Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle Film Festival

Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle Film Festival
Breslin Learning Center, District 1199C Hospital Worker Union
100 S. Broad St. Land Title Building, 10th Floor, 215-568-2220

The Created Equal Project uses the power of documentary films to encourage public conversations about the changing meanings of freedom and equality in America. This program was developed in partnership between The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Gilder Lehrman Institute of American, Moonstone is honored to be a participant and invites you to join us. Each program will consist a film followed by a discussion.

Thursday November 6, 5:30pm – The Abolitionist

Five leaders of the anti-slavery movement: impassioned New England newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison; former slave, author, and activist Frederick Douglass; Angelina Grimke, daughter of rich South Carolina slave-holder; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the enormously influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and John Brown, ultimately executed for his armed seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.

Thursday November 13, 5:30pm – Slavery by Another Name

A huge system of forced, unpaid labor, mostly affecting Southern black men, that lasted until World War II. Based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name tells the stories of men, charged with crimes like vagrancy, and often guilty of nothing, who were bought and sold, abused, and subject to sometimes deadly working conditions as unpaid convict labor.

Thursday December 4, 5:30pm – Freedom Riders

The Freedom Riders of 1961 took the civil rights struggle out of the courtroom and onto the streets of the Jim Crow South and tells the terrifying, moving, and suspenseful story of a time when white and black volunteers riding a bus into the Deep South risked being jailed, beaten, or killed, as white local and state authorities ignored or encouraged violent attacks.

Thursday December 11, 5:30pm – The Loving Story

The Lovings never expected to be woken up in their bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested (July 1958) for violating a state law that banned marriage between people of different races. These laws had been on the books in most states since the seventeenth century. The documentary brings to life the Lovings’ marriage and the legal battle that followed through little-known filmed interviews and photographs shot for Life magazine.

Thursday December 18, 5:30pm – Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin

Brother Outsider has introduced millions of viewers around the world to the life and work of Bayard Rustin – a visionary strategist and activist who has been called “the unknown hero” of the civil rights movement. A discipline of Ghandi, a mentor to Marin Luther King Jr., and the architect of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin dared to live as an openly gay man during the fiercely homophobic 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.