Beyond the Classroom presents the award-winning documentary "1971" on Monday, March 21st at 7:00 pm!

Monday, March 21, 7:00-9:00 pm

South Campus Commons Building 1, Room 1102

(http://www.beyondtheclassroom.umd.edu/locationbtc.htm)

 

Before Watergate, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, there was Media, Pennsylvania! 1971, the year a few ordinary citizens took on the FBI.

On March 8, 1971 eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a town just outside Philadelphia, took hundreds of secret files, and shared them with the public. In doing so, they uncovered the FBI’s vast and illegal regime of spying and intimidation of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.

On the night of the “Fight of the Century” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, the activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, picked the lock on the door to the small FBI field office. They took every file in the office, loaded them into suitcases, and walked out the front door.

Mailed anonymously, the documents started to show up in newsrooms. The heist yielded a trove of damning evidence that proved the FBI was deliberately working to intimidate civil rights activists and Americans nonviolently protesting the Vietnam War. The most significant revelation was an illegal program overseen by lifelong FBI director J. Edgar Hoover known as COINTELPRO – the Counter Intelligence Program.

Despite searching for the people behind the heist in one of the largest investigations ever conducted, the FBI never solved the mystery of the break-in, and the identities of the members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI remained a secret.

Until now.

For the first time, the members of the Citizens’ Commission have decided to come forward and speak out about their actions. 1971 is their story.

“An extraordinary film about one of the most important acts of civil disobedience in modern American history. 1971 offers much-needed historical context for understanding the urgent issues of surveillance and dissent in the United States.” – Professor Beverly Gage, Historian at Yale University

"'1971' unpacks a crucial but little-known episode in modern political and journalistic history. The story, inclusing its cat-and-mouse aftermath, add the intricate excitement of a thriller to righteous historical outrage." -- Richard Brody, The New Yorker.

"Deftly tracing the skullduggery of the mission as well as the impact of the find itself, '1971' crafts a thrilling lesson about how authoritarianism can be curbed, sometimes, by one simple and well-targeted blow." -- Chris Barsanti, POPMATTERS.

“1971 vividly, memorably, tells the extraordinary tale of how a band of nonviolent Vietnam war opponents ran rings around the FBI and exposed their illegal operations for the world to gasp at. Johanna Hamilton’s interviews are pointed and her dramatized re-creations well convey the spirit of a remarkable episode within a remarkable movement.”
-Professor Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, School of Journalism

For details, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/528612253978577/