Sunflower County Film Academy Awarded $22k MDNHA Grant
September 5, 2020 – CLEVELAND, MS
A young filmmaker’s workshop designed to engage more minority high school students in the Digital Arts field has received a $22,680 grant from the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA).
Initiated in 2018, the Sunflower County Film Academy is a free summer workshop that offers up to 15 Mississippi Delta students the opportunity to advance their understanding and appreciation of the Delta’s rich and cultural heritage through the art of filmmaking using professional-grade equipment. The instructors are filmmakers Dr. Pablo Correa of West Hartford, CT and Sunflower County native Robert “RJ” Fitzpatrick.
The workshop offers two forms of engagement. Students have reflective conversations about race and injustice in a classroom setting. And they also go into their local communities to create their own video narratives that will preserve and document their own family history as it relates to Fannie Lou Hamer and other local activists and artists.
Now in their fifth year, MDNHA has awarded more than $200,000 in grants for 12 projects focused on cultural heritage development in communities across the Mississippi Delta.
The funded work focuses on MDNHA’s themes, ranging from the culture of the Delta blues and its influence on American music to the rich natural history and resources of the land and water of the Mississippi River and Delta. The grants support museums, documentary films, the historic preservation of Delta landmarks and learning opportunities for students.
“We are proud to support the Sunflower County Film Academy, which has done excellent work engaging youth in learning about Mississippi Delta civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer,” said Dr. Rolando Herts, executive director of the MDNHA and director of The Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University. “This project will contribute tremendously toward accelerating civil rights heritage development in the Mississippi Delta region.”
The Academy is part of the K-12 educational curriculum for the multimodal project, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America. Funded through generous grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the MDNHA, Find Your Voice: The Online Resource for Fannie Lou Hamer Studies launched on Aug. 22, 2019, and features 30 new lesson plans for students, an animated cartoon and a children’s book. The centerpiece of the project is a new and original documentary of the same name slated for a public broadcast release in 2021. Both Correa and Fitzpatrick worked on the film.
The Academy partnered with Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) in Sumner, MS, for the 2020 workshop. The program, which was scheduled for June, was recruiting students from Tallahatchie County when it was canceled due to statewide COVID-19 restrictions. Plans are being made, however, to host the 2021 program at the same facility in Tallahatchie County. Weems said the Academy’s mission mirrors theirs of helping students to move forward artistically while processing “past pain” and inequity. ETIC offers several programs for local youths throughout the year.
One of the Mississippi Delta’s most influential citizens, Fannie Lou Hamer, was a Mississippi sharecropper known for her powerful speeches and impassioned pleas for equal rights. A voting rights advocate, Hamer was also a humanitarian and a proponent of justice. A Sunflower County native, Hamer believed in education and constantly sought to uplift and empower the citizens of the Delta. At the age of 59, Hamer died on March 14, 1977 of hypertension, breast cancer and the effects of a vicious jailhouse beating years earlier. But not before helping thousands to register and vote and leaving a legacy as one of the movement’s most pre-eminent orators.
About the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area
The MDNHA includes 18 counties that contain land located in the alluvial floodplain of the Mississippi Delta: Bolivar, Carroll, Coahoma, DeSoto, Holmes, Humphreys, Issaquena, Leflore, Panola, Quitman, Sharkey, Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Tate, Tunica, Warren, Washington, and Yazoo. The MDNHA was designated by U.S. Congress in 2009 and is governed by a board of directors representing agencies and organizations defined in the congressional legislation.
The mission of The Delta Center for Culture and Learning is to promote greater understanding of Mississippi Delta culture and history and its significance to the world through education, partnerships, and community engagement. The Delta Center serves as the management entity of the MDNHA and is the home of the International Delta Blues Project and the National Endowment for the Humanities “Most Southern Place on Earth” workshops. For more information, visit http://deltacenterdsu.com/