The Scholar Affirmed
A documentary about Weinberg College sociologist Aldon Morris wins a top award at the 2018 Hell’s Kitchen NYC Film Festival
A short film about Weinberg College sociologist Aldon Morris has won the 2018 Hell’s Kitchen NYC Film Festival’s award for best documentary film.
Morris, the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, has won numerous awards for his book, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California Press), including the R.R. Hawkins Award, the highest of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Awards.
The association produced a short film about Morris and his work. The film premiered at the PROSE Awards in Washington D.C. in February 2017.
The 21-minute film, entitled Aldon Morris: The Scholar Affirmed, provides a closer look at Morris’s life and that of Du Bois, the scholar-activist who inspired Morris to pursue a similar path of research and social justice.
In the film, Morris discusses his hardscrabble upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and revisits the nearby Tallahatchie River, where 15-year-old Emmet Till’s body was thrown in 1955 after Till was accused of flirting with a white woman. Morris describes the impact of Till’s murder on him and his generation.
“I always wanted to be a scholar-activist,” Morris says in the film. “I have never wanted to just be someone who was a professor, or someone who was smart, or someone who was an intellectual. That did not really appeal to me. What appealed to me was trying to get the knowledge that was necessary to go out and to participate in social change movements to try to better the world.”
The Marzipan Productions film was produced and directed by Mary Rose Synek.
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