Our church is partnering with the local SURJ group (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and Cinema 10 to show three, award-winning documentaries about racial injustice. Everyone is invited to view the films and to stay for discussion afterwards.
I Am Not Your Negro: this showing already happened on Monday October 16
I Am Not Your Negro is a 2016 documentary film directed by Raoul Peck, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. Narrated by actor Samuel L. Jackson, the film explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin’s reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as his personal observations of American history. It was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards.
13th: Sunday, October 29 at 4 p.m., with dinner and discussion to follow, Unitarian Universalist Church in Canton
13th is a 2016 American documentary by director Ava DuVernay (director of Selma). The film explores the “intersection of race, justice and mass incarceration in the United States”; it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which freed the slaves and prohibited slavery (unless as punishment for a crime).
At the River I Stand: Sunday, November 12 at 4 p.m., with dinner and discussion to follow, Unitarian Universalist Church in Canton
At the River I Stand is a 1993 award-winning documentary directed by David Appleby, Allison Graham and Steven Ross about Martin Luther King’s work in Memphis on behalf of striking sanitation workers, leading to unionization of the workers and the assassination of King. It is an early instance of the “fusion politics” that Rev. Barber calls for in his Moral Mondays Movement, combining racial justice with workers’ rights.