Meet the Filmmaker: Larry Benaquist & Bill Sullivan, Co-Producers

“The Journey of Jonathan Daniels” 

Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Location: NY NATAS, 1375 Broadway (between 37th and 38th Streets), Suite 2103

Reception: 6:00-6:30 PM ~ Program: 6:30-8:00 PM

*Free to NY NATAS Members!

$15 for those without current NY NATAS membership.

Produced & Moderated by Sumner Jules Glimcher.

“Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels,” examines the life of a brilliant, socially committed young man from New Hampshire who went south to answer Dr. Martin Luther King's call for Americans of good will to assist in the voting rights drive which was the purpose of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The violence of March 7th, Bloody Sunday, when Alabama State Troopers beat and tear-gassed innocent marchers who had begun the march touched him deeply.  Jonathan was shot and killed on August 20th, 1965, while pulling Ruby Sales, a young African American female civil rights worker, out of the path of Deputy Sheriff Tom Coleman's shotgun blast, taking the shot as he saved her life. This occurred in Hayneville, Alabama, after this group of protestors had been let out of the Hayneville jail, having spent a week there.   The film traces his life, focusing on the evolution of his social commitment, and is the result of over ten years' research and interviewing. Completed in 2003, presented nationally on PBS, and narrated by Sam Waterston, it has been praised by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center,  as "a powerful portrayal of the heroic life of a civil rights martyr, murdered for his ideals," and features interviews with many heroes of the civil rights movement, as well as friends and family of Jonathan Daniels.

Larry Benaquist was on the faculty at Keene State College, from 1969 until 2010.   He began offering courses in film theory, history and then film production.   He has produced films, several of which having been on public television. Another of his films was “Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve: The First Hundred Years of Keene State College,” an in-depth, historical  examination of one of the hundreds of normal schools in America,  Keene Normal, which opened the doors of education to those otherwise not able to afford it.

Space is  limited.  You  must  RSVP  to  info@nyemmys.org to reserve a seat. Please write “Jonathan Daniels!” in the Subject Box