You Got to Move

You Got to Move
Directed by	Lucy Massie Phenix Veronica Selver
Produced by	Cumberland Mountain Educational Cooperative
Cinematography	Alan Dater Roger Phenix Gary Steele
Edited by	Lucy Massie Phenix
Distributed by	Milliarum Zero
Release date	1985
Running time	87 minutes
Country	United States of America
Language	English

You Got to Move is a documentary by Lucie Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver that follows people from communities in the Southern United States in their various processes of becoming involved in social change. The film’s centerpiece is the Highlander Folk School (now known as Highlander Research and Education Center), a 75-year-old center for education and social action that was somehow involved in each of the lives chronicled in the documentary.

You Got to Move features folk, country and gospel music from the Southern United States and in fact takes its name from an old spiritual.

Featured People in You Got to Move:

Bernice Robinson A black beautician who became the first teacher of a literacy program on Johns Island, off the coast of South Carolina, talks about teaching adults to read and write in order to pass voter registration requirements during the mid-1950s and 1960s throughout the Southern states.

“I will never forget Anna Vastine. She couldn’t read or write and it was the greatest reward when I had all the names up on the board one night, in jungle fashion, you know and I’d asked them could they pick their names out. Mrs. Vastine said, ‘I see my name,’ and she went down the list and she took the ruler from me and she said, ‘That’s Anna, that’s my first name.’ And then she went over on the other side up and down ‘til she found Vastine and said, ‘That’s my name, V-A-S-T-I-N-E ,Vastine.’ And goose pimples just came out all over me, because that woman couldn’t read or write when she came in there. She was 65 years old.”

Bernice Johnson Reagon A college student who participated in challenging the legality of segregated public facilities in her hometown of Albany, Georgia—a student protest that grew into one of the first city-wide mass Demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, ‘What in the world came over us,’ you know? But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us we would be dead. And when people died, we cried. And we went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like... Sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing, and when you know what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s somebody else’s job to kill you.”

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