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Two local events honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday

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About 40 people attended Monday's service to honor the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr in Farmington.
About 40 people attended last year’s service to honor the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., which was held at Henderson Memorial Baptist Church in Farmington. This year the observance featuring two events will be held at the Old South Church in Farmington.
Martin Luther King Jr.

FARMINGTON – The Farmington Area Ecumenical Ministry’s annual service honoring Martin Luther King Jr. will be held at noon on Monday, Jan. 16 at Old South Congregational Church. A second event on Monday will be the screening of the documentary film, Freedom Summer 1964.

The guest speaker this year will be Charles Nero, a Bates College professor of Rhetoric, African American Studies and American Cultural Studies. He will be talking about the role of Hollywood in the Civil Rights movement.

Nero teaches upper level seminars at the college in Lewiston on The Harlem Renaissance for African American Studies and The Interracial Buddy Film from The Cold War to Obama. He designed the Introduction to African American Studies course and has served as chair of African American Studies. His other courses include Black Gay and Lesbian Literatures, Lesbian and Gay Images in Film, Minority Images in Film, and Black Pride and the 1970s.

He is a founding member of the James Baldwin Society and serves on the executive board of the Collegium of African American Research. His talk on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, “White Fragility and The Civil Rights Movement by Hollywood” is taken from his upcoming book, White Redemption: History by Hollywood, and is based on a popular course he teaches at Bates called White Redemption: Cinema and the Co-Optation of African American History.

The service will include special music by Patricia Hayden, Dan Woodward and Andy Buckland and a collection will be taken for New Beginnings, an organization that serves runaway and homeless young people.

The second event of the day, also to be held at Old South Congregational Church beginning at 3 p.m., will be screening of the documentary film, Freedom Summer 1964. A discussion will follow the two-hour film led by Rev. Doug Dunlap.

The documentary, Freedom Summer draws on archival film footage and current interviews to depict efforts by African-Americans to register to vote in Mississippi, where, at the beginning of 1964, fewer than 5 percent had been successful in doing so. In the summer of 1964 more than 700 college students from around the country joined Mississippi African-American leaders to assist with registration, encountering violence, intimidation, church burnings, and the deaths of three civil rights advocates. These events led to the 1965 passage by Congress of the Voting Rights Act.

The film was released on the 50th anniversary of that 1964 summer, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. It won the Best Documentary award at the 2014 Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The program, which is free of charge, is sponsored by the Farmington Area Ecumenical Ministry. The public is invited to attend. Old South Congregational Church is located at 227 Main Street in downtown Farmington.

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