Creating The Criminal: A Film Screening & Discussion Of Slavery By Another Name

Join us for a lively conversation connecting past and present as we view clips from and discuss the PBS documentary Slavery By Another Name, an official selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Working with Emahunn Campbell, PhD Student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, we will explore conceptions of African American criminality in the late 19th Century and the present day, using Slavery By Another Name as our “text”. Our guiding question will be: What can the past tell us about the idea of “Dangerous Blackness” in the popular mind today? Based upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglass A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name challenges the commonly-held assumption that slavery ended in the United States with the passage of the 13th Amendment. It shines a light on the involuntary servitude that sprung up immediately after the Civil War and was closely tied to the criminal justice and prison systems. This is Part 2 of a 4-part film series, Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle, presented by AAMP, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent and the National Constitution Center. Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of its Bridging Cultures initiative, in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. FREE Admission