Beyond FACTS: Community Conversations Hosted by Facing History and Ourselves

I’m bummed I couldn’t go. The latest event in a series of eleven Community Conversations hosted by Facing History and Ourselves actually took place in Denver last week. Award-winning producers Whitney Dow and Marco Williams (pictured at left) were in town to discuss their new documentary, I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Their film follows a racially diverse group of high school students as they attempt to integrate their lunchroom. The Denver Rocky Mountain chapter of Facing History and Ourselves did a great job promoting the event to local educators, calling it “an incredible opportunity to meet the filmmakers and discuss issues that are central to our work—how do we empower and equip students to navigate the levels of power and understand how to make positive social change in their community and their school.”

I love these people. Additional Community Conversations events are scheduled in other cities in upcoming weeks, and hopefully many more will eventually follow. Maybe even another one in Denver. Through this program, “Prominent scholars, authors, filmmakers and policy leaders…speak and participate in discussions about civic engagement, individual and collective responsibility, and tolerance.”

• At the San Francisco Main Library, Azar Nafisi, author of the national bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, will speak on November 9 at 6 p.m.

• At the Chicago Public Library, Canadian Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, author of the best-selling book Shake Hands with the Devil, will discuss his experience as the Force Commander of the U.N. Assistance Mission to Rwanda on November 28 at 5:30 p.m. His book exposes the failures of the international community to stop the Rwandan genocide.

• On December 5 (location TBA), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Taylor Branch will discuss the Civil Rights Movement and how ordinary people “pried their freedom loose from the grip of segregationist whites.” Branch is the author of an extensive trilogy called America in the King Years, which chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

All these events are free!