We Shall Not Be Moved - September 12, 2010

We Shall Not Be Moved
September 12, 2010

Film and discussion with Gary R. Grant,
Executive Director of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery

We Shall Not Be Moved is a film about Tillery, North Carolina, which had its beginnings in the slavery of the old South. During the 1930s, the Resettlement Administration of the New Deal gave landless sharecroppers the opportunity to buy their own farms. Roanoke Farms in Tillery was one of only a handful of resettlement projects for African Americans. Its families have overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow to earn their part of the American Dream. They and their successors continue to battle racism, assaults on their environment by agribusiness conglomerates, farm foreclosures, and natural disasters.

2010 Washburn University Oliver L. Brown
Distinguished Visiting Scholar for Diversity Issues
Gary R. Grant is the 2010 Washburn University Oliver L. Brown Distinguished Visiting Scholar for Diversity Issues. Mr. Grant was reared on a family farm in the New Deal Community of Tillery Resettlement Farms. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from North Carolina College at Durham (now North Carolina Central University) and an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Eastern North Carolina Theological Institute.

He is the Executive Director of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT). Formed in the 1990s in response to a proposed hog farm in the area, the CCT has grown to be a community organization with deep roots in the community it serves. The CCT’s purpose now is to promote and improve the social, economic and educational welfare of the citizens in the surrounding community through the self-development of its members.

September program co-sponsored by Washburn University.

Photo courtesy of Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Depression Era Prints at the James A. Michener Art Museum, PA.