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Please join the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation for a film screening of, “Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century.”
Produced by an award-winning Harvard/LA/NYC/DC team, the film offers a compelling view of major events of the past ten decades, as seen through the eyes of Mr. Pope, an unassuming man whose inner fortitude and quiet accomplishments represent the Spirit of an American Century. Completed very recently, the film has already been made an Official Selection of three film festivals, and audiences are giving the film an average of 5 out of 5 stars, calling it “phenomenal,” “rich on so many levels,” and “inspiring.”
“Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century” is a portrait of warm, enduring interracial friendships forged during World War II that present a model for today, and it uncovers unexpected, contemporary connections among its subjects that are astonishing and inspiring.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Panelists:
Attorney Michael Curry is the Immediate Past President of the Boston Branch of the NAACP (2010 – 2016), and has been elected twice by members nationally to serve on the National NAACP’s Board of Directors (2014-present). Michael has over 20 years of service to the NAACP on city, state and national levels. Michael embraced the challenge of reviving the nation’s first chartered branch and was effective at recruiting the next generation of civil rights leaders. He drew on his years of legislative experience, work in civil rights, business and health law to advance the mission of the NAACP. Since his election to the National Board, where he is the first New Englander to serve since the 1970s, he has been appointed to key committee leadership positions, including serving on the Association’s Executive, Legal, Image Awards, Convention Planning and Constitution Committees. He currently Chairs the Association’s Advocacy & Policy Committee and Vice-Chairs Legislation & Political Action. In 2016 Attorney Curry was appointed by then Chairman Roslyn Brock to serve on the Charter School/Quality Education Task Force, and he has traveled the nation over the past two years engaging educators, activists, policymakers, parents and students on the challenges faced in education. In 2017, Michael also co-founded the National NAACP’s Next Generation (NEXTGEN) Young Professional Leadership Training Program, aimed at training the next generation of civil rights activists and NAACP leaders.
Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., is a clinical and research psychologist, currently an Associate at the DuBois Institute of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard and the Project Director for the Voices of Diversity study that was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She is a former Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program. She is an award winning documentary filmmaker and playwright and the author of 11 books, one of which won three top national awards for nonfiction. Her previous documentary, "Is Anybody Listening?" isanybodylisteningmovie.org has been hailed by veterans, their loved ones, and nonveterans for helping bridge the chasms among them. It has had 60 screenings in a variety of places across the country, as well as on Capitol Hill and, in Canada, on Parliament Hill, and it was broadcast widely on PBS stations. "Isaac Pope: The Spirit of an American Century" isaacpopefilm.com was made with Director Rock Grant and Cinematographer Joseph Friedman, and the score was composed by Rodney Jones. It was chosen for a special screening at the NAACP's National Board meeting, had its LA premiere hosted by the LA County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs and cosponsored by the National Veterans Foundation, and is slated for PBS broadcasts. With Christina Marchand at the HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, she created the groundbreaking conference "A Better Welcome Home," which was about more than two dozen ways to help veterans while ceasing to call their deeply human suffering from war trauma or rape trauma mental illnesses. paulacaplan.net
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar, teacher, public servant, and social justice activist who holds a joint faculty appointment in Harvard’s undergraduate honors program in History and Literature, the Graduate School of Education, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Since 2008, he has also been Core Faculty and Program Director at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and on April 5, 2017, he delivered the inaugural lecture to launch Resistance School, an online learning hub for progressives who want to reclaim, rebuild, and reimagine America in the Trump era.
An historian of politics and social movements, Dr. McCarthy is the author or editor of five books from the New Press, including The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (2003), Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (2006), Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism (2010), The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the People’s Historian (2012), and Stonewall's Children: Living Queer History in an Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love (2019). He has been awarded fellowships and funding from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, Massachusetts Historical Society, Mass Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, Open Gate Foundation, David Bohnett Foundation, and Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Dr. McCarthy is the director of A.R.T. of Human Rights and host of Resistance Mic!, two ongoing series with the Tony Award-winning American Repertory Theater. A frequent media commentator, he is featured in several documentary films, has appeared on NPR, BBC, CBS News, Air America, Bloomberg Radio, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, HuffPost Live, and Big Think, and has published in The Daily Beast, Salon, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and The Nation.
In 2012, Dr. McCarthy was a member of the first-ever LGBTQ delegation from the US to Israel/Palestine, and served, from 2011-2017, on the board of Free the Slaves, From 1997 to 2012, Dr. McCarthy directed the Alternative Spring Break Church Rebuilding Program, where he brought hundreds of students down South to rebuild African-American churches destroyed in racist arson attacks. He has also served as an advisor on numerous political campaigns, including the 2008 Presidential campaign, when he was a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council.
Dr. McCarthy graduated with honors in History and Literature from Harvard College, and earned his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. He and his husband live in Quincy House, where they have been Resident Scholars since 2010.