FEATURED NEWS ARCHIVE - OCTOBER 2006
UHS students create documentary on Douglass Park Drum Corps
Six young African-American male filmmakers from Urbana High School will present their new video about the Douglass Park Drum Corps at a screening and discussion at Boardman's Art Theatre, 126 W. Church St., Champaign, at noon on Saturday, Sept. 23. The public is invited to the free event.
The students are participants in WILL's Youth Media Workshop, a collaboration of WILL AM-FM-TV and William M. Patterson, associate director of the University of Illinois African American Studies and Research Program. The after-school program teaches African-American youth how to make radio and television documentaries that link the hip-hop generation to the civil rights and black power generations.
The video, entitled "And the Beat Goes On: The Spirit in the Legacy of the Douglass Center Drum Corps," tells the story of the drum corps during its heyday in the late 1960s and asks the question, "Who will carry on the tradition and provide this important social outlet for young black men and women today?" Three student producers, Nick Green, Brian Mitchell and Jay Walker, will talk about making the video at the September 23 premiere. The other Urbana High School students who worked on the project were Coreyawn Donald, Kwan Cobbs and Mike Jones.
Mitchell said the students hope the video will help efforts to revive the drum corps. "It's about small town living. It's about the history of drumming itself, the egos and pride of the drummers, the personalities of the drummers and the future of drumming," Mitchell said.
The 25-minute video includes recollections of former drum corps leaders Jesse Ratliffe and Bud Johnson, along with former drum corps member Terry Townsend and drill team member Linda Turnbull. The video looks at recent efforts by Ratliffe and 17-year-old Lee Duncan to revive the drum corps, which in 1968 won first place in the national Elks Club competition in New York City. Townsend recalls the sense of community pride people felt in the victory. Walter Cronkite announced it on the CBS Evening News and when their bus pulled into town on their return, drum corps members discovered they were heroes, Townsend said. "When we got to Douglass Center, there was just a sea of people," he said.
The Youth Media Workshop received a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council to develop a pilot video about the history of Champaign's Douglass Park area.
For more information contact Kimberlie Kranich, co-director of the workshop, at 217-244-5072 or kranich@uiuc.edu.
- Text courtesy of WILL website and images courtesy of WILL-TV. For more information visit the WILL website.
