Revolution ‘67

• The Campaign
• The Filmmakers
• The Intellectual Work
• The Venues
• The National Partners

The Campaign

Revolution ‘67 is an illuminating account of events too often relegated to footnotes in U.S. history—the black urban rebellions of the 1960s.  Focusing on the six-day Newark, New Jersey outbreak in mid-July, Revolution ‘67 reveals how the disturbance began as spontaneous revolts against poverty and police brutality and ended as fateful milestones in America’s struggles over racial justice.  The film illuminates voices from across the spectrum—activists Tom Hayden and Amiri Baraka, journalist Bob Hebert, Mayor Sharpe James and other officials, National Guardsmen and Newark citizens—who recall lessons as hard-earned then as they have been easy to neglect since.

Civic Frame is partnering with P.O.V. to host screenings and discussions of Revolution ’67 in diverse communities across the nation.  The goals of the campaign are to:

• Use Revolution ‘67 and relevant intellectual work to encourage a discussion of the black urban rebellions that shaped many communities across the U.S. in the 1960s;
• Highlight the historical circumstances that made such black urban rebellions fertile;
• Host a screening and forum with local artists, activists, decision makers, students and the general public that examines how local communities are still affected by the legacy of the black urban rebellions of the 1960s;
• Remind communities of their own connection to the legacy of the issues that spurred past black urban rebellions and their impact on urban communities today; and
• Illuminate local initiatives and organizations that are engaged in an on-going process of addressing these issues today.

These forums will use the film and relevant intellectual work to encourage local artists, decision makers, activists, students and community members to examine the conditions that brought about the urban rebellions of the 1960’s and the lingering impact of those conditions in their communities today.

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The Filmmakers

Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno are award-winning husband-and-wife filmmakers who formed their own production company, Bongiorno Productions, in Newark, N.J. Marylou is a graduate of New York University's Graduate Film Program, where she received the $75,000 Richard Vague Film Production Fund award for the feature film "Little Kings," based on her multiple award-winning short.

Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno, Producer/Director, Jerome Bongiorno, Cinematographer/Editor/Animator

The Bongiornos' documentary "Mother-Tongue: Italian American Sons and Mothers," featuring Martin Scorsese, earned an Emmy nomination and screened at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Their global warming-themed screenplay, Watermark, was featured at Sundance's Investing in Media That Matters and the Tribeca Film Festival/Sloan Summit and was the centerpiece of a Johnson Foundation Wingspread Conference on Global Warming and Film in 2005.

Marylou and Jerome are in preproduction for the fictional version of "Revolution '67," executive-produced by Spike Lee. They are currently completing a series of short films on post-Katrina New Orleans and flood-plagued Venice, Italy, screening on PBS' Natural Heroes series and at film festivals. The Bongiornos are the recipients of a Film Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. They are longtime residents of Newark, N.J., where Marylou has lived all her life.

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The Intellectual Work

Here is some of the intellectual work that will guide our discussion of “Revolution ‘67”:

Anderson, Elijah. Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. This ethnographic study of an anonymous city explores the struggle of both blacks and whites of different classes for common ground and viable communities.

Bergesen, Albert. “Official Violence During the Watts, Newark, and Detroit Race Riots of the 1960s.” pp. 138-174 in Political Analysis of Deviance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. An article that studies the Detroit Race Riots of the 1960’s that is part of a collection of articles focusing on political deviance.

Durr, Kenneth D.  Beyond The Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. A snapshot of the neighborhoods, workplaces, and community institutions of blue-collar Baltimore in the decades after World War II, Durr challenges the notion that the “white backlash” of the 1960s and 1970s was driven by increasing race resentment but rising working-class populism shaped by mistrust of the means and ends of postwar liberalism in the face of urban decline.  Durr illuminates the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime to show how white working-class Baltimoreans who faced legitimate economic, social, and political grievances were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks.

Frost, Jennifer. An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s.  New York University Press, 2001. Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that came to be seen as synonymous with the white New Left, began community organizing in 1963, hoping to build an interracial movement of the poor through which to demand social and political change.  Organizers established a strong presence in numerous low-income, racially diverse urban neighborhoods in cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston.

Fullilove, Mindy. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhood Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It.  New York: One World/Ballantine, 2004. Discusses how African-American communities are affected by urban renewal projects.  Focusing on specific black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Newark, Philadelphia, and Roanoke, Virginia, the author brings together a patchwork of oral histories, aerial photographs, charts, and personal narrative to connect the dots between a prewar black community that was richly complex and mutually supportive and a twenty-first-century community at violent odds with itself.

Hayden, Thomas. Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. New York: Random House, 1967. Hayden worked with the Newark Community Union Project as a community organizer; this is his first-hand account of the street riots in Newark in 1967.

Hilfiker, David. Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.  New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Hilfiker explains why urban poverty persists, why poverty programs have failed and what solutions he envisions.

Mumford, Kevin. Newark: A History of Race, Rights and Riots in America. New York: University Press, 2007. Mumford applies the concept of the public sphere to the problem of race relations, demonstrating how political ideas and print culture were instrumental in shaping African American consciousness. He draws on both public and personal archives, interpreting official documents-such as newspapers, commission testimony, and government records-alongside interviews, political flyers, meeting minutes, and rare photos.

Orr, Marion.  Black Social Capital:  The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986-1998.  Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1999. Orr examines why school reform has been difficult to achieve in Baltimore due to deindustrialization, white flight, and inner city poverty.  His work illuminates the struggles of civic leaders, the limitations placed on Baltimore’s African-American community as each has tried to rescue the failing school system, showing that while black social capital may have created limited solidarity against white domination in Baltimore, it hampered African-American leaders’ ability to enlist the cooperation from white corporate elites and suburban residents needed for school reform.

Porambo, Ronald. No Cause for Indictment; an Autopsy of Newark. Vol. 1. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. This book is an account of the buildup, chaos, and aftermath of the 1967 Newark riots.  Being re-issued on the fortieth anniversary of the devastating event, No Cause For Indictment explores the issues still facing urban America:  poverty, political corruption, and racism.  This edition includes an introduction from the editor of the original manuscript about the tumult surrounding the book’s publication, and an afterword interviewing the author about the struggles he faced after publication.

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The Venues

Next Venue
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Seton Hall University School of Law sponsored by McCarter & English LLP
One Newark Center
Newark, New Jersey 07102
6 p.m.

Future Venues
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
at Harvard Law School sponsored by McCarter & English LLP

Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Brown University

Princeton University
TBA

Past Venues
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Kenyon College
Rosse Hall
Gambier, OH 43022
7 p.m.

Sunday, 2 March 2008
The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture
830 East Pratt Street
Baltimore, MD 21202
2 p.m.

Thursday, 17 April 2008
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Langston Hughes Auditorium
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, NY 10037
7 p.m.

Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue
New London, CT 06320
7 p.m.

Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Yale Divinity School
409 Prospect Street
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
6 p.m.

Thursday, 17 April 2008
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
515 Malcolm X Boulevard
New York, New York 10037
7 p.m.

Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Connecticut College
F.W. Olin Science Center Auditorium
270 Mohegan Avenue
New London, Connecticut 06320
7 p.m.

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The National Partners

P.O.V.
P.O.V. (a cinema term for "point of view") is television's longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. P.O.V. premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, P.O.V. has presented over 225 films to public television audiences across the country. P.O.V. films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues. 

Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
Alpha Phi Alpha (ΑΦΑ) is the first intercollegiate fraternity established by African Americans. Founded on December 4, 1906, on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a social fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha has initiated over 175,000 men into the organization and has been open to men of all races since 1945. The fraternity utilizes motifs and artifacts from Ancient Egypt to represent the organization and preserves its archives at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

The founders, Henry Callis, Charles Chapman, Eugene Jones, George Kelley, Nathaniel Murray, Robert Ogle, and Vertner Tandy, are collectively known as the "Seven Jewels". The fraternity expanded when a second chapter was chartered at Howard University in 1907. Beginning in 1908, Alpha Phi Alpha became the prototype for other Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLO). Today, there are over 680 active Alpha chapters in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, the West Indies, and the Virgin Islands.

Alpha Phi Alpha evolved into a primarily service organization and has provided leadership and service during the Great Depression, World Wars, Civil Rights Movements, and addresses social issues such as apartheid, AIDS, urban housing, and other economic, cultural, and political issues affecting people of color. The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial is a project of Alpha Phi Alpha and the fraternity jointly leads philanthropic programming initiatives with March of Dimes, Head Start, Boy Scouts! of America and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

Members of Alpha Phi Alpha include Jamaican Prime Minister and Rhodes Scholar Norman Manley, Nobel Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Olympian Jesse Owens, Justice Thurgood Marshall, United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, and Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. Numerous other American leaders are among the men who have adopted the fraternity’s principles—manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind.

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