Below is the schedule for this Spring’s (2014) Power of the People Labor Film Series. All three films are scheduled for 7 p.m. in White Hall Room G09, on West Virginia University’s Downtown Campus in Morgantown, WV. As always, all films are free and open to the public. 

Wednesday, February 19, 2014: 10,000 Black Men Named George (2002). Directed by Robert Townsend and featuring a strong cast including Emmy winners Andre Braugher and Charles S. Dutton, this film depicts the struggles of A. Philip Randolph and other activists to form the black-led Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1920s.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014: Norma Rae (1979). Starring Sally Field, who won the Best Actress Oscar for the title role, and directed by Martin Ritt, this Oscar-nominated film focuses on the efforts of a young mother and leader at work to unionize a southern textile. It is a fictionalized version of the long and difficult battle to unionize the J.P. Stevens textile mill in North Carolina in the 1970s.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014: Cradle Will Rock (1999). Based on actual events, Cradle Will Rock recounts Orson Welles’s endeavors to stage a play about a steel strike in mid-1930s Manhattan, and the great resistance to suppress it. Weaving together radical politics with New Deal programs (such as the Federal Theater Project to which many historical figures in the film belonged) and a period of heightened labor unrest, it is directed by Tim Robbins and boasts a star-studded cast including Hank Azaria, Vanessa Redgrave, John Cusack, Ruben Blades, Susan Sarandon, and Bill Murray.

Jason Kozlowski, Assistant Professor
Institute for Labor Studies and Research
West Virginia University
719 Knapp Hall
P.O. Box 6031
Morgantown, WV 26506-6031
(304) 293-5790
Jason.Kozlowski@mail.wvu.edu