In hopes of educating community members about the history of Freedom Schools, a local nonprofit is hosting a screening of “Freedom Summer: Mississippi 1964.”
The Listening, the local nonprofit that is working to launch a Freedom School in Central Virginia, is showing the award-winning Sundance documentary at 7 p.m. July 14 at Riverviews Artspace.
“Since we are working to bring the Freedom School to Central Virginia next summer, we didn’t want to present it as another summer program. There’s a lot of history and context. We wanted to be sure we did our due diligence to the community to witness the atmosphere that this program was born into,” said Nick George, founder of The Listening.
The documentary focuses on the 10-week period in 1964 in which hundreds of student activists went to Mississippi to register voters, start Freedom Schools and establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party — a voter registration project for African Americans in Mississippi.
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The screening is free, but The Listening will accept donations.
“Even though [the documentary] was chronicling what took place in 1964, there’s a lot that still hasn’t changed, and there’s still work to be done. We hope that The Listening will be a part of the conversation in addressing these concerns not from a political perspective but from a cultural perspective,” George said.
After the screening, viewers can participate in a brief discussion to “process and reflect on what they watched,” George said.