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Posts tagged as “inequality”

Ava DuVernay's Mass Incarceration Documentary "13th" Opens to Standing Ovation at New York Film Festival

By goodblacknews on October 2, 2016
New York Film Festival 2016 opening
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay (GREGORY PACE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK)

article by Gordon Cox via Variety.com

Ava DuVernay’s “13th” opened the 54th New York Film Festival with a jolt of topical urgency, shaking up tradition as the first documentary to kick off the festival and addressing head-on the issue of mass incarceration and its historical roots. The crowd at the premiere screening rose to its feet when the credits rolled — and then did it a couple more times after that: once when the lights came up on the filmmakers, activists and academics involved in the film, and again when DuVernay appeared for a brief talkback after the movie.

Heightened security measures, a reaction to the Sept. 17 bombing in Chelsea, made the opening the first in recent memory to involve bomb-sniffing dogs and security wands. Famous faces including Oprah Winfrey, Common and Don Lemon turned out for the film, which confronts issues at the forefront of the current political conversation: race, inequality, the fallout of slavery, police brutality and Black Lives Matter.
“This moment, this Black Lives Matter moment, it’s not a moment. It’s a movement,” said DuVernay on the red carpet before the film’s world premiere (in words she would later echo when she addressed the crowd in the theater). “People thought, ‘Oh, will it last?’ Well, it has lasted. It’s changed things. It’s forced candidates to talk about things that they did not talk about in previous elections. It’s opened people’s minds. It’s changed art-making. It’s changed music. People are seeing things through a different filter now.”
To read full article, go to: http://variety.com/2016/film/news/new-york-film-festival-2016-opening-13th-ava-duvernay-1201875308/

50 Years Later: Remembering Female Civil Rights Activist Pauli Murray

By goodblacknews on January 30, 2013

Attorney Pauli Murray

Harvard Law School professor Kenneth W. Mack writes at the Huffington Post that it’s an African-American woman, attorney Pauli Murray, who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights in 1963 to include women’s rights — and even LGBT rights.

“President Obama’s unprecedented endorsement of gay rights in his inauguration address last week — delivered on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday — marks the beginning of a year when Americans will celebrate the 50th anniversary of so many groundbreaking events of 1963: children defying dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, President Kennedy’s endorsement of civil rights as a moral cause, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Alabama, and the March on Washington. As the nation remembers these important milestones, it is important not to forget the work of a long-forgotten activist who emerged publicly that year to link civil rights to women’s rights, and ultimately to her own closeted sexual identity. In doing so, an African American woman lawyer named Pauli Murray strongly criticized the leadership of the civil rights movement for excluding women as it was planning for the march that would bring 250,000 protesters to Washington that fall. More than any other individual, it is Murray who deserves credit for expanding the language of civil rights beyond the African American struggle for equality to women’s rights, and ultimately to what she later called “human rights” — and for paving the way for a President of the United States to claim that it included gays and lesbians as well. 
In 1963, Pauli Murray was working hard to make Americans aware of an idea she had come up with two decades earlier — one that influenced people as different from one another as Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Wright Edelman — and which would help change the meaning of equality. She called it Jane Crow. Alongside the system of Jim Crow race segregation, Murray argued, there was an equally wrong system of sex segregation. Sex discrimination should be against the law for the same reasons as race discrimination. This was a radical idea at the time …”

Read Kenneth W. Mack’s entire piece at the Huffington Post.
article via theroot.com