Noontime Wednesday Movie Series

In Celebration of Black History Month
The Committee for Equity and Inclusion & iSTAND present:

Noontime Wednesday Movie Series

(Note: February 10th movie will be in the evening from 4p-6p)

Bechtel Living Room, 12p-1p
Lunch will be provided to the first 30 people

 For more information, contact the Committee for Equity and Inclusion.

February 3rd: The Pact
After making good on a high-school pact to become physicians despite extraordinary odds, three friends return to their tough hometown of Newark, N.J., to practice medicine and to inspire at-risk youth to stay in school and off the streets. Documentarian Andrea Kalin recounts the remarkable true story of doctors Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins while painting an unflinching portrait of an urban center wracked with crime and poverty.

February 10th:  Something The Lord Made (will be shown from 4p-6p)
Tells the story of the extraordinary 34-year partnership which begins in Depression Era Nashville in 1930, when Blalock hires Thomas as an assistant in his Vanderbilt University lab, expecting him merely to perform janitorial work. Thomas, an African-American without a college degree, is a gifted mechanic and tool-maker with hands splendidly adept at surgery, and Thomas rapidly becomes indispensable as a research partner to Blalock in his first daring forays into heart surgery. The film traces the groundbreaking work the two men undertake when they move in 1941 from Vanderbilt to Johns Hopkins, an institution where the only black employees are janitors and where Thomas must enter by the back door. Together, they boldly attack the devastating heart problem of Tetralogy of Fallot, also known as Blue Baby Syndrome, and in so doing they open the field of heart surgery. The film dramatizes their race to save dying Blue Babies against the background of a Jim Crow (Racial Segregation) America, illuminating the nuanced and complex relationship the two sustain. Featuring Mos Def & Alan Rickman.

February 17th:  All My Babies
This historically significant documentary captures the conditions of poor, black families living in rural Georgia in the 1950s through the eyes of veteran midwife "Miss Mary" Coley. Also included is the bonus public service film Palmour Street (1949), which portrays the everyday lives of African-American families in Gainesville, Ga.

February 24th:  Black American Experience: Williams and Drew
Despite barriers of race and class, the two African-American physicians profiled here rose to the top of their fields -- one as a cardiac surgeon and the other with his groundbreaking research in blood work. Despairing over disparities in care between Black and White patients, cardiologist Daniel Hale Williams established the first U.S. hospital for Blacks, while Charles Richard Drew railed against racial segregation of donated blood.