An unlikely meeting:

By Heather J. Smith
Media General News Service
David Wilson had questions, and the answers led him from New York City to Reidsville, N.C., and to ... David Wilson.
Their story, “Meeting David Wilson” will be told in a documentary Friday at 9 p.m. on MSNBC.
The film follows the unlikely meeting of two men. Reidsville’s David Wilson owns Short Sugar’s Drive-In on Scales Street. The other David Wilson is a young black man from New Jersey.
The thread connecting them is the relationship between their great-grandfathers. In the 1800s, Ruben Wilson was a slave belonging to John Wilson, who owned the Sunrise Plantation in Caswell County.
As a child in Newark, N.J, young David Wilson wondered why it was virtually impossible to find an aspect of his neighborhood not touched by violent crime, drug abuse or poverty. He grew up in the ghetto.
There were no opportunities for good jobs, few opportunities for work of any kind, no safety, no guarantee of a good education and little hope.
Wilson saw that hopelessness in the faces of the black men and women in Newark.
“I asked these questions when I was a child, when I saw violence and hopelessness and poverty in an impoverished neighborhood,” Wilson said. “Why do we live like this?”
His parents encouraged him and his 10 siblings to set goals and achieve them, even while other young black men joined gangs, dealt drugs, killed each other on the streets or spent their youth in prison.
He grew up, graduated from college and moved to New York City to be a researcher for the CBS news program “48 Hours.” At 28, Wilson asked the same questions he did as a child. But he was no closer to an answer.
Three years ago, he decided to ask, and not to stop asking until he found answers.   
“The question really didn’t start off as such a large question,” Wilson said. “I wanted to answer my questions, not necessarily make a documentary. But I realized what kind of hard questions I was trying to find answers for as I looked through my family history and found stories of incredible strength.”
A friend, filmmaker Dan Woolsey, encouraged Wilson to turn the experience into a documentary. The men quit their jobs and dedicated the next few years to research, filming and fundraising.
Wilson began with his own past, tracing his family back to distant cousins in Caswell County. Through their conversations, Wilson was stunned to learn many family members live only miles away from Sunrise Plantation, where his ancestors were kept as slaves. His great-great grandfather, the Rev. Ruben Wilson, was the last ancestor to be kept as a slave. After he was freed, Ruben Wilson founded several existing black churches in Caswell County.
“It happened in the past, but this history that we think happened so long ago wasn’t so long ago,” Wilson said. “It was only a couple of generations back.”
He learned the house still stood and was owned by another man named David Wilson. Nervous but determined, Wilson decided that meeting this descendant of slave owners was something he had to face.
In 2005, Reidsville’s David Wilson was working at Short Sugar’s when he picked up the phone and was introduced to David Wilson. He remembers a strong male voice nervously say, “I think your family once owned my family.”
Reidsville’s Wilson said he paused before saying, “That may be so.”
He knew since his childhood growing up in Yanceyville that his ancestors owned a slave plantation, but he did not understand the full magnitude of slave suffering until he reached adulthood. 
“(Family history) was not really discussed that much when I was coming up,” Wilson said. “I knew my family had once owned slaves, but I didn’t really know what that meant until I got older.”
Life was segregated. Blacks and whites had separate water fountains, restrooms, lunch counters and schools. That separation was all the Reidsville’s Wilson knew.
“There are very serious things that don’t impact you until you get out in the world,” he said.
The awareness that this past was a reality was driven home earlier than New York Wilson’s call; it was not Reidsville Wilson’s first encounter with descendants of former slaves.
“Years before, a minister here in Reidsville by the name of Charles Wilson did some research and traced his line to Caswell County and Sunrise Plantation,” Wilson said. “I had conversations with him, so when David called me one day out of the blue, it was not something I was completely unfamiliar with.”
A series of phone calls were made between Reidsville and New York, as Wilson explained why he asked the question and why he needed the other’s help to answer it.
“It was really a stab in the dark for him,” Reidsville’s Wilson said. “He just made this phone call and he didn’t know if the person on the other end would be willing to work with him or might be highly prejudiced.” 
Wilson made the trip to North Carolina, and the two spent hours talking. New York’s Wilson asked Reidsville’s Wilson questions he admitted he had no answers for. Reidsville’s Wilson wondered about some of the questions himself. Some were beyond his control, yet he answered the best he could.
“I very much wanted to answer what I could,” Reidsville’s Wilson said. “David was 28 years old and had left his job at CBS to make this, and that really made an impression on me that this was very important.”
“It is possible to have a conversation about it,” New York’s Wilson said. “People can do it, just like the conversation Dave and I had. We didn’t always agree, but we knew how to disagree agreeably.”
In three years, Wilson made several trips to North Carolina, ate many Short Sugar’s barbeque plates, organized a family reunion between the Wilsons of Newark and the Wilsons of Caswell County and traveled to his ancestor’s homeland of Ghana.
He and the crew interviewed young black men and women about their self-identity. They heard stories about poverty, fear, hopelessness and lack of direction. But Wilson found one common feeling among them - they feared no matter how strong their will to succeed, the world would see only their skin color.
After hundreds of hours filming and editing, Wilson and Woolsey had little trouble getting the attention of MSNBC and sponsorship from Ford Motor Co. Wilson said he was amazed, considering he left a major network to make the film.
Though he feels there are many other questions to answer, New York’s Wilson hopes the film speaks to everyone, and everyone will join the conversation.
“This is not a black film. It’s an American film,” he said. “Slavery had a very strong role in our nation’s history, but we wrestle with talking about it. Slavery can still be seen in problems facing our people today, and we must find a way to talk about it if we are to ever move forward.”
Staff writer Heather J. Smith can be reached at or 623-2155, ext. 15.