"The Cost of Inheritance": Screening and Discussion of the latest film by Yoruba Richen

The Quest for Reparations for Descendants of Enslaved Persons in Modern America — SCREENING, RECEPTION AND DISCUSSION WITH FILMMAKER YORUBA RICHEN

Please join The Brown Club of New York, Inman Page Black Alumni Council and The Brown Media Group for a screening of the latest film directed by Yoruba Richen '94, The Cost of Inheritance, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker and Brown Professor Dr. Françoise N. Hamlin.

THE COST OF INHERITANCE explores the complex issue of reparations in the U.S. The film traces the nation's legacy of systemic inequities to modern-day America, introducing audiences to descendants of enslaved persons and slave owners, profiling their complex intertwined histories and detailing how their quest to bridge divides galvanized them to seek reparations together.

Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC,  MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO, and PBS. Her most recent film The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and won a Peabody Award. It is currently streaming on Peacock. Other recent work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning (Frontline), How It Feels to Be Free (American Masters), The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Peacock), and Green Book: Guide to Freedom (Smithsonian Channel). Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award and is streaming on HULU.

Yoruba is a past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and she won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access. She was a Sundance Producers Fellow and Women’s Fellow. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She founded Promise Land Films, which focuses on producing nuanced, compelling documentary films that illuminate issues of race, space, and power.

Dr. Françoise Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies and History at Brown University. She earned her doctorate in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Hamlin is the author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II -  winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizeand the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War is a co-edited anthology. It was a finalist for the QBR 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction. 

Her most notable research awards and fellowships include: the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize; the Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship at the University of Michigan; the Charles Warren Center Fellowship at Harvard University; a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship; the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies; a fellowship at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; and a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship. She was named an Andrew Carnegie Foundation Fellow in 2021.

Hamlin’s new research focuses on youth, trauma, and activism.

Questions? Email: brownmediagroup2000@gmail.com