Arts & Entertainment
On Wednesday, August 10, at 5 p.m. there will be a screening of the short film The Barber of Birmingham at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. The film is part of the ninth annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival taking place here on the Island, beginning today, August 9, and running through Saturday, August 13.
African Rhythms
“Dear friends, people of peace. We gather to remember the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the horror of war and violence, and to rededicate ourselves to a peace sustained by justice.”
So spoke the Rev. Alden Besse to begin the Martha’s Vineyard Peace Council’s 34th consecutive remembrance of the explosion of the atomic bomb that would bring an end to the Second World War.
Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but at 5 p.m. the circus, complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music, gets underway.
At the age of 15, Massoud Kohistani was chosen along with 40 other first-time students from Afghanistan to spend a year with an American family and learn about democracy. Massoud touched down on American soil in Washington, D.C. but unfortunately, at the last minute, a few of the students were left without host families or supervision. Welcome to democracy, where freedom to choose can also lead to freedom not to choose.
“These people did what the Emancipation Proclamation could not do, what Lincoln could not do, what the North and South alone could not do,” Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson said, outlining one of many legacies of the Great Migration, which she chronicled in The Warmth of Other Suns, her epic account of this demographic seism.
“They freed themselves.”
