Peace &
Justice Film Series: 13th. - From Slave to Criminal with One Amendment
Wednesday,
February 22 at 7pm
Upper Room
This acclaimed documentary on the
history of black incarceration in the United States has won numerous festival
and critical awards and been nominated for many others, including the Academy
Award for Best Documentary of 2016. Selma DuVernay (Selma) makes the
argument that the 13th Amendment, in abolishing slavery, created at the same
time a loophole to replace slavery with the mass incarceration of Black
Americans, a system that has continued evolving into the present.
The film was produced in secrecy
and its existence made public only when its many accolades started rolling in.
"13th made me ashamed
because it made me realize I'd stopped gasping. In its sweeping treatment of
the history of American racism, the film brought me closer than I've ever been
to understanding how it could be that so many people could have ever grown used
to the moral catastrophes that were slavery and Jim Crow. How did they not wake
up every morning, nauseated and panicked about what was happening? The same way
people like me wake up in 2016 and take it as a given that there are 2.3
million people living in cages, a third of them black" (Leon Neyfakh, Slate).
Contact Biff Baker for more information at biff@aleks.com
