a film by Andrea Morales
Angela Davis, the civil rights freedom fighter and scholar, is a daughter of Birmingham, Alabama. At the end of 2018, the city’s Civil Rights Institute announced they would honor her with the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights award, but then rescinded it, saying she did not meet all the criteria. Davis is an unapologetic supporter of Free Palestine and, according to sources, folks in the community who hold Zionist stances were quietly responsible for the pressure that led to the change.
Former SouthDocs producer Andrea Morales collaborated with the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation, a grassroots organization that came together in the wake of these events, to honor Davis for her contributions to collective liberation and assert Birmingham’s place as a cradle for radical thought. This short film brings together portraits of folks in Birmingham who look to Davis as a guiding light and source of inspiration in their own fights.
This film was screened at a special event honoring Davis in Birmingham in February 2019.
Andrea Morales is a documentary photographer, journalist and educator born in Peru, raised in Miami, now living and working in Memphis, Tennessee. Her personal work attempts to lens the issues of displacement, disruption and magic. Adding glimpses of daily life, meaningful or mundane, to the record through photography is central to her practice.
She has worked as a photojournalist in newsrooms small and large, such as The Concord Monitor, The Lima News and The New York Times, with equal enthusiasm. She’s also worked at the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project with students in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.