By: Steve Goodman
From EVC’s beginning in the 80s, our youth producers have created documentaries that ask critical questions about injustice and, in so doing, disrupt dehumanizing narratives and oppressive systems. They tell stories that lift up the silenced and the stigmatized and let them live in their full humanity. They lifted up the voices of people suffering from the AIDS epidemic, youth living in foster care, or in juvenile detention facilities, and asked why in the richest nation in the world, families were living in homeless shelters in Queens, in apartments without heat or hot water in East Harlem, or attending failing schools in the Bronx, segregated and unequal. Highlighting the grassroots activists and organizations working to change these injustices, EVC used culture and media arts as a form of activism to educate and motivate community audiences to support these efforts.
EVC’s role as an agent for change is more important than ever today, 40 years later, as our civil liberties and human rights are being eroded, dissent is being silenced, and a climate of intimidation and authoritarianism is on the rise. Teachers and librarians are attacked for teaching the truth about slavery and African American freedom struggles, and for teaching about LGBTQ life, particularly about Trans people. Migrants are exploited and discriminated against and are under constant threat of detention and deportation. School principals and college presidents are under attack, and in turn are cracking down on their students’ freedom of speech and protest of the US supported genocide in Gaza.
With the future of our democracy on the line in the upcoming presidential election and the new school year sure to bring renewed student protests and brutal police suppression of them, I’m reminded of two EVC documentaries: Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue and Policing the Times. They are exemplars of EVC’s work at the intersection of youth filmmaking, radical education, and political and social change. And they highlight the multiple strategies for organizing and activist-driven change including: the power of voting and the electoral process, the power of direct action and protest on the streets, and the power of teaching and critical student inquiry. They addressed two historic human rights and freedom struggles for African American dignity, empowerment and political representation: safety from state-sanctioned violence, systemic police brutality and murder; and protection of voting rights and political representation.
In both cases, EVC students were chronicling and also participating in critical moments in our nation’s social and political activist history. They were both witnessing and making that history.
Students produced Policing the Times during the early actions of the Black Lives Matter movement, which would explode five years later in the summer 2020 as one of the largest protest movements in US history. In Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue they documented a grassroots organizing effort in communities of color as well as the personal journeys of some group members preparing to vote for the first time in what would become the historic election of the first African American president.
In the Tradition of Activist Filmmaking
In Policing the Times, EVC students documented protesters holding signs and chanting, “All Lives Matter! When Black Lives Matter! All Lives Matter! When Black Lives Matter!” This was back in 2015, before the police murder of George Floyd, but after the police killings of other unarmed Black people, including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and others. They filmed this peaceful rally held weekly at Grand Central Station, but they also ended up recording the arrest of the leader of the rally. I was struck by the flickering image of EVC student Jordi with camera in hand, illuminated by the red police lights reflected in side window of the police car as he bears witness to the arrest as they drove him away.
In 2008, the Journeys Through the Red, White and Blue crew brought their cameras to the Barack Obama presidential campaign headquarters in West Philadelphia. They volunteered as canvassers to knock on doors and distribute campaign literature to get out the vote in the Democratic primary. And they recorded themselves as active participants going door to door and also registering new citizen immigrants. As EVC student Shon says to one of the campaign organizers, “We’re gonna canvass, so get me some instructions. So we can go make history, right? Then he pumps his fist and says, “Yes, we can!”
These projects not only included interviews with experts, but documented EVC students as they investigated and also participated in educational and political organizing work. For example, Shon is the same young man, who, earlier in the film and his own political development, ponders if his vote really matters, after speaking with his brother, a Iraq veteran, who laments on camera that his vote doesn’t really matter, and then contends with his dad, who reminds him that people died so that he could have the right to vote.
We certainly weren’t the first to use media as a form of cultural activism; we were building on a rich history of radical filmmaking. As a college student in the mid 1970’s, I was shaken to my core after seeing The Battle of Chile directed by Patricio Guzman and also Harlan County, USA directed by Barbara Kopple. Guzman documented the CIA-backed fascist coup that overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende and Kopple documented (and lived with) the miners’ years-long struggle for better wages and humane working conditions in the coalfields of Harlan County, Kentucky. After watching these, I decided I wanted to somehow be involved as a social documentary maker.
Closer to home, I was also inspired by how The Newsreel (now Third World Newsreel), a film collective formed in the late 60’s, used the power of media as a catalyst for discussion and social change. The media they created was always meant to be put in service of further organizing and activism. Shot in the gritty verite style of guerrilla filmmaking they produced dozens of radical films including Break and Enter a.k.a. Squatters, Rompiendo Puertas (1971) that documented families who had been displaced by gentrification as they “liberated” and moved into vacant city-owned buildings in upper west side Manhattan. And they shot Columbia Revolt inside the university buildings to capture the student protesters’ perspective who were occupying the university and then evicted and beaten by the police. Newsreel films were not for sale, but were meant to be put in the hands of organizers and activists to use in their political work. The makers would often go out to screen and speak with their films in union halls, college campuses, community and tenants organizations to show what organizing for social change looks like.
Drawing lessons from these and scores of other social change documentaries, in the 90s at EVC we established YOTV workshops (Youth Organizers TV) and later COTV workshops (Community Organizers TV), creating handbooks and teaching production to youth and to adult community activists. Behind these programs was the question of what we understood to be the relationship between the producers we taught, the social change documentaries they created, and the social change we/they sought to bring about. And finally, underlying all of this work was the question of what we meant by social change.
Multiple Iterations of Activism
It was always the case that our students were the first to experience change through the EVC projects they worked on. They learned about and developed their consciousness of social change through their research and active engagement with a wide range of family, friends and community members. These community partners also provided positive role models who were teaching, organizing and leading in the community and showing students that change is possible. In Journeys, students interviewed activists from the Medgar Evers College Center for Law and Social Justice, and the NY Immigration Coalition in addition to a NYC council member, a NY State Assemblyman, a civil rights activist/freedom singer, a political scientist, and immigration lawyer, as well as family members and friends.
The crew structured their stories around three of the crew members’ own autobiographical explorations into the value of their vote. Brian questions how the electoral college works and the role of his local Washington Heights city council member. Shon talks with his family members and voting activists to decide whether or not to vote. And Tidiane, an immigrant from Guinea, learns that as a non-citizen he pays taxes but is prevented from voting. As former YOTV Director Andrea Ortega-Williams described it,
We were all really tuned into the fact that this was a historic election. So when we thought about how do we engage and participate, ….we looked at ourselves [as an entry point to the topic]… we represented a Latino perspective of a young person, an African American voting for the first time, and an immigrant. ….here’s a line of inquiry that they’re following and they’re agents in their journey of discovery. And what’s great is that their discovery leads to something tangible that helps them and others in the community.
Andrea described her students’ deepening engagement from behind-the-camera documentarians to on-camera participants and activists:
What is so powerful about EVC’s model of engagement during a moment like this is that [there were] multiple iterations of activism. There’s the level of them being engaged as active participants in their processes of learning. And then volunteering and canvassing, and speaking to other young people about their experience -registering new citizens to vote,speaking to elected officials, family members and activists. And then there’s the layer of them taking the film out, once it's done. Engaging in Q&As, and being in the community. ... I think it's one of the best forms of learning and activism.
School and Community Screenings
In the tradition of The Newsreel’s call for media to further organizing, the Journeys team extensively screened their documentary as part of registration drives for new youth voters of color. Coordinated by then EVC Community Engagement Director Sheila Aminmadani, in the months leading up the election the crew screened the documentary and led discussions in countless high schools and colleges in swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania as well as in media festivals and on community television. And the crew even went to Washington, D.C. to screen it on the weekend prior to Obama’s swearing in as part of “The People’s Inaugural Ball” at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. to celebrate the impact of grassroots organizing and the impact of the youth vote.
Andrea further reflected on the importance of the students recordings of their own grassroots organizing efforts canvassing and registering new immigrant voters,
......you’re amplifying those efforts that are on the ground. And you’re creating a record of it that can go in different spaces that are, you know, that are far greater than that one immediate action that's taking place. So it's amplifying, multiplying.
In Policing, they interviewed grassroots activists in the National Action Against Police Brutality and Brownsville Community Justice Center, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and recorded their Know Your Rights workshop. They also interviewed a NYC Deputy Police Commissioner, a high school principal and a human rights lawyer, and screened past EVC videos on police brutality from the archives.
The Policing crew included a brief but powerful history of the systemic anti-black brutality dating back to patrols organized to catch fugitive slaves, the police dogs on civil rights protesters, though the beating of Rodney King, EVC footage from the ‘90s of a Harlem community protest of police shootings, up through police shootings of unarmed blacks in 2015. And they followed the story of Robert, one of the EVC youth producers who talks about his own experiences being brutalized by police in his community and in his school. Policing ends as Robert and a friend meet with their school principal, asking him for a school-wide program to teach students their rights.
Both of these projects sparked social and political change on multiple levels during and after production. Like throwing a stone into a pond and watching the circles of ripples grow, the school and community screenings reached individuals and institutions far beyond the students who originally made them. Policing was not only screened in Robert’s school, but we were able to reach many more New York City students and teachers by partnering with the New York City DOE’s Office of Post Secondary Readiness (OPSR). We developed a teaching guide and copied hundreds of DVDs for OPSR to disseminate to Transfer school classrooms. We also presented the film and teaching guide for teachers and school leaders during a workshop at OPSR’s annual Transfer School Conference.
Engaging Teachers and Communities in Social Change
This led to a deeper level of engagement with the Transfer Schools. They asked us to provide professional development training for teachers in the schools so they could facilitate video inquiry projects exploring the problem of police violence with their students. During the next semester, EVC teacher developers Cynthia Copeland, Emmanuel Garcia and I guided teachers in the planning and facilitation of three student projects in two schools, and also a “Making Of…” video documenting the entire process.
We called this professional development project, “Youth Powered Change.” One class chose to investigate the impact of gentrification and policing in their communities, particularly in Harlem where many students lived. Another looked at how police abuse of students in communities and in schools contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline. The third, with a large number of Dominican students, investigated how police departments’ "broken windows” tactics --- arresting residents for minor infractions such as jumping turnstiles or writing graffiti -- could lead to increased deportation and prevent NY from being a sanctuary city for unauthorized immigrants.
As co-facilitator and historian, Cynthia Copeland taught the police and gentrification project students about the history of Seneca Village that she had researched, a thriving 19th-century community of predominantly middle-class African Americans that was located near their Upper West Side Manhattan school. The ENL (English as a New Language) students felt proud and self-affirmed after interviewing community immigrant rights lawyers (in Spanish), who could provide them with critical assistance if any of their own family members ever faced deportation.
They presented their three final projects at a school-wide “town hall” meeting, which led to a powerful dialogue among students, teachers, school leaders, police officers, and city council members. The students concluded their video on police and immigrant rights with a narration in English and Spanish that taught the community audience about their legal rights, should immigration agents knock on their door.
As the principal described it, “The town hall was quite magical. To be able to bring all the stakeholders into the same room and engage in authentic dialogue and problem solving session is no easy task…. Both of my teachers said this has been a highlight of their careers. This has been for a cause, which has allowed us to take student voice to a new level…”
Institutional Impact
EVC’s impact on an institutional level expanded further the following year when OPSR asked us to develop a “Know Your Rights Blueprint” curriculum guide for principals and teachers across all their schools including unit plans linked to the students’ documentaries. The Blueprint was designed for schools to adopt EVC’s model of Youth Participatory Action based on student voice/choice and promotes collective study, problem solving, and action.
I thought it was significant that we had gained officially sanctioned systemic support for students to use documentary to investigate and confront the social injustices in their lives. Here’s the Blueprint description explaining to the principal or teacher “What’s This Project All About?”
Around the country and around the world, young people are raising their voices about issues that matter most to them, whether marching through the streets, lobbying for change with government and community leaders, or expressing their ideas through poetry, painting, or song. Young people are witness to injustice and advocates for system-wide changes. They are claiming their agency to participate and lead movements for positive change.
The Know Your Rights Blueprint is a teaching guide with everything you need to support students in taking action in their own school or community through the creation of a powerful documentary film. On the following pages, you will find lessons, models and tools that will make it possible for you to create a course, program or club that encourages youth activism….
Even in these dark times, I remain hopeful thinking about how the power of EVC’s activism lives on in the many thousands of students, teachers, principals and community members who‘ve participated in our projects over the last 40 years. And how its impact continues to be felt in the countless others who’ve watched, discussed and were empowered by our films to make a change in their communities. Whether that meant registering new voters, joining marches, organizing school teach-ins, or so many other forms of action, I’m proud that EVC’s documentaries and community engagement have carried on the radical tradition of using media to expose injustice, humanize and defend the rights and dignity of our students, their families, and all historically marginalized people.
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