The First Rainbow Coalition – Film Screening
This film will be screened for free as part of our Reel Stories: Housing Justice in Film series, presented in collaboration with Trilingua Cinema, East Side Freedom Library and East Side Housing Justice.
May 21st, 7:00pm
East Side Freedom Library
1105 Greenbrier Street, St Paul
“You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.”
-Fred Hampton
Join us with our partners at East Side Freedom Library for a free screening of The First Rainbow Coalition about Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panther Party. Then stick around for a post-screening discussion about what lessons might be drawn from the film with present day Twin Cities tenant organizers.
Synopsis
In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by the charismatic Fred Hampton, began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latinx group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots. Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. The First Rainbow Coalition tells the movement’s little-known story through rare archival footage and interviews with former coalition members in the present-day.
This film is rated TV-PG.
This film will be screened in English with English subtitles.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.