25/08/2025
Wednesday, September 10 | 4:30 PM | Schomburg Center: Join us for Teaching Liberation: Education by Us, for Us, the inaugural centennial program in the series Black on Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture. This series captures 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film. Sourced from The Schomburg’s collection and others, it takes a kaleidoscopic look at Black life and expression across diasporas, rendering a range of storytelling traditions that incite and inspire Black world-building. https://ow.ly/OWgc50WJPp8
4:30 PM (Doors Open at 4 PM) | Explore the legacies of Black educational self-determination beginning with screenings of selected shorts from Schomburg Center collections, including Positively Black: Episode #518: The Barbara Taylor School (1988) spotlighting community-rooted education initiatives spearheaded by Black women and a keynote conversation with Dr. E. Babette Edwards — Harlem-born advocate and veteran of NYC school reform — joined by Dr. Terri N. Watson, Professor of Educational Leadership at CCNY and a protege of Dr. Edwards with Ronald Evans, the first principal of Arthur A. Schomburg Intermediate School 201.
6:00 PM | The evening features a screening of The Sun Rises in the East (58 min), which documents the pan-African educational renaissance in 1970s Brooklyn, followed by a Q&A with directors Tayo and Cynthia Gordy Giwa and Basir Mchawi, educator and member of Brooklyn’s EAST. A celebration of learning as liberation, this program honors “by us, for us” traditions of study in this current moment, as Black thought and history increasingly face censorship.
