Make revolution irresistible!

Philadelphia and nearby friends, I’m sending elated word about an event next Tuesday, November 4, at Swarthmore College. Come through! Copies of New York Liberation School and Bambara’s Realizing the Dream of a Black University will be for sale. Details below…

Community screening of the new documentary TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

Tuesday, November 4, 7pm, Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema

The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College
Presents a special community screening of the new documentary TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

Tuesday, November 4, 7pm, Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema

Followed by a conversation at 9pm between filmmaker Louis Massiah and documentary participant Conor “Coco” Tomás Reed, moderated by Nina Johnson (Chair of Sociology and Anthropology) and introduced by Jamal Batts (Assistant Professor of Black Studies)

Toni Cade Bambara, photo credit: LeRoy Henderson

Author, educator, activist, and documentary filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. Editor of the breakthrough anthology The Black Woman (1970) and author of The Salt Eaters (1980) among other acclaimed works, Bambara came to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Massiah on the truth-telling documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) and remained an activist and cultural worker in film and literature until her untimely death in 1995. TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 min.) is a testament to their long and generative collaboration.

Massiah’s film, co-directed with and edited by Monica Henriquez, is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara’s life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Not yet widely released, the film received its world premiere opening night at Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival in August, where it was awarded Best Feature Documentary by the jury, voted Favorite Feature Documentary by the audience, and called “riveting” by Variety. Featuring: Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, Haile Gerima, Shirikiana Aina, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Manthia Diawara, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Malaika Adero, Linda Holmes, Conor Tomás Reed, Makeba Lavan, and Clyde Taylor.

Credits:
Producer/Director – Louis Massiah
Editor/Director – Monica Henriquez
Director of Photography – Michael Chin, Henry Adebonjo
Sound – J.T. Takagi
Music – Jerome Jennings
Animation/Motion Graphics Design – Gabriel Coffey

Aydelotte’s ongoing series, Race, Racism and the Liberal Arts, explores histories of how Black people, organizations, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the legacies and institutions of the liberal arts. Bambara’s legacy and Scribe Video Center are vivid examples of this cultural work.

Louis Massiah’s award-winning documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986); W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (1996), two episodes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002). Recipient of many accolades, including a duPont-Columbia Award, a Peabody, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and a local Emmy for his coverage of the MOVE Commission Hearings, Massiah is founder and director of Scribe Video Center, a leading Philadelphia-based nonprofit media arts center that seeks to explore, develop, and advance media as art and tool for progressive social change. From 2010-2012, Massiah served as the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College, and he received an Honorary Doctor of Arts in 2024.

Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid street scholar of social movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (2023). Coco is developing a new book project Hemisphere in Bloom, as well as a co-edited multilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones). They have been immersed in two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond, and they recently relocated to Philadelphia.

This event is free, accessible, and open to the public. Swarthmore can be reached by SEPTA Regional Rail on the Media/Wawa line. Driving directions can be found here. The conversation will be livestreamed here beginning at 9pm.

This event is co-sponsored by the Black Cultural Center, Black Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.