The Riverhead Free Library will host film screenings, performances and talks featuring prominent Black community members to celebrate Black History Month. The events begin this weekend.
On Saturday at 11 a.m.. The Heart of Riverhead Civic Association is hosting a viewing of the 2017 documentary film “Step,” which tells the story of a girls’ high school step team in Baltimore. The showing of the firm will be followed by a live step dance team performance by the Butterfly Effect Project’s dancers.
On Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 7 p.m. the library will host a discussion celebrating Black history with Brenda Simmons, founder of the Southampton African American Museum and Georgette Grier-Key, executive director and curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society.
Music, poetry, dance and spoken word performances about the Black community is the focus of “Generations: This is Our Story” on Saturday, Feb. 10 at 2 p.m.. The event is described as “An intergenerational performance that takes audience members on a creative journey through milestones in Black history.” Performers include accomplished musicians and up-and-coming artists and students.
Robert “Bubbie” Brown of Riverside will lead a discussion of the 2011 documentary film Hidden Colors after a showing of the film on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 11 a.m. The documentary “discusses some of the reasons the contributions of African and aboriginal people have been left out of the pages of history,” according to the film’s description on IMDb.
The library will have an exhibit curated by the African American Educational and Cultural Festival on local Black families on display in its lobby throughout the month. The AAECF’s current exhibit celebrating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. will stay up until the end of January.
Black History month was started as Negro History Week in 1926 by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its founder, Carter G. Woodson, to celebrate Black American achievement and history, according to the organization, which is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping Black history, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays were traditionally celebrated by Black Americans.
The celebration was expanded to a month in 1976. President Gerald Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history,” according to the Library of Congress.
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