By Lilly Howard

“Eroding History” is screening at the National History Society of Maryland on Aug. 14 at 7 p.m. Following the 27-minute documentary is a Q&A Meet the Filmmakers Panel with Director Andrè Chung, Co-writer and Co-producer Sean Yoes, and Co-writer and Producer Rona Kobell. 

Chung is a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, award-winning photojournalist and portrait photographer. Yoes is a 34-year professional reporter from Baltimore. Kobell is a Philip Merrill College of Journalism alumna, where she started her thesis for her master’s degree, which led her to the untold story of Deal Island. She also co-founded the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative, an organization engaging with underserved communities to address environmental inequities and increase diversity in marine science, journalism and environmental activism. 

“Eroding History” dives into the connection between systemic racism and climate change. It is centered on the Deal Island Peninsula on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where Black communities have lived and instilled their culture for centuries. 

After being emancipated, formerly enslaved individuals were given the most undesirable land on the Island: low-lying, floodable, infertile, wetland no one else wanted. The film’s mission is to highlight the issue of climate change and how it impacts people of color disproportionately, inspiring the next generation of filmmakers, according to Yoes.

From centuries of sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, and marsh migration, Deal Island has become a difficult place to live, but an even harder place to leave. 

“Land on the Eastern Shore is value…many weren’t able to maximize that because they weren’t given good land in the first place. They couldn’t grow things there then and today it’s flooding,” Kobell said. 

Out on the budding piece of land in the Chesapeake Bay, there was not much governance or oversight, so the churches became the support system for Deal Island’s Black community. The graves outside one of the churches got flooded so heavily that they rose out of the ground and floated down the road, washing away the community’s history as sea levels rise.

When Chung and Yoes observed these flooded graves, they knew they needed to tell this story because they had never seen anything like it in their careers of over 30 years in journalism. The few Black communities left on the Deal Island peninsula don’t want to leave behind their history, their family, and their home.

Deal Island ex-residents forced out of their homes due to climate change attended a recent film screening at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington D.C. earlier this summer. 

“These people gave some words to what we have been trying to do since 2011…our families moved away because the Chesapeake Bay was another environmental problem,” one attendee said. “The Chesapeake Bay became polluted and they couldn’t make a living crabbing, or pulling dredge for oysters anymore. They moved to Baltimore and didn’t come back. There was nothing to come back to.”

Registration is available for the August 14 screening to watch the film.

“Eroding History” won Best Environmental Reporting in Baltimore Magazine’s “Best of Baltimore”, Best Environmental Film at the Multi-Dimensional Film Festival in London and was a semi-finalist for Best Doc Directing at the Lonely Wolf Film Festival in London. It also got an official selection at the Loyola Environmental Film Festival in Baltimore and the Chesapeake Film Festival in Easton. 

“People on Deal Island felt that we captured their stories. That’s the most exciting thing,” Kobell said. 

Kobell was recently named an SNF AGORA Fellow at Johns Hopkins University for the 2023-2024 academic year. With this fellowship, she plans to turn her thesis into a book that delves more into the policies surrounding the deterioration of Black generational wealth on the Eastern Shore.