TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing

Producer: Louis Massiah

Co-Presented by community programming partners BlackStar Projects and featuring a conversation with director and producer Louis Massiah, moderated by Courtney R. Baker – Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside.

Author, educator, activist, and documentary filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, with humor and deep insight, inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment. Editor of the breakthrough anthology The Black Woman (1970) and author of The Salt Eaters (1980) among other acclaimed works, Bambara came to Philadelphia and worked with Louis Massiah on the truth-telling documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) and remained an activist and cultural worker in film and literature until her untimely death in 1995. TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 min.) is a testament to their long and generative collaboration.

Massiah’s film, directed with and edited by Monica Henriquez, is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara’s life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students. Not yet widely released, the film received its world premiere opening night at BlackStar Film Festival in August, where it was awarded Best Feature Documentary by the jury, voted Favorite Feature Documentary by the audience, and called “riveting” by Variety.  Featuring: Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, Haile Gerima, Shirikiana Aina, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Manthia Diawara, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Malaika Adero, Linda Holmes, Conor Tomás Reed, Makeba Lavan and Clyde Taylor.