by Cieslafdn | Mar 18, 2014 | Ciesla Foundation
The AFI Theater in Silver Spring is screening a series of baseball films in March and April, including one of the Ciesla Foundation’s previous productions, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (1999). Their description is below:
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HANK GREENBERG
April 6, 2014 at 5:15 pm
AFI Silver Theatre, Silver Spring, MD
Tickets $5!
In person: filmmaker Aviva Kempner
This Peabody Award-winning film is a humorous and nostalgic documentary about an extraordinary baseball player who transcended religious prejudice to become an American icon. Hammerin’ Hank’s accomplishments for the Detroit Tigers during the Golden Age of Baseball rivaled those of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. America’s first Jewish baseball star was a beacon of hope to American Jews who faced bigotry during the Depression and World War II.
DIR/SCR/PROD Aviva Kempner. US, 1999, b&w and color, 95 min, 35mm. RATED PG
Co-presented by the Washington Jewish Film Festival and Women in Film & Video of Washington, DC.
by Cieslafdn | Apr 25, 2013 | Ciesla Foundation, Film Production
In a small ceremony held at the Shepherd Park Library in Northwest Washington D.C., the Humanities Council of Washington D.C. awarded its 2013 Cycle I Grants. The Ciesla Foundation, among a group of other deserving awardees, received funds that will be used to film final interviews for The Rosenwald Schools documentary. Many thanks to the Humanities Council for this generous award.
Aviva Kempner and Michael Rose of the Ciesla Foundation receiving a check from D.C. Humanities director Joy Ford Austin
Photo courtesy of the Humanities Council of Washington D.C.
by Cieslafdn | Apr 3, 2013 | Aviva Kempner, Ciesla Foundation
The long-awaited debut of the new addition to the Washington Nationals’ Presidents Race, William Howard Taft, was enjoyed by Nats fans on Monday, opening day of the 2013 baseball season. Taft didn’t win the race, getting bogged down in a tussle with Theodore Roosevelt that recalled for history buffs the infighting of the 1912 election between the two Republicans (and erstwhile friends).
President Taft posing before the game
Photo credit: Andrew Geyer, April 2013
Julius Rosenwald was closely acquainted with Taft, probably closer than with any of the other presidents he met and worked with during his life. We’ve talked about their relationship before on this blog, such as when Rosenwald responded to Taft’s call to build an African American YMCA in Washington D.C. and spent the night at the Taft White House. Taft is a great addition to the Presidents Race, which has already become a cherished tradition to Nats fans.
by Cieslafdn | Jun 20, 2011 | Ciesla Foundation, School Restorations
Being interested in film and history, I jumped at the chance to work on the Rosenwald Schools film. It’s surprising how little most people know about them given that there were almost 6000 scattered across the South. I was shocked to find out that Rosenwald Schools were a part of my own personal history—-my own grandfather Robert Davis went to a Rosenwald School.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise. He was born in 1919 in tiny Franklin, Virginia. The school, probably built in the mid-1920s was small and crowded with only one room for 30 students per grade. Yet it was the only grammar school for black students in the town so my grandfather made the hour long walk (The white students had busses).
The school did not have many resources; it only had one teacher when my grandfather first started attending. His school did have had a basketball team and a sandlot football team that played without jerseys or pads. My grandfather enjoyed the school but few of his fellow students would go to high school and even fewer would graduate from high school. Most students usually dropped out to work as peanut farmers or in the mill. But my grandfather always enjoyed school and wanted to have a professional degree. He was one of the six who went on to high school, and would be one of the only two people from high school who went on to college and the first in his family.
He graduated from Virginia State in 1937 and enlisted in the army soon after. After the war he got his Masters in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin (the University of Virginia did not take black students). While there he met my grandmother who was pursuing her masters in history. He graduated in 1949 and married her in July of that year. He couldn’t get a job at a white school so he started teaching horticulture at Prairie View A&M, where my mother was born. Eventually he became a landscape architect in the state department—making him one of few black architects in the country–and would travel the world building embassies and residences for diplomats.
On the whole my grandfather’s experience at the Rosenwald School was unremarkable. However, at a time when few black children in Virginia went to school the fact that my grandfather’s experience at the school was so normal is actually extraordinary. What is important is not that the Rosenwald Schools were great schools but that they were the only schools and gave people like my grandfather a chance. My grandfather is a man of incredible drive and was a diligent student so he may have ended up in the same place he is now even without the school, but chances are he would have been building boxes in the local factory like his father instead of building embassies. So thanks Julius I guess I owe you one.
Robert L Ruffins: Ciesla Foundation summer intern, Harvard History, and African American Studies major and blog manager.
Recent Comments