A documentary 10 years in the making about the sacrifices and accomplishments of African American soldiers will be screened at Vanderbilt University Friday, Jan. 29.
For Love of Liberty: The Story of America‘s Black Patriots will be presented at 7 p.m. in Sarratt Cinema in the Sarratt Student Center on the Vanderbilt campus. The screening will precede airing of the film on PBS stations in February.
The event is free and the public is invited. A question-and-answer session will follow the screening, which will be attended by Richard Hull, a producer of For Love of Liberty and a Vanderbilt alumnus, and Frank Martin, the writer and director of the film. Paul Young, director of film studies at Vanderbilt, will introduce the film and moderate.
Beginning with the death of Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave who was the first casualty of the Revolutionary War, the film uses interviews, letters, diaries, speeches, journalistic accounts and historical text to document the service of African American men and women since the earliest days of the republic through the current battles against terrorists.
“It is a wonderful story … of a group of Americans who never lost their love of this country, never lost their faith in it or what the founding fathers had promised them,” said Gen. Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state.
The film boasts dramatic readings by Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, Susan Sarandon, John Travolta, Ossie Davis, Robert Duvall, Walter Cronkite, LeVar Burton, Kris Kristofferson and many others. Actress Halle Berry hosts the film.
The screening is sponsored by Vanderbilt‘s film studies program, the Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt, and the Vanderbilt in Hollywood program.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu