Inspired by Matthew Van Meter’s “non-fiction novel” Deep Delta Justice, Nancy Buirski’s documentary, A Crime on the Bayou depicts a series of systemic and systematic wrongs committed against two vastly different men, the Black Gary Duncan and the Jewish Richard Sobol.

The film’s release is timed to this year’s Juneteenth commemoration of the end of slavery announced in Texas in 1865, the last Confederate state to formally adopt President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation.

Crime on the Bayou can be considered to be the third panel in director Buirski’s trilogy about racial injustice, which also includes The Loving Story (2011) and The Rape of Recy Tyalor (2017).

The tale begins in 1966, in Louisiana, focusing on Gary Duncan, a Black youngster of 19, who is accused by a White kid of intentional assault. Duncan’s defense against the false accusation, assisted by Civil Rights attorney Richard Sobol, aimed to demonstrate the broader dimensions of the inherent inequities of the Jim Crow South.

The film’s main issue is Duncan’s defense against “the system of pretend law,” as attorney Armand Derfner calls it, controlled by the Plaquemines Parish’s segregationist District Attorney, Leander Perez.

As a boy, Duncan earned a living by trawling with his father by boat for fish and shrimp. While driving to the hospital to pick up his wife and newborn son, he runs into his cousin and nephew leaving their recently integrated public school.

Suddenly, a bunch of White teenagers began following the Black men. Trying to deescalate the potentially violent confrontation, Duncan got out of his car and touched lightly the elbow of one of the White kids.

As a result of the boy’s complaint to his father, and the latter’s anger, Duncan was blamed for “slapping” the White boy. Emotional, barely holding back his tears, he recalls vividly the night when his mom called to say there was a warrant for his arrest on a charge of cruelty to a juvenile, and the moment the police arrived. “They wanted to use me as an example for the rest of the Blacks,” says Duncan, who turned himself in the next day.

Though he pleaded not guilty and the charge was dropped, he swiftly was targeted with a new charge: assault and battery. “I realized they were really after me,” he says.

The documentary uses this case to show the random and arbitrary nature of violence in the South. “The essence of the Southern system in those days was total control – control of Black people and White people,” Armand Derfner, a civil rights attorney, says. “If a White person thought differently, they’d find the law on them, too.” “We didn’t have no rights,” Duncan says in his defense, knowing the indifference and careless attitude of the White residents toward their Black neighbors.

But Duncan was not exactly passive or obedient and was determined to fight back with the voluntary assistance of Sobel. A young attorney at the prestigious law firm of Arnold, Fortas and Porter. Sobel, like many of his peers, had traveled several times to the South via the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC) to improve the legal defense of Black people against the region’s deeply held and well-recorded level of prejudice.

The director includes two interviews with Sobol, the first of which is more revelatory because it took place in 2011 when the lawyer was in better health and could articulate more clearly the details. Sobol and Duncan teamed against Leander Perez, a corrupt Democratic political boss, demanding that Duncan’s rights be upheld, and refusing to take the easier way out of a plea deal.

Plaquemines Parish was the fiefdom of the vicious Perez from the 1920s until his death in 1969. Perez is heard in a series of inflammatory racist comments, such as, “We are not surrendering our schools.”  He also claims at one point that the brains of Black people are “biologically smaller.”

During the trial, other racist comments are made, sort of spontaneously. While testifying in court, one White kid points his finger at Duncan and calls him “boy. What followed were a series of legal skirmishes, with one court eventually concluding that charges repeatedly pursued against Duncan amounted to “malicious prosecution.”  

In addition to Duncan’s legal battle, there is another case of Perez versus Sobol, accusing the latter of unlawfully practicing law by defending Duncan. And as if those two were not enough, there is a third trial in which Perez charges Duncan again with a crime.

One of the documentary’s interesting, if not central, concerns is the alliance between Jewish and Black people, illustrating how the prevalent antisemitism during and after WWII made many Jews more sensitive to the plight of their Black fellow Americans.

Viewers will also learn of the existence of a rather powerful black law firm, Collins, Douglas, and Elie, and their indefatigable efforts in the South. The interviews with the sons of Collins and Elie describe in detail the ever-present fear of death by Black citizens.

If the nominal crime in the documentary’s apt title, A Crime on the Bayou, concerns the particulars of Duncan’s accusation, there is no doubt that the filmmakers consider the racism committed against him (and other Blacks) as the real – and very much persistent – crime.

While Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” plays in the background, Duncan describes his serious thoughts of committing suicide, an “option” that, at the time, was deemed better than to go back to jail – again.

As is known, the trial eventually reached the Supreme Court as Duncan vs. Louisiana and is documented in the film by audio of those proceedings.

Though its central case occurred over 50 years ago, the documentary feels very contemporary. Buirski began making it before the Black Lives Matter movement got underway, and before George Floyd’s killing, a year ago. And while Duncan was not physically abused by police, it was the policing and the legal systems that caused the various injustices. What’s worse, the authorities felt they had a right to do it, and were sparked to do it by a White supremacist power broker.

There are other unfortunate parallels between past and present. Newsreel of the 1965 Hurricane Betsy’s devastating impact, in which African Americans wade through floodwaters, with their homes submerged and belongings lost, inevitably draws comparison to the tragedy of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.

Contrary to common sense, the documentary ends on a hopeful note by showing Duncan, who has become head of the Organized Seafood Association of Alabama, living an honest family life. And it’s also a tale of a touching bond: Duncan and Sobol maintained a friendship for decades – until Sobol’s death in 2020.