Thu 10/7 @ 7PM

The Chagrin Documentary Film Festival is going on all week through Sunday October 10, with 38 feature films and 30 short docs (less than 40 minutes), including numerous festival premiers.

One of those is the 40-minute film Training for Freedom, sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women, which tackles the timely and critical subject of voting rights, now under attack across the country.

The film, by Kathy Conkwright, looks back at the 1964 Freedom Summer, when volunteers from across the country descended on Mississippi with the goal of registering Black voters in the state where the fewest were registered (not even 8%), despite being 1/3 of the population, and where white segregationist politicians said things like “Our Negroes are happy and don’t want to vote.”

The film focuses on the training sessions that brought together college students and Black activist teachers at the former Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio to prepare to go to Mississippi for a campaign that resulting in three registration workers murdered by Klansmen and few Black voters registered but had a major impact on moving the Civil Rights Movement forward.

“Discuss Fighting For Voting Rights: Then And Now” features a virtual screening and discussion, which will look at how voting rights have been blocked in the past and how they’re under attack today. Participants include Case Western Reserve law professor Bryan Adamson, Miami University archivist and film producer Jacqueline Johnson, League of Women Voters Ohio executive director Jen Miller, and Diane Leatherberry who participated in the Freedom Summer, as well as her daughter Wendy, a local activist and former member of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Board of education.

Those who register will get a link to watch the film before the discussion. To register, go here.