The Coolidge Corner Theatre will screen “Brookline, Facing Civil Rights,” on Thursday, January 9, at 7 pm. The film, first screened at the Coolidge on MLK Day, was created by “Soul Witness” and Brookline Youth Awards producer/director R. Harvey Bravman. The evening will also feature an audience/panel discussion on the state of inclusivity today moderated by Paris Alston, Producer of WBUR’s Radio Boston.
The “Facing Civil Rights” screening and discussion are part of the Coolidge’s Panorama Series. As described on the Coolidge’s website, “PANORAMA is a film and discussion series designed to increase the scope of our awareness, empathy, and humility around issues important to our community.”
All proceeds from ticket sales to the event will benefit the Brookline Food Pantry.
“Brookline, Facing Civil Rights” melds first-person testimony from prominent black community members, as well as an account from former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, to paint a complete picture of the wealthy Boston suburb — often touted as a bastion of liberal values — during the civil rights era.
Boston Globe Spotlight Team Editor Patricia Wen, commenting in 2019, said Bravman’s film was very “powerful … intimate” and “excellent.” “It made a large, cosmic issue very local,” said Wen, a Brookline resident. “I felt like I was sitting in the living room, listening to these people talk.”
Wen said she appreciated the “mixing of the national reminders of the civil rights movement through the film’s archived photographs with local Brookline voices. “You got the impression that there was very little filter, and that you got to hear directly from them,” she said.
Testimony from the film aims at, among other things, Brookline’s discriminatory housing practices, which Dukakis investigated at the time. “Brookline, like the country, was racist,” Dukakis said in the film, “People of color had virtually nothing in this town. They didn’t live here; they weren’t welcomed … I mean, this town was just shut off to people of color.”
Panelists joining moderator Alston onstage that evening include:
- Sunila Thomas George, Director/Commissioner MCAD
- Robert Trestan, NE Director, Anti-Defamation League
- Susan Howards, Civil Rights Attorney
- Malcolm Cawthorne, Coordinator, BHS METCO
- Adam Strom, Director/Founder Reimagining Migration
- R. Harvey Bravman, Director/Producer
The evening will include a short tribute to the late Edward McClure, who was one of those featured in the film. McClure served as a community relations specialist for the U.S. Department of Justice for 24 years, including during the Boston busing desegregation crises. McClure, with his wife, Diana, founded Freckles Associates, a multiracial model of the language of confrontation or conciliation, based on the philosophy to include rather than exclude.
Also featured in “Facing Civil Rights”:
- Ruth Ellen Fitch, Brookline’s first METCO Director, and the first black female to become a partner in a Boston law firm
- Bobbie Knable, Dean of Students at Tufts from 1980 to 2000
- Julia Wilson, wife of the renowned artist, John Wilson
- Mark Gray, former General Counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office
- Diana McClure, Co-Founder of the Freckles Association
- Michael Dukakis, former MA Governor, and a “housing tester” in Brookline.
In 2019, Brookline’s MLK Celebration Committee commissioned filmmaker R. Harvey Bravman, publisher of BrooklineHub.com, to interview a group of Brookline residents who lived through the tumultuous period of the town’s history for its archives. Bravman, who previously compiled interview footage of residents who survived the Holocaust, took on the task, sitting down with the seven high-powered witnesses to the often-untold underbelly of racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination rampant in the all-white Brookline throughout the 50s and 60s.
The result was five hours of video interview footage, which Bravman compressed into a 23-minute documentary short that threads the testimonies of their lived experiences into a compelling narrative, accompanied by photos from that period. Bravman teamed up with his longtime editor and friend, Robert Kirwan, on the project. Kirwan, an acknowledged documentary editor, also served as editor for Bravman on “Soul Witness, The Brookline Holocaust Witness Project.”
The evening is made possible from grants from the Brookline Community Foundation, BrooklineHub.com, the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation, and the Town of Brookline.
