Dani Gagnon

Features Editor

Within the last year, College of Wooster libraries received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as a branch of their Bridging Cultures programming. Research and Outreach Librarian Julia Gustafson spearheaded the project of applying for the grant, organizing the program and engaging specialized faculty in related fields of study. Through the grant, COW received four civil rights films with performance rights. They also received a stipend to bring in an off campus speaker to facilitate discussions in response to the films and about the larger issues at hand, particularly racial tensions in contemporary life.

This coming Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 6:30 p.m., College of Wooster libraries will present the first event of the Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle film and discussion series. The series will open in Lean Lecture Hall with Criminalizing Black Life … Sound Familiar?, a presentation by Boubacar N’Diaye, of the Africana Studies and Political Science Departments at the college. Following N’Diaye’s lecture there will be a film screening of Slavery by Another Name. The film examines the decades on both sides of the Emancipation Proclamation and how the hopes of the proclamation’s effects compared with the reality. N’Diaye will lead a post-film discussion.

Two weeks later on Feb. 24 associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Manish Sinha, will present Movement and the Origins of American Democracy. Following her presentation a screening of the Emmy-nominated film, The Abolitionists will be offered. In the film, the efforts of abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké are depicted as they form a movement that changes the nations view on slavery.

Assistant Professor of History, Kabria Baumgartner at the College will lead the third event of the series on April 8 as she presents A Loving Story Lives: Sex, Marriage, and the Color Line in America. A showing of the Emmy-nominated film, The Loving Story which depicts the relationship of an interracial couple in the 1950s, will follow her talk with a group discussion.

The series will come to a close on April 16 with Associate Professor of History, Jeff Roche. Roche will present Passive Resistance and Massive Resistance: The Nationalization of the Civil Rights Movement before showing the Emmy-winning film Freedom Riders. Discussion about the film’s documentation of the 400 multiracial citizens who protested in their participation of the history freedom rides will follow Roche’s lecture and the film.

The organization of this series was successful because of Gustafson and her allies in the Center for Diversity and Global Engagement, the Africana Studies Department, the History Department and the Dean for Curriculum and Academic Engagement. Furthermore, the Wooster Forum 2013 on Facing Race was extended to include this programming.

Gustafson said that because the mission of the program is to “engage people in discussion,” all efforts will be aimed at drawing people to the event. The multimedia formatting paired with academic scholars from on and off campus leading discussion on these valuable and sensitive topics will hopefully engage the Wooster communities in an open discourse about race.

“[Learning] to speak openly with one another about how such discrimination affects us still” is one of the many goals of the events, as Gustafson reflected. “Many think it is all behind us, but it is not, so we all need to be sensitive when racial tensions arise as they tend to do.”

For more information, visit http://libguides.wooster.edu/createdequal.