was all Fair’s mother, Alice, needed to hear to month what became an unrelenting 26-month campaign in the fight for her son’s life.

Roxbury-based filmmaker Clennon L. King dedicates the documentary to the 24 Black men who known to have been lynched between 1881 and 1960 in Early County, Georgia, and to his father, Georgia’s legendary civil rights attorney C. B. King, who tried to prevent Fair from becoming the 25th victim.

Followed by a discussion with the director.