On Tuesday, Oct. 22, the Afro-American Cultural Center hosted a documentary screening to celebrate the organization's 55th anniversary.
The documentary, titled "Black Table," premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2024 and is based on the experiences of Black Yalies in the class of 1997 who found community around a table in the Commons. In a Q&A session following the screening, writer and co-director, Bill Mack '95 spoke about the creative process behind the documentary.
"I was eventually brought on to the project because I was an insider at the Black table," Mack said. "When I came to campus as a freshman, the seniors at the table had had this terrible experience -- the Naples incident -- that clouded their experience. So I wanted to tell the story of their resilience."
The Naples incident, which occurred in 1990, involved Naples pizza employees and eight Black Yale students, who said they were racially profiled by employees and later made feel unsafe by police officers who arrived on the scene.
Mack feels that the themes of the documentary were especially relevant to modern audiences.
"I wanted to connect the culture wars of the 90s to the culture wars of today," Mack said. "When John James, the director, first showed me the reel for the documentary in early spring of 2021, I [had] never seen anything like it. Because of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, Black voices were more important than ever -- I wanted to show the world a successful group of Black people talking about their experiences at the Black table."
Still, Mack said that the directors grappled with the amount of material to cover, and were forced to narrow their focus despite other relevant themes, such as the relationship between New Haven and black students.
Marah Rigoud '28, a student in Silliman College, told the News that learning about the Naples incident, which occurred in part outside the Silliman gates, was extremely impactful.
"It's pretty alarming that no one really knows about it, and that recollections of the event are nowhere to be found," Rigoud told the News.
Rigoud also said that, although she initially struggled with transitioning from home surrounded by a Black community to a predominantly white Ivy League education, the experiences of Black students who came before her in the film have inspired her. "
"You can exist loudly and proudly," Rigoud told the News. "You just have to find your table."
New Havener Tracea Glover, who has worked at Yale Medicine for 20 years, told the News that she attended because she wanted to learn about "the experience of Black students on the inside." She said that the documentary confirmed her assumptions about the environment Black students faced inside the university.
Tyler Wade, a meta-data specialist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, told the News that he attended the documentary screening to become more familiar with Yale's campus and Black cultural organizations.
"I thought the documentary was awesome," said Wade. "While I didn't necessarily go to an Ivy League college, I went to a predominantly white institution, and I related to so many of the experiences in the documentary. Sometimes I would be too timid to go and introduce myself to people, just because I didn't meet a lot of people who looked like me in my field."
The Afro-American Cultural Center is located at 211 Park St.