Bay Area filmmaker tells complicated history of slave-owning relative in documentary

When Rachel Knight started looking into her family’s genealogy, she came across a history her grandmother had typed years before, and a shocking discovery.

The history detailed how she and her brother, Jonathan Knight, were descendants of Maj. Richard Bibb, a significant slave and land owner in Kentucky who on his death bed in the 1800s emancipated dozens of his enslaved people. They inherited land, tools, houses and money — the resources needed to establish themselves as free Blacks in America.

It’s a story and a relative they had never heard about. As the siblings started to do more research, they began to realize how complicated history can be, especially depending on who is telling it.

“We found this connection through the daughter of Richard Bibb, and my grandmother had written in there a blurb about freeing the enslaved people,” Jonathan Knight, of San Anselmo, says. “I think she treated it well but it was interesting it was treated as this purely altruistic act and instead of highlighting that we had slaveholders in our family history. He was very old when he wrote his will, so it’s hard to recognize his dying act with a whole lifetime of exploitation.

“Then what we ended up discovering through the oral histories and documentation was that he was the father of a number of his enslaved people who he owned, so that again really complicates the story,” he says. “You have to parse out all these different aspects and think it was good that he decided to free people, but how on earth could he also be raping people he enslaved and fathering children with them?”

This discovery became the catalyst for his documentary “Invented Before You Were Born,” which will be screened online at 7 p.m. Monday as part of this year’s Tiburon International Film Festival.

Hidden stories

The documentary culminates with a reunion of the descendants of those who had been enslaved and the White descendants of Bibb. With the help of co-producer and historian Le Datta Grimes, they delve into the area’s history, speak to residents and descendants as well as highlight historian and Russellville, Kentucky, native Michael Morrow’s efforts in the community, including helping create the SEEK Museum, which is dedicated to telling the hidden stories of the struggles for emancipation and equality in Kentucky. A portion of the film’s proceeds will benefit the museum.

While he’s spent more than 20 years working in the film industry in visual effects, including for big-budget films like in the Harry Potter and Star Wars series, this is the first film Knight has produced and directed. It first screened a few months ago in a church at Russellville, Kentucky.

“It was important for me to share it with the community that we filmed it in,” Knight says. “A lot of people came up to me afterward and said how much it meant to them, how they felt it was really their community, which is sort of the best thing I could hear. My hope and goal was to be true to the people who I met there. I feel like after showing it to the community, everything else is frosting on top, I am just happy to be able to share it now.”

Shocking events

The film might not have happened if the Knights hadn’t watched the deadly violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when hundreds of White nationalists and their supporters gathered for a rally over plans to remove a Confederate statue.

“As most people, I found those events really shocking,” he says. “I think they brought to light a lot of racial tension that we had been ignoring for a long time, I know I certainly was. And my sister was feeling the same thing and we were getting a little bit of a family conversation going about what can we do to address racial justice more in our lives.”

Not long after, Rachel Knight began looking into their family history.

“She found this ancestor of ours and she brought it to me and said, this might be a way for us to access addressing this story, this despair that we are feeling over the state of racism and racial justice in our country,” he says.

In the spring of 2018, they went to the community to learn more and see this historic area for themselves, thinking maybe they’d turn their family story into a historical piece. After meeting with Grimes, however, they knew it was more than that — it was a narrative “that was very much alive today.”

Becoming an insider

“I came into this story as a definite outsider and in the process, really found myself becoming more of an insider to the whole story and that hopefully comes across in the film,” he says. “We are White and initially, we weren’t approaching it as this was our story. Through a lot of conversations, and including people in the community in them, it’s really a story that involves both sides, the White descendants of this enslaver and the Black descendants of the people who were enslaved.”

It was important that they weren’t afraid to shy away from the history and be able to have tougher conversations, he says.