PART TWO - American Promise Screening hosted by MLK Jr State Commission

310 San Pedro Drive Northeast,Albuquerque NM 87108

25 March, 2022

Description

American Promise - Part Two - Film Screening and Discussion with Youth Leaders. Free Parking. Dinner will be served. Please join The New Mexico Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission, The African American Performing Arts Center and NMPBS for PART TWO of our special FREE screening of the PBS documentary American Promise by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. This event is a collaboration with POV, PBS' award-winning nonfiction film series. http://www.pbs.org/pov About the film: In part two of American Promise, the boys' paths have diverge. Upon graduating middle school, Seun leaves Dalton to attend the mostly black Benjamin Banneker Academy, a public high school in Brooklyn, where he thrives, traveling to West Africa with his school's Africa Tours Club and setting his sights on a career in graphic design (to his parents' consternation). Idris stays at Dalton through high school, but is disappointed when he doesn't get into Stanford, his dad's alma mater. Now dating a girl he adores, he is accepted into Occidental College in California and exuberantly comes to see that what seemed a setback is just another challenge to overcome. Even Joe, the Stanford and Harvard graduate who admits that he has at times been too hard on Idris, accepts that there are roads to success that don't run straight through the Ivy League. Seun gets into the State University of New York, Fredonia, where he will study graphic arts, and his parents, too, realize there are many paths to success and happiness. Idris' parents, Joe, a Harvard- and Stanford-trained psychiatrist, and Michèle, a Columbia Law School graduate and filmmaker, decided to film the boys' progress starting in 1999. They and members of the large Summers family soon found themselves struggling not only with kids' typical growing pains and the kinds of racial issues one might expect, but also with surprising class, gender and generational gaps. American Promise, which traces the boys' journey from kindergarten through high school graduation, finds the greatest challenge for the families--and perhaps the country--is to close the black male educational achievement gap, which has been called "the civil rights crusade of the 21st century." Following the screening, join a discussion with a panel of young community leaders. Dinner will be served at 6 PM, the film will begin at 6:30. MASKS REQUIRED New Mexico PBS is one of the most watched public television stations in the country reaching almost 700,000 households each week with 20,000 members in central and northern New Mexico. newmexicopbs.org provides users with a place to interact, learn more, and connect with others and has over 80,000 page views per month. New Mexico PBS has extensive partnerships throughout the community. These partnerships include the K-12 community, higher- education, dozens of community service organizations and more.