44 Miles: On Watching My Omaha
When documentary takes you unexpected places.
by Floyd Webb
I did not want to see this film.
When I first read the synopsis of My Omaha — a young white filmmaker returns to Omaha, Nebraska, to document its racial justice movement while reconciling with his dying Trump-supporting father — I felt the familiar weight of a story I thought I already knew. The well-meaning white liberal. The teachable moment. The tears. The festival circuit. The warm applause.
I almost let that cynicism win.
What stopped me was a single word: Omaha.
Because Omaha is the birthplace of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm Little. Malcolm X. And I put respect on his name. I am not a Muslim. I was taught respect.
And 44 miles away sits Nebraska City, where John Brown ran part of the Underground Railroad through Nebraska soil, moving human beings from bondage toward freedom through caves, safe houses, and the specific American darkness that makes such journeys necessary.
Malcolm and John Brown never met. History did not arrange it that way. But the ground between them has been asking the same question of every person who has walked it since:
What are you willing to do?
Nick Beaulieu decided to make My Omaha.
Any film planted in that soil — whether it knows it or not — is growing in ground that has been demanding an answer for a very long time.
The ground between Malcolm X’s birthplace and John Brown’s Cave has been asking the same question for generations: What are you willing to do?
My father was born in 1936 in the Mississippi Delta. He came back from Vietnam and once told one of my white friends, “If you’re hanging around with my son and your people come for him, they’ll probably hang you on the same tree.” Then he laughed and walked away. He never explained himself. He did not have to.
Only my friend Joh Hoffman got the joke.
That joke — that laugh — is my critical instrument. It is the straight razor I inherited. My father was describing something he had known since Mississippi, since before Vietnam, since before he ever put it into words. He was describing what I call the two noose syndrome.
The first noose has a long and documented American history. It has been waiting for Black men and women since before this country had a name for itself.
The second noose is less discussed. It does not wait for people who love Black people. Not for allies. Not for fellow travelers. Not for people with their declared intentions and borrowed politics.
It waits for something simpler and more threatening than all of that.
It waits for people who stop confirming whiteness.
My father knew that when he walked away laughing. Joh Hoffman understood it when everyone else in the room just heard a punchline. I bring that understanding with me into every film about race in America. I brought it into My Omaha.
Nick Beaulieu saw a divide and felt he needed to do something. So he picked up a camera. That is all the intent a documentary filmmaker needs at the beginning. Because every honest documentarian knows this: you have your intent until the story takes over. Once the film becomes alive, you hold on for your life and trust that what finds you is more important than what you were looking for.
Nick was looking for the divide in Omaha.
What found him was his father dying. What found him was Leo Louis II already standing in the middle of North Omaha doing the work that needed doing whether a camera showed up or not.
Nick held on.
That decision — to hold on rather than retreat to the safety of his original thesis — is what made this film worth watching.
The second noose waits for people who stop confirming whiteness.
I have spent decades building a taxonomy of racists. Not as an academic exercise, but as a survival skill. When I watched Nick move through Omaha, I imagined the terrain he would inevitably face.
There are the virulent ones, who announce themselves and require almost no interpretation.
There are the closeted liberals, more emotionally expensive, who want credit for their discomfort and will praise courage while risking nothing themselves.
There are the confused ones, sometimes salvageable, sometimes simply dangerous in a softer register.
There are the social pact racists, the ones who go along because the room requires it. These are the people who keep the machinery running quietly. West Omaha is full of them. Every American suburb is full of them.
And then there are the ideologues and the bosses — the ones with architecture, the ones who have built systems around their beliefs or who are the system itself. These are the ones I save my worst ire for. They do not show up at community meetings. They show up in budgets. In policy. In the funding cuts that dismantle the work people like Leo have spent years building.
Nick is up against all of them. Every filmmaker who points a camera at race in America is up against all of them.
But Nick made a different choice. He did not go looking for the machinery. He went home. He centered the film on his father. And in doing so, he found something more instructive and more human than a direct confrontation with the infrastructure would have produced.
He found Randy.
Nick Beaulieu does not look like trouble. No tattoos, no affectation, no costume of radicalism. He looks like exactly what he is: a young white man from Omaha who does not yet know enough.
In another filmmaker that might be disqualifying. In Nick it becomes a strange kind of bravery. He is not performing allyship. He is not costuming himself as someone who belongs in North Omaha. He walks in as himself — uncertain, curious, willing.
Saint Clair Bourne, the great documentary filmmaker, once told me that every filmmaker’s first film is the realization of who they are, the first step on a path.
Nick Beaulieu did not make a film about Omaha.
Nick Beaulieu made a film about Nick Beaulieu discovering that he does not know what Omaha is.
That is exactly what a first film should do.
“Malcolm X once said that white Americans who truly wanted to confront racism needed to go among their own people and do that work. In My Omaha, Nick Beaulieu turns his camera toward home, sitting across from his dying father and discovering that the distance between love, inheritance, and ideology is far more complicated than he imagined.”
And then there is Leo Louis II.
Leo is what happens when a community refuses to abandon itself. Charismatic, intelligent, deeply rooted, he knows North Omaha the way a man knows his own bloodstream. He walks those streets like he owns them because, in the truest sense, he does — not by deed or title, but by commitment, by presence, by the daily decision to stay and fight when leaving would have been easier.
There is a moment in the film that stopped me. Leo is on the street, surrounded by people, speaking with the kind of force that reached across decades and touched a memory I did not expect to find in a documentary about Omaha in 2025:
The first time I saw Fred Hampton speak.
Leo is not Hampton. The movement that shaped Hampton belonged to a different and more dangerous moment in American history. But the commitment is of the same quality. The same refusal to perform for the camera. The same certainty that this street matters, that these people matter, that North Omaha matters as much as any place on earth.
Nick’s camera found that almost by accident, the way first films often find their best moments: by being present and willing.
That is Leo. Not a symbol. Not a guide for a white filmmaker’s awakening. A man standing on his street speaking truth that has weight.
Nick is in therapy. Leo is giving testimony.
Let me be precise. Leo was already Leo before Nick arrived with a camera. He had already built his mission, already walked his patrols, already become the godfather of North Omaha. Nick’s camera did not create Leo Louis II. It simply had the good fortune to find him.
And what Leo does for Nick is both generous and calculated. He does not shrink himself to make Nick comfortable. He does not translate himself into a language Nick already speaks. He simply lets Nick walk beside him and trusts that the walking itself will be the education.
That matters.
But here is my honest critical observation: the hierarchy of characters functions as designed. I do not say that as a condemnation. I say it as a description of the infrastructure that produced the film — a white filmmaker, a festival circuit, a predominantly white audience, a distribution system. All of it exerts a gravitational pull that keeps Nick at the center even when Leo is the more compelling human being in the frame.
Leo’s story — where he comes from, what he has survived, what he has built — is a documentary in itself. But that is a film for someone else to make. Someone who can sit inside that story rather than approach it from outside.
What Nick gives us is Leo as encountered by a young white man whose assumptions are being quietly dismantled by someone who never had the luxury of assumptions. There is value in that. Real value.
But it can only be fully read if you understand the difference between testimony and therapy.
Nick is in therapy.
Leo is giving testimony.
Now let me tell you about the ground Nick was standing on.
Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, was a Baptist preacher and a Garveyite organizer. The family was marked before Malcolm drew his first breath — threats, fire, terror, the specific American ritual of making Black ambition pay a price. The Little family eventually fled Omaha for Lansing, but the soil of Omaha held that seed first.
And 44 miles away sits John Brown’s Cave, behind the Mayhew Cabin in Nebraska City — a stop on the road to freedom, a hole in the ground where human beings hid from other human beings who believed they owned them.
That distance matters.
It is the distance between a white man who decided Black liberation was worth his life and a Black child who would grow up to tell white people that sympathy was not enough.
White supremacy has always been enforced by violence and exclusion. That is not history. That is architecture.
The simplest thing can make you a race traitor: a conversation, a sentence, a documentary film, a refusal to confirm the lie. The infrastructure does not grade on a curve. It does not sharply distinguish between intellectual apostasy and active rebellion. Both represent the same threat.
Both get the second noose.
Consider the Nebraska triptych.
John Brown picked up a rifle. Decided that Black liberation was worth his life. Died at Harpers Ferry for what he believed and history still hasn’t decided whether he was a saint or a madman or whether that distinction matters when you are standing on the right side of a burning question. His own government hung him. The first noose belonged to the state.
Derek Black didn’t march with Black people. He didn’t align himself with any movement or make any declaration of solidarity. The godson of David Duke. The man who coined the term alt-right on Stormfront. Raised inside the machinery of white supremacist belief the way other children are raised inside religions. He didn’t defect to the other side. He simply stepped outside the foundational lie. Said there is no such thing as the white race. That was enough. His own people hung the second noose out for him. His family. His community. His entire inherited world. Gone. I met him on a metro train coming from a film in the Chicago suburbs. We talked for 45 minutes. He had found the sanctuary of academia. Still a young man searching for his place in an America he could not return to.
Nick Beaulieu picked up a camera. Looked with his own eyes instead of the eyes the infrastructure provided for him. And then showed other people what he saw.
Three white men. Three different depths of disassociation from whiteness. Three different versions of the second noose.
My father knew all three were possible when he walked away laughing.
White supremacy is not just history. It is architecture.
And now the ground beneath Leo is shifting in real time.
Between Nick finishing his film and you reading this, the Omaha 360 initiative — the collaboration Leo helped build, the model credited with a documented 70% reduction in gun violence in targeted North Omaha neighborhoods, the model the rest of the country was beginning to study and replicate — has been caught inside a broader dismantling of community violence intervention funding. The administration terminated approximately $150 million in CVI grants through the Department of Justice in 2025, independent of the budget process. The proposed FY 2026 budget goes further — a 59% reduction in youth mentoring programs, a 25% reduction in delinquency prevention services, the elimination of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative. Congress has pushed back on some proposals. But the grant terminations already executed are real and their damage is already being felt on the ground in communities like North Omaha.
The point is larger than any one line item. What is being undone is not just a program. It is an entire philosophy — the idea that communities can interrupt violence through relationship, presence, trust, and local accountability rather than through punishment alone.
They are not just cutting programs.
They are cutting the ground out from under Leo’s feet.
That means Nick’s film now functions as a historical document in real time. It captured Leo Louis II at the height of what was possible in Omaha just as the conditions that made that work possible were being put under assault.
And still, Nick’s camera did something that matters.
It pointed at Black people in Omaha and said: look.
Look at these fully realized human beings. Look at this community. Look at this resilience. Look at what they have built. Look at who they are underneath every stereotype, every news cycle, every political narrative that reduces them to a problem.
In a moment when Black history, Black resilience, and even the language used to acknowledge Black life are being treated as threats, Nick’s camera said no.
These people are here.
They have always been here.
They are not going anywhere.
And Leo standing there with his community in the frame is not merely a documentary image.
It is an act of resistance.
That grace note is where criticism usually ends.
But I am not finished.
My verdict is simpler than politics or cinematography or screen-time balance. This film took me somewhere I would not have gone otherwise.
That is what distinguishes documentary from every other form of filmmaking. Not production value. Not intention. Not applause. But whether the film becomes a key that opens a door inside the viewer that was previously locked.
My Omaha is a key.
It is not a mirror.
The film gives us what Nick needed, not what those of us on the other side of the divide might have wanted. What he needed was to see his father as a man before he lost him. Randy Beaulieu is dying. Nick’s camera catches this without flinching — the way a man who has spent his life certain of things looks when his body is telling him certainty was never the point. Nick is losing his father. The film knows this. What it doesn’t know — what Nick may not know yet — is whether he is also losing his father’s politics or whether those politics will outlive the man.
To walk beside Leo long enough to understand that North Omaha is not a problem waiting to be solved by outsiders but a community already struggling to sustain itself with dignity and force. To make something. To begin.
The film delivers all of that honestly.
What some of us wanted was for the film to feel the full historical weight of the ground beneath it — to know in its bones that it stood 44 miles from John Brown’s Cave and in the birthplace of Malcolm X. That Leo Louis II patrolling North Omaha at night is the latest chapter in a freedom story written on this ground for over 150 years.
Nick’s film does not fully know where it is standing.
But here is my grace note, and I mean it. Saint Clair Bourne, the great documentary filmmaker, told me that every first film is a beginning, not a conclusion. Nick Beaulieu has taken that first step. Where that path leads is not in this film because it has not happened yet.
I have known men who took that first step and drifted back into comfort.
I have known men who kept walking into the harder territory — into the rooms where policy gets made, into the places where Malcolm’s demand becomes real, into the full cost of refusing to confirm whiteness.
I cannot tell you where Nick Beaulieu will end up.
No one can.
The film is a document of a beginning. Not a conclusion. And beginnings are not verdicts. They are evidence of motion.
Nick is not only one person. He stands in for hundreds of thousands of young white Americans sitting in that same uncomfortable middle — the same inheritance, the same fathers, the same communities they grew up in without ever really seeing. Most will never pick up a camera. Most will never walk into North Omaha. Most will never ask what it would actually mean to do the work among their own.
Nick went first.
My father laughed and walked away.
Joh Hoffman got the joke.
Leo Louis II is still out there on those streets. The funding is being dismantled. The camera has moved on. The festival audiences have applauded and gone home. And somewhere in Omaha, another young white man is sitting in that same uncomfortable middle, feeling the same weather change, wondering if someone else will go first.
Nick already went.
The ground is still asking its question.
Now what?
My Omaha (2025) is a documentary produced in association with the renowned Chicago-based documentary powerhouse Kartemquin Films . It screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago from April 3 to April 9, 2026. Directed and written by Nick Beaulieu. Starring Nick Beaulieu, Randy Beaulieu, and Leo Louis II.
If this film is half as brilliant as your commentary,it will br well worth the time spent. Anxious to see it, now.
Wow. This is incredibly thoughtful and beautifully written.