Black Fire

A collaboration with Art and African American Studies, the screening of the film “Black Fire” was followed by a conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson (William R. Kenan Professor of Art, University of Virginia) and Claudrena N. Harold (Edward Stettinus Professor of History, University of Virginia). 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.