Special Screening of Revolution '67

December 3
7 p.m.

The 1960s were in full heat. The Vietnam War, campus unrest, political assassinations and a defiant counterculture were remaking the country. For African Americans, nonviolent protest was giving way to "black power" as the traditional civil rights movement was seen as failing the aspirations of poor blacks in decaying urban centers. There had been deadly race riots in Jersey City (1964), Harlem (1964) and Watts, Los Angeles (1965). So when black Newark taxi driver John Smith was stopped for a traffic violation on July 12, 1967, the rumor that he had not only been beaten but had died spread like a force of nature through Newark's impoverished black neighborhoods.

As meticulously reconstructed in "Revolution '67", the response of Newark's black citizens to Smith's beating and purported death was a long time in the making. And the heavy-handed response of the police and city leaders — also long in the making — turned a spontaneous protest against police actions into a full-scale revolt. After six days, 26 people lay dead, 725 people were injured, and close to 1,500 had been arrested. "Revolution '67" marshals chilling archival footage and the vivid memories of a remarkable number of key players on the scene — citizens, community activists, police, National Guardsmen and the state's future governor — to render an insiders' account of racial and economic division in an American city.

To tell its tale, "Revolution '67" makes use of archival news footage from an era when portable cameras and television were making coverage more plentiful and more candid, punctuated by filmmaker Jerome Bongiorno's bold animation to illustrate the film's events and statistics. A musical score comprised of more than 60 jazz pieces by international artists sets the mood for Newark in the late '60s. Most dramatically, "Revolution '67" offers an unprecedented array of eyewitness accounts of an emblematic American tragedy. The passion over events that summer in Newark remains strong among those who were on the scene.

Activist George Richardson recounts the challenges faced by black community activists in Newark prior to the riots. Controversial poet and Newark native Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) recalls the temper of the community and recounts being arrested for no better reason than venturing outside. Journalist Bob Herbert, now of the New York Times, remembers the shooting death of his friend Billy Furr on July 15 — for taking beer from an already-looted store to give to thirsty newsmen.

Other witnesses include then-Essex County Prosecutor Brendan T. Byrne, who later became New Jersey governor; then-UCC Area Board President Sharpe James, later Newark's mayor; then-National Guardsman Paul Zigo; photographer Bud Lee; activists Carol Glassman and Richard Cammarieri; then-police officer Armando B. Fontoura, later Essex County sheriff; journalist Ronald Smothers; and Harold Lucas, former head of the Newark Housing Authority. Historical commentary is provided by preeminent historians Kenneth T. Jackson, Clement A. Price, Nell Irvin Painter and Charles F. Cummings.

Well-known '60s activist Tom Hayden and other community organizers living in Newark were suspected by some people to be "outside agitators" behind the disturbances, but the activists were experiencing quite a different reality. Hayden says that in Newark in 1967, he realized that the day of the white civil rights worker was over. In fact powerless to influence the black community, Hayden gave a frustrated Governor Richard Hughes the key to ending the tumult — removing the troops. When the governor did so, the disorder subsided. Historians agree that contrary to news reports of the day, the reaction by city, state and national forces caused most, if not all, of the deaths.

The Newark riots were among the deadliest racial disturbances per capita in recent U.S. history. The outbreak, as told by "Revolution '67," offers a "textbook" case of how endemic conditions — poverty, racial injustice, police reaction and a corrupt power structure — alienated Newark's neediest citizens and fed a cycle of resistance and destruction in poor black neighborhoods. The film is also a disturbing examination of how neither facts nor cool heads can stand in the way of explosive social forces once they have been set in motion.

The Newark rebellion, as many observers prefer to call it, could be seen as both predictable and predicted — regardless of what had happened to Smith. In fact, the taxi driver, alleged to have sideswiped a double-parked police car, had been beaten by white police and taken to the Fourth Precinct, across the street from a large public-housing project. An angry crowd gathered, believing Smith was still being abused. But Smith, accompanied by black community leaders, had left via a side door for the hospital, even as word spread out front that he had died. Community leaders could not persuade the angry crowd that Smith was alive. Nor could the crowd be stopped from assaulting the police with empty bottles and at least one Molotov cocktail — provoking an "overwhelming" response from the police.

Soon unverified alarms over black "snipers" had first police, then state troopers and National Guard troops firing into the upper stories of tenements at any real or imagined activity on rooftops. It was this type of indiscriminate gunfire that accounted for many, if not all, of the riot's most tragic fatalities — people sitting in their own homes. "Revolution '67" makes use of news footage, juxtaposed with the recollections of those who still argue about the existence of snipers, to disprove that there were any. Later investigations found that out of some 13,000 rounds of ammunition fired, only 100 of them were even alleged to have come from rioters rather than law enforcement, and not one of those cases was proved. Of all those arrested, no one was charged with being a sniper.

"Revolution '67" documents the social forces at work — a city government and police force that hadn't sufficiently analyzed the demographic change that had made Newark a black city, and the fears of suburban and rural state police and National Guardsmen sent into an urban civil war for which they were ill-prepared. "Revolution '67" also captures the anger and desperation of a community bitterly disappointed by continued police actions and economic injustice after years of civil rights progress.

"Revolution '67" is an illuminating account of important events too often relegated to footnotes in U.S. history and not explored in depth in school textbooks — the black urban rebellions of the 1960s. The days of the Newark rebellion formed a fateful milestone in America's continuing struggles over race, economic justice and corruption, and recall lessons as hard-learned then as they are dangerous to forget today.

"I'm a native daughter and resident of Newark," says director Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno, "and for as long as I can remember, Newark has been stigmatized by the riots of 1967. The questions remain: What really happened, who's to blame, and why hasn't the city recovered? Are the problems Newark faced in the '60s the same that plague it today? That's why my husband and I made this film — to get those answers."

Annual Book Sale

Please join us for the annual Friends of the Ephrata Public Library Annual Book Sale. Opening night is Friday, October 12 from 6-9 with the food stand opening at 5 p.m. Admission for opening night (only) is $7 for adults and $1 for children. Admission for the rest of the sale is free. The sale runs Saturday, October 13 from 9 a.m.-1 p.m.; Sunday, October 14 from 2-5 p.m.; Monday, October 15 from 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Tuesday, October 16 from 9 a.m.-8 p.m. and Wednesday, October 17 from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. This is a great way to support the library AND get some great books!

Film Screening - Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars

October 1, 7 p.m. - Join us for this special screening!

The plight of the refugee in today's war-torn world is captured in the African proverb "When two elephants are fighting, the grass dem' a-suffer." So it was in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002, when the government and various rebel factions carried out a brutal civil war in which the terrorizing of civilians — by killing, mutilation, rape and forced conscription — was common practice on all sides. The war sent hundreds of thousands of ordinary Sierra Leoneans fleeing to refugee camps in the neighboring West African nation of the Republic of Guinea. That's where the remarkable story told by the new documentary "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" began.

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars are a band of six Sierra Leonean musicians who have been living in Guinea. Many of their family and friends were murdered in the violence, leaving them with physical and emotional scars that may never heal. Despite the unimaginable horrors of civil war, they were saved through their music. Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars chronicles the band over three years, from Guinean refugee camps back to war-ravaged Sierra Leone, where they realize the dream of recording their first studio album. And so begins a musical phenomenon that is making the world hear the voices of West Africa's refugees while drawing the accolades of musical superstars Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Ice Cube (one of the executive producers of the film), and Joe Perry.

Walking with his wife, Grace, through the squalid and dangerous Kalia camp in Guinea, Reuben Koroma was happy to find Franco John Langba, a "musical brother" from the prewar music scene in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. In camps like Kalia, discovering someone alive feels like a miracle. But the three took the miracle a step further by making music for their fellow refugees. The camp had already become embroiled in Guinea's fractious politics, and soon the unwanted Sierra Leoneans were relocated to the Sembakounya camp in the remote countryside. It was there that Reuben, Grace and Franco were joined by three other refugee musicians and acquired beat-up instruments and a rusted-out sound system.

At Sembakounya the newly formed Refugee All Stars, led by Reuben, had another fortuitous encounter — with American filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White and their musical director, Chris Velan. The filmmakers, both living in San Francisco, had previously had substantial experience in Africa and were in Guinea looking for stories that would balance the Western media's focus on the region's violence with a sense of African society's beauty and resilience.

When they were introduced to the All Stars, Niles and White knew they had found their story. That was in August 2002, and the band was just preparing, under the auspices of the U.N. refugee agency, to tour other refugee camps in Guinea. The filmmakers followed the All Stars on that tour — where they were wildly received — and over the following three years as the members worked on their songs, wrestled with the lasting traumas of the war and ultimately returned to Freetown, under an uneasy peace settlement, to record their first album, Living Like a Refugee. (Information on the band's album and U.S. tour, beginning June 8, 2007, is available at www.refugeeallstars.org.)

Despite all the recent hoopla in the group's life, including a tour of music festivals throughout Europe, North America and Japan, the band and its music remain close to the reality of the camps that gave them life. The songs on Living Like a Refugee, including the title track, "Bull to the Weak," as well as "Weapon Conflict," and "Compliments for Peace" speak directly from the refugees' experience — against war, and the hatred, greed and brutality that accompany it.
As "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" so vividly reveals, no amount of Western entertainment glitz could sweep away the pain and terror that gave the band its soul and which, paradoxically, led to buoyant, hopeful and even joyous music. With its own blend of traditional Sierra Leonean goombay, West African high-life, reggae and hip-hop, the All Stars are bonded by the determination to do no less than "take the suffering of the people and make a song of it." In this, there is no distance between them and their subject — the suffering is indelibly their own.

Reuben and Grace had fared among the best of Sierra Leone's refugees, having fled Freetown in the midst of a rebel attack. In the camps, the couple had one another but had lost everything else, including contact with family, friends and the musical life they had known.

Franco had been separated from his wife and kids and had still not been able to learn anything of their fates. Of the other bandmates, Arahim "Jah Voice," so called for his perfect high pitches, was forced to watch rebels kill his father before they cut off his arm at the shoulder and left him for dead. Mohammed Bangura had similarly been forced to watch the murder of his parents, wife and infant child before having his hand severed. At 15, Alhadji Jeffrey Kamara, called "Black Nature," is the youngest of the group. Orphaned by the war and tortured by police in Guinea, to which he had fled, Black Nature is perhaps the most traumatized and is considered an adopted son by the others.

Yet it is in such grace notes — in the warmth, humor and searing candor with which the band members bear their personal and collective wounds — as well as in the music they make, that the All Stars express their fierce loyalty to one another and to their people, and indeed to refugees of all the world's terrible conflicts. They must face the present with courage and the future with hope in order to save their lives. Thus the band's return to a barely reconstructed Island Studios in Freetown, while the devastation and a shaky peace treaty signed in 2002 keep many refugees away, comes as a powerful message of renewal.

Says co-director Zach Niles: "Even amidst unimaginable hardships, we knew the All Stars' story would be not only a celebration of what is beautiful about Africa, but what is beautiful about the human spirit — the willingness to overcome adversity, the ability to forgive, the desire to share hope with others."

Adds co-director Banker White: "From the beginning, we would joke that Reuben knew what we were doing there better than we did. Reuben said they had been writing and practicing all along and were just waiting for us to arrive. He really was writing songs for the whole world to hear."

Screening of the Indepdent Film "Mother of Mine"

Join us on September 17 at 6 p.m. for a screening of this great film! This film has won a TON of awards including: Best Foreign Language Film at the Satellite Awards; Official Selection at the Toronto International Film Festival; Audience Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival; and more!

During World War II, more than 70,000 Finnish children were evacuated to neutral Sweden to avoid the conflict. "Mother of Mine," the latest from the award-winning Klaus Haro ("Elina"), tackles that painful patch of history in a tale of 9-year-old Eero, a child who increasingly feels abandoned by his biological Finnish mother and yet not attached to his Swedish surrogate mom. When he is returned to Finland, his confusion intensifies. Finnish and Swedish with English subtitles.

Rain in a Dry Land - A Special Screening

Screening of Rain in a Dry Land
September 10 • 7 p.m.

After more than a decade in a refugee camp in Kenya, to which they had fled to escape the civil wars tearing apart the Horn of Africa, two Somali Bantu families are stunned to learn in early 2004 that they will finally be allowed to immigrate to America. The resettlement plan began under Clinton in 1999, was interrupted by September 11th, and began again late in 2003. The families are, in a Somali Bantu expression, grateful recipients of bish-bish, which translates literally as "splash-splash," indicating the first rains after a long drought ("rain in a dry land") and, by extension, resettlement in America. In a world teeming with desperate refugees, where barren camps like the U.N.-supported Kakuma in Kenya become permanent rather than temporary fixtures on troubled borders, a ticket to the United States may be the ultimate bish-bish.

"Rain in a Dry Land" chronicles, in their own poetic words, the first 18 months of the American lives of Arbai Barre Abdi and her children and Aden Edow and Madina Ali Yunye and their children. Beginning with "cultural orientation" classes in Kenya, where they are introduced to such novelties as electric appliances and the prospect of living in high-rise apartment buildings, the film follows the Muslim families on divergent yet parallel paths as they learn that the streets in America are definitely not paved with gold, especially for poor immigrants. The families' sponsors -- Jewish Family Services in Springfield, Massachusetts, and World Relief in Atlanta, have pledged six months of support, which gives the families a daunting learning curve to take themselves from the 19th century to the 21st.

The film measures the distance from an African refugee camp to an American city and asks what it means to be a refugee in today's "global village," providing answers in the stories of two families whose response to 21st-century culture shock presents an uncommon portrait of human persistence in the face of social disorder and change.

The journeys of these Bantu families actually began two centuries ago, when their ancestors arrived in Somalia as slaves. African rather than Arab, Somali Bantus lived among the Somalis as a despised minority. They were relegated to the meanest labor, while being excluded from education, politics and mixing with the dominant Somali clans. When civil war broke out in 1991, various armed factions mercilessly attacked the largely agricultural -- and largely defenseless -- Bantu. Madina Yunye, for one, saw her mother gunned down before she herself was gang raped in front of her children. She and thousands of others fled to Kenya, where history might have finally orphaned them.

Then, in 1999, the United States announced that it would resettle the 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees who had escaped over the border into refugee camps in Kenya eight years before. After nearly 13 years in camps, and five years after this announcement, Madina anticipates her new life in America with the poetry that is one of the delights of "Rain in a Dry Land." "If God permits me to get to America peacefully," she says, "and my eyes and ears arrive in a place where the breeze is blowing, I will learn how to live there..."

Yet even walking up and down flights of stairs takes some getting used to for these families. Their strong bonds and devout Muslim faith have seen them through terrors and misery, but their culture and life experiences are essentially those of illiterate subsistence farmers in village societies. Whatever the strangeness of America's material culture, far more critical challenges lay ahead. How are they going to adapt -- and in quick order -- to an urban America devoted to individualism and novelty, haunted by racism and its legacies, and offering these foreigners few economic opportunities? How will they write in a new language when they were never allowed to learn to write in their own?

The film's first view of Aden Edow and Madina Yunye and their seven children -- Ali, Warsame, Aday, Abdulkadir, Hassan, Hindi and Hussein -- in America, shivering in the winter cold of Springfield, marks the family's dramatic shift in reality. They are quickly facing other challenges as well. Crash courses in English have ill-prepared them to get along in America. And although the kids progress quickly at school, they are placed in regular classrooms too soon, without access to translations. They fall behind, growing demoralized. The adults struggle even more with translating the skills of pre-industrial farmers to the U.S. job market. The family is soon facing the end of their six months of support -- and the prospect of losing the roof over their heads.

In Atlanta, meanwhile, Arbai Barre Abdi and her children Khadija, Sahara, Mainun and Said face a less severe climate but similar social challenges, including America's brand of racism. Though hardly alien to social bigotry -- between Arab and African and Muslim and non-Muslim -- which contributes to the disorders in their homeland, the families must decipher an American code that makes them triple minorities: immigrant, black and Muslim.

One response to these social confusions and barriers is to fall back more heavily on family and tradition, which Arbai struggles to do. But another response is embodied by Arbai's daughter, Sahara, who -- with breathtaking rapidity -- gravitates to the streets and pop culture, and is soon talking like a typical teenager with no use for her elders' opinions or authority.

Yet, through it all, the Bantu immigrants in "Rain in a Dry Land" reveal a remarkable buoyancy and determination in dealing with the demands of a journey whose speed and distance -- both psychological and geographic -- are astounding. That "Rain in a Dry Land" shows them to be people who will likely forge a way does not disguise the fact that, for all the generosity accorded them, immigrants such as these are not given longer-term support for the radical transitions demanded of them. The film raises the question of whether such relocation programs, for all their good intents, are the best way to deal with the world's mounting refugee crises.

For curriculum resources and more information about the film, visit the film's official website.

Paranormal Events in Pennsylvania

Wednesday, July 25 at 6 p.m.

Join us for a discussion of local paranormal events with Rick Fisher of the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania. Rick Fisher has had an interest in the paranormal since an early age when he saw what he believes to have been a ghost. Since then Rick has spent much of his life in search of answers into the unknown. Rick’s journey has taken him to interesting places and has given him the opportunity to meet interesting people. In 1997 he founded the Pennsylvania Ghost Hunters Society which is now the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania and investigates reported hauntings, strange creatures, UFO’s, mysterious places, and unexplained phenomena. An innovator in modern ghost hunting techniques he was the first ghost hunter to use a digital camera, digital recorder, motion sensors and surveillance cameras when conducting investigations of reported haunted places. His techniques are used by many paranormal groups. He teaches classes on Paranormal Investigating at a local community college and has conducted hundreds of investigations and appeared on such programs as the Travel Channel’s “Ghostly Gettysburg” and “Supernatural Destinations” as well as local TV and numerous newspapers, books, magazines and radio programs.

Haven't Signed Up For Summer Reading?

Library staff will be at Royer's Pharmacy in Akron next Friday and Saturday. Stop by and sign up for summer reading if you haven't already. The response has been great -- and lots of adults are turning in their summer reading reviews and their downtown clue solutions -- why not get on board?

Barbara Workinger - June 13th!

Barbara Workinger, author of the Amish Country mystery series, will be visiting the library on June 13th for a program we're calling Literary Tastings. Along with discussing her books, which are available at the library, we will be sharing some Amish desserts! Ms. Workinger will also have books available for purchase and signing during the visit. Please note: registration for this program is required! Hope to see you there!

Summer Reading for Adults

Summer reading is coming! And this year, even adults can participate. For the first time ever, the library is launching a program for adults, "Summer Sleuthing at Your Library!" There are many programs revolving around the mystery theme - and a special downtown mystery, in which participants can win great prizes for solving clues and visiting downtown businesses. In addition, patrons can turn in review slips from books they've read (of any genre) and have their names entered into drawings for prizes. Stop by the library -- sign-ups start June 1st!

EASD Art Show...

Ephrata Area School District Art Show A Success!

In its' sixth year, the partnership between the Ephrata Area School District and the Ephrata Public Library to hold an annual art show for all grades in the school district filled the library with vibrant colors and creativity! Over 3,000 pieces of artwork were featured by school students. We've already begun planning for next year show and are grateful that such a great cooperative exists!