Our John Brown 225th Birthday Presentation
Three short videos and some words in between
We recently celebrated the 225th birthday of Torrington’s John Brown at the Workman AME Zion Church with Our Culture is Beautiful and the Torrington Historical Society. We were asked to present an update of our recent work and gladly accepted.
The agenda:
African drumming with the Howard’s Bookstore All Stars
Welcome Prayer by Rev. Kevin Johnson
Harriet Tubman talks about John Brown, by Effie Mwando
National Network to Freedom Program (NTF) Announcement: John Brown homesite added to the list, by Mark McEachern, executive director, Torrington Historical Society
Dan Morrison, executive director, The John Brown Project: What We’ve Been Doing
Birthday cake and coffee
I want to say that Rev Kev is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and Effie’s presentation was the most dramatic and fantastic I’ve ever seen. You can see them on the Workman AME Zion Church’s Facebook page.
I wanted to share our presentation here.
What The John Brown Project Has Been Up To
“Hello, My name is Dan and I wanted to give you a peek into what the John Brown Project’s been working on over the past year or so. We’re producing another musical documentary called Pushing the Rock, about systemic racism in the United States and beyond.
We’ve been working for free and I’ve been paying for travel and incidentals with my lunch money and nickels I find on the street, but I am really pleased with how far we’ve come.
We interviewed one of the remaining Tuskegee Airmen, we interviewed one of Dave Brubeck’s sons, and we have the promise of another, we interviewed one of the top abolition scholars (Dr. Manisha Sinha) up at the John Brown Farm in North Elba, NY, Dr. Kathy Bullock, a music scholar from Berea College in Kentucky (photo on hopme page), and I was able to record Sule Greg Wilson, a music historian and banjo expert in a recod=rding studio performing three songs for the film.
That piece was paid for by a Connecticut Office of the Arts grant and I want to thank them like crazy because I think funds are going to be a lot harder to come by.
I have a few short videos to show you, a rough trailer, explaining the film and two first-cut samples.
One is about the Black ballads of Reconstruction and the other is about the history of American legal systemic racism, and how we exported it worldwide.
Here’s the trailer:”
Pushing the Rock Early Trailer
(it is .org now, not .com)
I told you its a musical documentary, so I’m going to show you what I mean by that. Here is a cool segment featuring Sule Greg Wilson talking about Black ballads of Reconstruction.
It was the first time that Black songwriters could write about badass Black men and women and legally sing about them. “John Henry,” “Stagger Lee,” “Railroad Bill,” all of those old songs that are classics of American folk music were born during this brief period between racial terror storms.
John Henry and Other Black Ballads of Reconstruction
And the reason we needed Reconstruction in the first place was because the system, which had been constructed to (hopefully) lead to a multiracial democracy, was torn down by white supremacy built on a foundation of systemic racism.
Ultimately, Pushing The Rock answers the last question, “Does systemic racism exist?” The answer is yes, but this film isn’t really for the people who know the answer to this question. It is for people who pause before answering. I think we need to lay it out to the racist-curious that racism is terrorism.
The next clip features Dr. Manishsa Sinha, a UCONN professor and one of the top abolition scholars in the United States.
In this clip, she explains that race was invented in the colonies in the form of the first American Slave Codes. These laws were replaced by Black Codes, then Jim Crow laws, and then the Nuremberg Laws, and South Africa’s system of Apartheid.
How the Foundation of Systemic Racism Formed, Cured, and was Exported
The South Africa connection that Dr. Manisha establishes in this clip weaves into our Darius Brubeck interview. In the mid-1980s, he and his wife, Cathy, moved to South Africa to establish a jazz program at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as an act of resistance. Both Darius and Cathy give first-hand accounts of Apartheid and its overthrow.
The interview is recorded but not edited yet. We’ve got a couple more interviews we’d like to do, we want to record a choir performing some songs of slavery, and I’d really like to hire an animator to do some work for this project.
We will launch a crowdfunding campaign sometime this summer, so if you are looking for a way to make your voice heard, join our chorus. The Browniac Fun Club Newsletter is highly occasional and secure. We will not sell, trade, barter, lend, or otherwise share your info with anyone.
Because, unlike the bad guys, we are allies.