The vital role and relevance of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) has been contested in contemporary times. Until recently, no central text or film documented the history of these institutions as they transformed the lives of African-Americans and American society over the arc of time.
Emmy award-winning director Stanley Nelson’s forthcoming film does just that. Grounded in history, “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities” sheds light on the “unapologetic Black spaces” specifically dedicated to affirming Black students’ identities, culture and intellectual possibilities.
“The thing I love most about this film is that it drives home the fact that education has always been at the center of the Black freedom struggle,” says Dr. Crystal R. Sanders, associate professor of history and African-American studies at Pennsylvania State University. “Before and after emancipation, African-Americans pooled their resources to set up institutions of learning because they understood that literacy was the key to freedom itself.”
Beautiful black-and-white archival images of freed Blacks with heads down in books, gathering at schoolhouses and taking education into their own hands, is at the beginning of the narrative Nelson weaves about the nation’s 100-plus HBCUs. The inclusion of speeches by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and other key Black intellectuals shows the sharp divide in early theories on how to promote Black social and economic progress at the turn of the 20th century.
Dr. Marybeth Gasman, director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions and the Judy & Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, says she appreciated Nelson’s inclusion of rich voices, institutional archival material, music, color and sounds throughout the film — sounds such as those of Florida A&M University’s “Marching 100” band, church choirs and students’ freedom songs of the protest movements in the 1950s and ’60s.
A historian by training, Gasman says the inclusion of African-American scholars and historians was especially noteworthy to her. Viewers can expect to see scholars, historians and Black education leaders like Sanders, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Margaret Washington, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Dr. Heather Andrea Williams, Dr. Jonathan Holloway and Johnny C. Taylor — formerly of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund — curating the history of HBCUs at different points throughout the film.
The African-American historians featured in the film are scholars whom viewers “don’t get to see in documentaries” because they are often overlooked, Gasman said. “To me, that’s incredibly important.”
