Stories That Change the World
The film is streaming. The conversation isn’t. One afternoon, one room, and the two people who can tell you what it took to make it.
The film
Born five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Died in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington. In between: Fisk, a Harvard doctorate in 1895 — the first the institution ever awarded a Black man — The Souls of Black Folk, the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and sixty years of writing that has not stopped being current.
The conversation
When the credits roll, the director who made the film sits down with a Netflix vice president who was born in this state. That part isn’t streaming anywhere, and it happens once.
Director and producer · Peabody and Emmy winner
She started as a production assistant at a Chicago television station in 1980. Four decades later she holds a Peabody and an Emmy, and a filmography — Maya Angelou, Marian Anderson, W.E.B. Du Bois — that reads as one long argument for putting Black American lives on the record at full length.
The Peabody was for Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise. She directed and produced this film.
Photograph by Megan Schmidt.
Vice President, Netflix · Former NFL player
Born in Jacksonville, Arkansas, raised mostly in Denver, and still says his Southern roots live in soul food, gospel and the blues. He played professional football, became the NFL’s first LGBT inclusion consultant, served as a national surrogate for President Obama, and taught at NYU.
Coburn has spent years on the question of what a country owes the people inside it. Davis asks a narrower, harder version of it of the organizations he advises.
After the conversation
The screening is free and always will be. The reception that follows is how it gets paid for — and how the Celebrate! Maya Project keeps bringing work like this to Arkansas.
Your gift supports the Project’s capital campaign: a permanent home in Little Rock, and the literacy and humanities programming that runs out of it.
Minimum gift of $100 to attend
Choose your gift
Admission to the reception begins at $100. You choose your amount on the next screen.
Celebrate! Maya Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. EIN 35‑2547694 — your gift is tax‑deductible to the extent allowed by law. Giving by check? Make it out to Celebrate! Maya Project, PO Box 241792, Little Rock, AR 72223. Questions: celebratingmaya@gmail.com.
Presented by
CALS is providing the Ron Robinson Theater. Netflix is bringing the film to a public audience here. Celebrate! Maya Project is convening it, as part of Stories That Change the World.
Plan your visit
CALS Darragh Center
Main Library, 100 Rock Street
Little Rock, AR 72201
A short walk across the CALS Library Square campus, immediately following the conversation.
Email celebratingmaya@gmail.com.
Registration is free and takes under a minute. Walk-ins are welcome while seats last — the theater holds 315.
Free · Oct 9W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause — a free screening and live conversation with director Rita Coburn and Netflix vice president Wade Davis.
See the event