The voice of the writer Toni Cade Bambara overlays a montage of archival film and photographs of Black people at school and work in a new feature documentary about her life. “The Reconstruction era offers a window into the 1930s,” Bambara says in the film. “There is the same drive for land, for the vote, for labor rights, education. The same need for self-help enterprises, for group cooperation.”
So begins TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, the biographical film about the Black author, documentarian and social activist whose work on Black liberation and feminism helped inspire 20th-century social justice movements. The documentary by the film-maker Louis Massiah is a composite of her words and stories from her friends including Toni Morrison.
