Saturday, November 14, 1998

Former McMurry student produces TV special

By LORETTA FULTON

Senior Staff Writer

A television special airing at 12 noon Sunday on KTXS-TV will be special in more ways than one to a number of people in Abilene.

The show, "Hope Out of the Ashes," deals with racism and reconciliation and was produced by United Methodist Communications, with former McMurry University student Nancy Cockrell Jackson as producer.

"Basically it was my responsibility to get the show together and get the stories told," Jackson said in a telephone interview from her office in Nashville, Tenn.

Jackson, whose mother Nila Cockrell Meriwether lives in Abilene, oversaw the filming, writing, and editing of all but two of the five segments of the show. The documentary was produced by United Methodist Communications for the National Council of Churches.

The show debuted Oct. 11 on ABC affiliates nationwide, but some chose to tape it for later viewing.

"We've gotten pretty good coverage," Jackson said. "People were quite excited about it."

The one-hour documentary shows how five communities confronted inequality and how interracial contact occurs in each.

One segment tells of how a white woman, Jane Sherman, grew up in the racially segregated town of Kingsport, Tenn., during the 1950s and worked in a northern innercity during the 1960s.

She was seized by an unrelenting curiosity about years growing up in a racially segregated community.

"It was like a huge epiphany," Sherman says in the documentary, which led her to search Kingsport for her counterpart in the African-American community.

Her meeting with Pauletta Crockett Sensabaugh generated spontaneous conversation and recollections of people and places and the different circumstances of their upbringing.

"I really feel blessed," Sensabaugh says, "that we have been put together to try to discuss and try to heal from whatever the past might have been with us."

That sense of healing is something Jackson, the show's producer, hopes the audience will share.

"If more people would do that it would really help race relations," Jackson said.

Jackson has a number of McMurry ties, and she recently renewed old acquaintances during the university's 75th homecoming.

Her late father, Alby Cockrell, was a United Methodist minister in the Northwest Texas Annual Conference and a graduate of McMurry. A sister, Connie Cockrell Kaplan of Santa Monica, Calif., also graduated from McMurry.

Jackson attended McMurry two years and earned a degree from SMU. Her mother and another sister, Marsha Cockrell Hartos, both attended McMurry.

Jackson started working on the documentary last spring, with filming in April through June, editing in July and August and airing in October.

"It was a fairly longterm project," she said. "It was really a nice thing to be able to do."