In celebration of Black History Month, award-winning author, university lecturer, and documentary producer, China Galland, will be discussing the "Transformation of Racism as a Path of Liberation" for all. People of all backgrounds are welcome. Galland will show short video excerpts from her documentary film-in-progress, Resurrecting Love. The documentary grew out of her book, Love Cemetery, Unburying the Secret History of Slaves. She will present at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center on Saturday night, February 20th, 2016, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in San Geronimo, CA. On Wednesday night, 2-24-16, she’ll present at Unity of Marin in Novato, CA from 7:15 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. 
Bill Moyers called Galland’s Love Cemetery book "riveting” and said it "couldn’t have come at a more crucial time.” The documentary Resurrecting Love grew out of this decades-long racial conflict over access to Love Cemetery, the 175 year-old, land-locked African-American burial ground in East Texas that descendants owned and struggled to reclaim for 40 years. Starting in the 1960’s, during the Civil Rights movement, descendants suddenly found themselves locked out of their own cemetery by an adjacent corporate landowner in the rural East Texas countryside. 

Forty years later, Galland, who grew up in Texas, was asked by two older African American women to join their battle to regain access to their Ancestors. Even Nate Parker was drawn in, the African-American actor and activist who just recently won the Grand Jury award at Sundance for his feature, Birth of a Nation. Parker is the Executive Producer for Resurrecting Love and also appears in the documentary.

"Transforming racism requires fierce compassion," Galland says. "We have to purify our hearts so that our motivation is love, even of our enemies. Love is the only force that brings lasting change.”

Galland’s talk also encapsulates the origins of her interest in race and her background as a wilderness guide, pilgrim, and student of world religion. She will also show handful of images from her pioneering work on the Black Madonna in Longing for Darkness, Tara and the Black Madonna. It was on a pilgrimage in Nepal that she first encountered the powerful, dark, positive female images of the divine. They turned her Western ideas about God inside out. In her interview with the Dalai Lama, in India, she found the encouragement needed to take the positive associations with darkness and the color black she had found in Southeast Asia back into an exploration of her own roots in the Christianity of European Catholicism. The hundreds of Black or Dark Madonnas she found in Europe helped Galland continue to dissolve western associations of darkness and blackness with negativity. Longing for Darkness was one of the first books on the Black Madonnas to be published in the U.S.

“Black Lives Have Always Mattered” https://vimeo.com/130559585 

View clips from the movie here. 

For more information, contact China Galland, chinagalland@yahoo.com 415-451-7497