Dancing, drumrolls, and too many flies! It’s hot as Hell in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, when the Continental Congress meets to decide the question of Independency. The main sticking point – the abolition of enslavement. Although the Congress has agreed that the decision will be unanimous or nothing, nearly half of the states are unwilling to budge on their peculiar institution; abolition would devastate their economies, and the economy of the whole new country. Although 1776 is filled with great music and is genuinely funny, it is also remarkable in that it refuses to look away from the hard issue of how enslavement remained a national institution despite the high-minded Declaration that All Men are Created Equal. It also refuses to let anyone off the hook – not the southerners whose plantations are run on slave labor, not their allies who condone even when they are not enslavers themselves, and not even the North and our beloved John Adams, who is forced to acknowledge that Boston is just as complicit and dependent as Charleston. Join us in Powers Hall on June 14th at 2:00 pm, for a free community showing of the film, 1776: the Musical. This event is co-sponsored by the Needham History Center and the Needham Free Public Library.
To preserve the treasures and teach the stories of Needham’s past as a gift to its future
