JUSTICE MATTERS

TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

LOUIS MASSIAH, MONICA HENRIQUEZ
USA, UK, Canada, France, Senegal, 2025
105 minutes, Color and Black & White
Official website

In Person:
April 22 screening: Producer/Director Louis Massiah and Director/Editor Monica Henriquez with guest moderator Dr. Rhea Combs, curator, writer, arts leader, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Baltimore Museum of Art, Former Director of Curatorial Affairs National Portrait Gallery
April 23 screening: Producer/Director Louis Massiah and Director/Editor Monica Henriquez with guest moderator Darryl C. Murphy, Arts & Culture Reporter, WAMU 88.5

"The role of a revolutionary artist is to make revolution irresistible," Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995) was known for saying. She was a novelist, filmmaker, professor, and editor of the groundbreaking 1970 literary anthology The Black Woman, but none of these accomplishments defined her; she referred to herself simply as a "culture worker." "She swept into the room like she owned it," poet Nikky Finney recalls, "then sat down and started stuffing envelopes." For her editor, the estimable Toni Morrison, "She was the finest fiction writer I had encountered." Cade Bambara's activist and artistic enthusiasms, her oratory wit, and the love of community they held resonated with filmmakers Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, whose documentary set to a jazz score by Jerome Jennings perfectly reflects TCB's sensibilities. She filled folks up. This irresistible film fills us up as we rediscover an icon of a beautiful moment in Black liberation.—Judy Bloch

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