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Director Shola Lynch has been mining the rich terrain of black American history for a while now, notably in the award-winning 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, about the 1972 presidential campaign by the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American and the first woman to mount a serious, credible run for the office, and most recently with last year’s Free Angela Davis and all Political Prisoners, her soulful, illuminating documentary about the activist icon’s notorious 1971 trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. (The DVD was just released this week.)
Where much official history (even that of radical movements) still places men at the locus of celebration and inquiry, Lynch’s ongoing artistic/journalistic project is the reclamation of the contributions black women have made to struggles for freedom. In a recent conversation, she spoke about black female agency, struggles to get her films made, and why Harriet Tubman deserves so much better than
