The March 25 Thursdays with the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience offers a virtual film screening of “Freedom Riders” by celebrated director Stanley Nelson. A Q and A with Stanley Nelson will follow at 7 pm.

The year was 1961 and the Deep South was steeped in racial disparity when 400 black and white Americans challenged the Jim Crow laws of a segregated interstate travel system traveling by buses together. They risked beatings, imprisonment, and death to bring their message of non-violent protest to the wider world and to test the compliance of two Supreme Court rulings: segregated bathrooms, waiting rooms and lunch counters were unconstitutional; it was unconstitutional to implement and enforce segregation on interstate buses and trains.

Of the many defining moments in the Freedom Rider’s journey through the South, the bus bombing and beatings in Anniston, Alabama stands as the apex of the brutality they endured. A 21-year-old John Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders on that bus and would soon emerge as one of the country’s leading civil rights activists.

“Freedom Riders” (2010) is an extraordinary documentary of that year and how the movement forced the realization of racial injustice into the White House and into the American living room.

A 2011 New York Times review stated, “It is hard to imagine a feature film conveying the events with a more vivid sense of drama or suspense. The commentators —the riders themselves, historians, politicians, civil rights leaders — have mostly been chosen for an uncanny ability to convey the tension in a present-tense reconstruction. Blowhards and professors of the obvious have been excised, and the archival photographs and news clips have been edited down to those most affecting and lyrical.”

Starr Center’s Digital Historian and Archivist Jasmyn R. Castro was instrumental in arranging the event. “When I attended NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Master’s Program I was part of a student chapter of the Association of Moving Image Archivists that organized a screening and Q and A of “Freedom Summer” and we invited Stanley Nelson to attend.”

Castro thought “Freedom Riders” and its famous director would be an ideal presentation for the Starr Center. He happily accepted the invitation.

“A colleague of mine, Carmel Curtis, from Indiana University will act as moderator during the Q and A and I’m also excited to have found out that former Director of Kent Arts Council Leslie Raimond had archival video of Freedom Riders coming through Chestertown in the 1960s,” she says. The original footage has be cleaned and digitized and will be shown in the background of the Q and A.

Reverend Brown of Chestertown, whose father welcomed the Freedom Riders to Chestertown will also participate in the discussion.

The Starr Center notes that “Stanley Nelson is today’s leading documentarian of the African American experience. His films combine compelling narratives with rich historical detail to shine new light on the under-explored American past. Awards received over the course of his career include a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, five Primetime Emmy Awards, and lifetime achievement awards from the Emmys and IDA. In 2013, Nelson received the National Medal in the Humanities from President Obama. In 2019 “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” was nominated by the GRAMMYs for Best Music Film. Nelson’s latest documentary, “Crack: Cocaine, Conspiracy, & Corruption” debuted on Netflix in 2021.”

The evening will begin at 5 p.m. ET with a free, two-hour screening of Nelson’s “Freedom Riders.” After a brief intermission, starting at 7 p.m., Nelson will share with us his professional insights about the film. A moderated Q&A with Nelson with conclude our time together. Join us for the screening at 5 p.m. and the conversation at 7 p.m. or just drop in for the conversation at 7 p.m.

To Register for the event, go here. To watch the film beforehand, go here.

If the last four years feels like a crash course in American civics, constitutional law, and history, the Covid-19 pandemic—and our forced retirement from whatever we considered normal— has allowed us time to jump down the rabbit hole of research to look for facts, context, and an equation to understand how we arrived to a democracy in peril.

Had you attended the online event “Thursdays with the Starr Center” last week you would have discovered another perilous moment in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s thirteen-day train trip from Springfield, Illinois to his inauguration in Washington DC—a subject brought to the fore by historian Ted Widmer in his book Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.

For Widmer, the Starr invitation to lecture was a chance to return to Chestertown: he was the first Director of the Center (2001-2006) and shaped its mission to become a preeminent learning center for American history. The author of many other books, Widmer is currently the historian at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

The evening was introduced by fellow historian and Starr Center Director Adam Goodheart, the successor to Widmer’s directorship. Goodheart’s book 1861; The Civil War Awakening stands as a stellar important contribution to the history of the Civil War. Over the years, Widmer and Goodheart have worked together on projects, including a 2010-2012 Civil War series in the New York Times. 

Widmer’s talk about Lincoln’s “Inaugural Express” train odyssey from Springfield, Illinois to Washington gave extraordinary insight to the gravity of the era, a year when six states had already seceded from the Union, the South was a burning fuse of insurrection, and the nation was adrift and desperate for a moral compass to guide them through the impending immolation of the young democracy.

While pro-southern militias awaited the President-elect in Washington, at least two assassination plots along the journey were discovered. Fear of plots to impair the electoral certificate count was rampant, and some believed Lincoln would not make it to The Capitol alive.

Where most historians address Lincoln’s Civil War years, Widmer finds the thirteen days before his presidency a window into the formation of the President he would become. Even during the train trip, few knew anything about the young legislator from the Midwest. Still, Lincoln used each stop along the way to build his reputation as a master of oratory and reveal himself as a “man of the people.”

Careful to hew toward a politically non-partisan approach to discussing the book, Widmer nonetheless conveyed such a vivid account of America teetering on the brink of civil chaos that one would be hard put not to find parallels with our current political dilemmas.

I recommend viewing the complete Starr Center talk on their Facebook page and buying the book. It’s elegant prose in the hands of a master historian who reminds us how tenuous the structure of Democracy can be.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For “Thursdays with the Starr Center” upcoming events, go here.