Ken Burns and Skip Gates on Race in America

Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns on “Visions of Race” Screening and Panel Discussion

WHEN:        Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 4:00 p.m.

WHERE:      Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at 
                    Harvard Law School  
                    Austin Hall’s Ames Courtroon
                    125 Mount Auburn Street, 3^rd floor  
                    Cambridge, MA 02138

REGISTER:  CharlesHamiltonHouston.org and click on “ Events"  --  or call 617-495-8285

EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Filmmaker Ken Burns will screen a series of clips from his celebrated films and then join distinguished scholars in a panel discussion entitled “Visions of Race in America in the Films of Ken Burns.”

Besides Burns, the panel will include:

• Stanley Crouch, writer and cultural critic
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard;
• Edward Schumacher-Matos, Shorenstein Fellow on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; and
• Geoffrey C. Ward, biographer, historian and documentary writer, .
  
  The panel members will explore the themes of race, ethnicity and citizenship in Burns’ films.

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Burns is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose documentaries have profoundly influenced American culture and society during the past three decades. Most recently, his seven-part documentary about World War II, The War, aired on PBS in 2007.

His films include The Civil War, an 11-hour series that won more than 40 major television and film awards; Baseball (1994); Jazz (2001); Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004) and many others.