Standing On My Sisters’ Shoulders
March 8, 2015 - 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
“If you can show just one film on the Civil Rights Movement, this should be the one.”
Pricilla Murolo, Dir. Women’s History program, Sarah Lawrence
Hosted by Dr. Marcelle Haddix
In conjunction with the ArtRage exhibition on the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march and International Women’s Day, ArtRage Gallery and the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation are celebrating the heroic women of the civil rights movement with the award-winning documentary STANDING ON MY SISTERS’ SHOULDERS: the story of the Mississippi Civil Rights movement from the point of view of its remarkable and courageous women who changed the course of history. This film is important now more than ever given the racial climate of the country after Ferguson, subsequent events in NYC, and similar incidents happening across the nation, bringing a contemporary urgency to these issues.
Marcelle Haddix is a Dean’s Associate Professor and Director of English Education Programs. She is a core faculty member in the Renée Crown University Honors Program, an affiliated faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies, a member of the Democratizing Knowledge Core Team, and she holds a courtesy faculty appointment in Cultural Foundations of Education. Her scholarly interests center on the experiences of students of color in literacy and English teaching and teacher education. She also directs the Writing Our Lives project, a program geared toward supporting the writing practices of urban youth within and beyond school contexts.
Heroines of the Film: Meet the women of the film…Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper turned activist, who became Mississippi’s first female black mayor; Mae Bertha Carter, a mother of 13, whose children became the first to integrate the Drew County schools against dangerous opposition; white student activist Joan Trumpauer Mulholland who not only participated in sit-ins but took a stand on integration by attending an all black university; Annie Devine and Victoria Gray Adams, who, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, stepped up and challenged the Democratic Party and President Johnson at the 1964 Convention. They not only brought about change in Mississippi, but they altered the course of American history. Read their bios at http://sisters-shoulders.org/heroines/bios-heroines-film/
Free to the Public. Co-Sponsored by the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and
Tyler Gallery at the Oswego, Metro Center in downtown Syracuse /race.place.being
