TO COMMEMORATE AND HONOR
Black August began in the California prison system in the 1970s as an act of collective memory. It honors the Black freedom fighters who gave everything — Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, and the generations of organizers who came before and after them — and insists that their sacrifice be named, studied, and carried forward.
Every August, we remember. We study. We practice the discipline that the struggle demands. Because Black liberation is not a moment in history. It is a living commitment, passed from one generation to the next, built by people who refused to let the movement die with them.
We're partnering with The Shoulders Beneath My Feet for three special events. All events to take place at ThirdSpace Reading Room (1464 E. 105th St.).
This film should not exist. The men who made it were incarcerated in an Alabama prison rife with abuse, corruption, and wrongful deaths. They got access to phones because of that same corruption — and they turned those cameras on their captors.
The Alabama Solution is an Academy Award-nominated documentary built from grainy cell phone footage shot behind bars and high-end cinematography from filmmakers on the outside. Together, they document a prison strike — men who crossed racial lines, shared their food, and refused to be broken. They named the deaths. They demanded accountability. They kept filming.
The state of Alabama is still expanding its prisons.
This screening is not entertainment. It is testimony. Come prepared to sit with what it means to bear witness — and what it demands of us in return.
August 6
The Alabama Solution: Movie Screening
August 20
Harvest of Voices: A Black August Art Gathering
Art has always been how the movement remembers itself. The poem passed through the slot of a cell door. The drawing made in solitary. The story that survived because someone refused to let it die.
Harvest of Voices is an art exhibition and poetry slam that centers works created in and around the tradition of Black liberation struggle — centering the voices, images, and narratives of those who have been caged by a system designed to make them invisible.
This is an open call. If you are an artist, poet, writer, or creator whose work speaks to Black liberation, incarceration, resistance, or freedom, your work belongs in this gathering. Submissions are open.
The harvest is collective. Bring what you have grown.
August 21
Intergenerational Lunch: Prisoner Keith LaMar in conversation
On January 13, 2027, the State of Ohio intends to execute Keith LaMar — a man who has maintained his innocence for three decades, who was wrongfully convicted in the aftermath of the 1993 Lucasville Prison Uprising, whose trial was held in a community known to be hostile to Black defendants, whose jury was all-white after every Black prospective juror was dismissed by the prosecution, and who has spent years in indefinite solitary confinement building a body of work in poetry, jazz, and prose that refuses to let the system have the final word.
He is also a Clevelander.
This Intergenerational Lunch brings Keith into virtual conversation with our community — directly, in his own voice, from death row. This is not a panel about the prison system in the abstract. This is a man who has lived inside the machinery of state violence, who has named it precisely, and who is still here to tell it.
Come to the table ready to listen, to ask, and to understand what Black August demands of those of us who are free.