Leveling Lincoln
Running Time: 74 minutes
Sunday, February 18, 2024 at 2:00pm
read more about Leveling Lincoln
To level the playing field, they leveled the school: The segregation case that brought school integration to the "tolerant" North East in 1961.
In honor of Black History Month, Theatre West is proud to present the full 74-minute Directors Cut of Leveling Lincoln, helmed by Arden Teresa Lewis. Selected for over a dozen film festivals in Canada, England, and the United States, this Civil Rights documentary has won best in its category in 9 of them. The New York Vision Award in the Harlem International Film Festival, and Best Documentary in the Rhode Island Black Film Festival, the Lady Filmmakers Festival, and the Yonkers YoFi Festival, among others. Our team has been proud to be part of New Rochelle, New York's 2022 Juneteenth festival celebrations as well as several University, High School, Black History Month, and Civil Rights History curriculum and community group events. We have screened for DEI corporate staff training, resulting in positive and open discussions that led to growth.
The award-winning documentary Leveling Lincoln is part of the Race, Equity, and Inclusion collection of NETA, the National Education and Telecommunications Association, with the shortened 58-minute version. They present it for public television programming and on the PBS App. The concise, 58-minute version is available for licensing to colleges, universities, and libraries, through the Films Media Group, an Infobase Learning Company. See our website for more information www.levelinglincoln.com
Come see the full version that won all those awards and prizes, meet the filmmakers and alumni of New Rochelle High School Class of 77, and start a conversation about this unique piece of Civil Rights history.
Arden Lewis, Director
Leveling Lincoln is a documentary feature film that explores the history behind the landmark 1961 desegregation case Taylor vs. The Board of Education of New Rochelle, NY where an entire elementary school had to be torn down to achieve a level playing field in education. The case, the first of its kind in the North (seven years after Brown vs. The Board of Education), was praised on the floor of the United States Senate as an example of successful integration by peaceful protest, discourse, and jurisprudence. It's the story of how a community came together at the grassroots level to reject the accepted de facto segregation of their town and recognize how its history of privilege made them blind to systemic inequality.
