Made as part of an ongoing collaboration between experimental filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, historian Claudrena N. Harold, and the students and alumni of the University of Virginia, these unclassifiable, poetic short films explore the ways in which Black students have transformed the university—politically, socially, culturally, and intellectually—from the 1960s through the present. Creatively employing reenactment, interviews, music, and performance, Everson and Harold pay tribute to the unsung trailblazers who paved the way for greater equality on the UVA campus while bringing the university’s history of racial and social struggle into dialogue with the present.
This interview with directors Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold was recorded in 2021.
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2014 • United States
Starring Erin Stewart, Vivian Gordon
SUGARCOATED ARSENIC is a cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s. Starring Erin Stewart a...
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2016 • United States
Starring Ricky Goldman, Richard Warner, Ryan Leach
WE DEMAND tells the story of the anti–Vietnam War movement from the perspective of James R. Roebuck, a Northern-born African American man who studied at the Universi...
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2017 • United States
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena Harold imagine a group of African American students from the University of Virginia greeting Sly and the Family Stone at the Charlottesville airport in 1973.
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2017 • United States
Starring Kent Merritt
Kent Merritt waxes poetic about being one of the first four Black scholarship athletes at the University of Virginia.
Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold • 2019 • United States
Students reclaim a popular gathering spot on the campus of the University of Virginia.
