Heather Booth: Changing the World 2016
Distributed by Women Make Movies, 115 W. 29th Street, Suite 1200,New York, NY, 10001; 212-925-0606
Produced by Lilly Rivlin
Directed by Lilly Rivlin
DVD , color, 62 min.
High School - General Adult
Activism, Civil Rights, Documentaries, Discrimination, Environmental Movement, Feminism, Human Rights, Protest Movements, Reproductive Rights, Social Movements, Women’s Rights
Date Entered: 05/29/2018
Reviewed by Jeffrey Pearson, University of Michigan Ann ArborThe subtitle of this documentary is “The most influential person you have never heard of,” and it is an apt description of the life and work of Heather Booth. An interviewee refers to her as the “Zelig” of community organizers, participating and providing guidance in every social movement from the fifties to the present that you can think of. She hung out with beatniks in Greenwich Village, and did voter registration and Freedom School training with the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi. She helped establish the Jane Underground in the mid-sixties, an ad hoc service to provide counseling and safe abortions before Roe V. Wade. She was active in organizing sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1973 she co-founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for community organizing, promoting the idea that one could choose organizing as a calling and a profession. She did all this while getting married to another activist and having two children. Active in getting out the vote since 1964, she headed the NAACP National Voter Fund in 2000, influential in increasing black voter participation in the Gore/Bush presidential election. Senator Elizabeth Warren looked to Heather Booth and her Americans for Financial Reform group to work for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010.
The film includes generous interviews with Heather Booth and her family, friends, and fellow activists to chronicle her life and speak to the influence of her work. It is light in tone with snappy editing and upbeat music, reflecting the positivity of Heather Booth herself. She always speaks with enthusiasm and a broad smile, even while relating the darkest episodes and hardest defeats. To her it is simple, as when she states, “To be an organizer you have to love people, and hate injustice.” The film’s final mention of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president is a call to action, prompting curiosity about Heather’s efforts in the time since.
This documentary is highly recommended, particularly in light of the current political climate.