arrow Nitehawk also offered a sign: See you on the other side. Jake Dobkin / Gothamist
Movie-lovers will finally be able to return to theaters this Friday as much for the thrill of watching a film on the big screen, as for the film itself.
“The theatrical experience is something that has been missing for our audiences and our members, said John Vanco, the general manager and senior vice president of the Greenwich Village-based IFC Center, one of the few indie theaters expected to open on Friday. Regardless of whether or not you could technically watch some of these movies on your phone or your Apple Watch or your television doesn’t really matter very much to us … people for a century and then some have loved coming out to the theater and sitting in front of a huge screen and falling into a movie.
Freedomways, the African American journal of politics and culture that for nearly a quarter century chronicled the civil rights and Black freedom movements beginning in the early 1960s, started in 1961, a year that was a kind of transitional one for the civil rights movement. The sit-ins that had begun in early 1960, and the continuing demonstrations and emerging fervor, had made national headlines, but the movement hadn’t yet achieved the national stature that it would a couple of years later. Nevertheless, the civil rights movement was still a significant, if not yet overwhelming, news media story. The 1961 Freedom Rides, in which Black and white movement volunteers tested a recent Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on interstate bus travel by sitting together on trips through the South, brought headlines, photographs and television news footage of racist mobs, burning buses and bloodied civil rights activists.