A free Thursday screening in Crown Heights connects one of Brooklyn’s most important Black historic sites to a chapter of Black Power that is still too often treated as somebody else’s history.
Weeksville Watch Night: True North brings director Michèle Stephenson’s documentary to Weeksville Heritage Center on November 12 from 6 to 9 p.m. The program is free and open to the public at 158 Buffalo Avenue.
Montreal was part of the Black freedom map
True North returns to Montreal in the late 1960s, when Black writers, students and organizers were building connections across Canada, the Caribbean, the United States and Africa. The film centers the 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair through rare archival material and testimony from people who lived through them.
The Congress of Black Writers met at McGill University from October 11 through 14, 1968. Its speakers included C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Miriam Makeba and Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture. The Canadian Museum of History describes the gathering as a meeting of international thinkers confronting racism, colonialism and imperialism six months after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The following year, Black students and allies at Sir George Williams University challenged the institution’s handling of racism allegations against a professor. The protest became a major episode in Canadian civil-rights history. Concordia University’s archival teaching resources place it within Black Montreal, Caribbean migration, decolonial politics and a wider North American student movement.
Why the setting matters
Weeksville is not a neutral screening room. The historic Brooklyn community was founded by free Black New Yorkers in the 19th century, and its surviving Hunterfly Road Houses give Black self-determination a physical address. Pairing that setting with a film about Montreal changes the scale of the story. The distance between Crown Heights and Quebec matters less than the routes people, ideas and strategies traveled.
Stephenson’s film makes that movement visible by keeping elders at the center. PBS’s Independent Lens describes the documentary as a history built from rare footage and firsthand accounts. That choice resists the habit of reducing political struggle to one famous photograph, one burning building or one heroic name. It asks viewers to listen to the people who carried the consequences.
That is also why this Watch Night is more useful than a passive stream at home. Weeksville’s ongoing series brings films into conversation with artists, historians and community members. The institution says its Watch Nights are designed around Black history, political struggle, cultural memory and collective care. The screening is presented with Rada Studio.
Before you go
- What: Weeksville Watch Night: True North
- When: Thursday, November 12, 2026, 6 to 9 p.m.
- Where: Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Brooklyn
- Admission: Free and open to the public
- Plan: Review the JSM CULTURE Calendar listing and use Weeksville’s official event page for current entry information.
If you have never visited the historic site, read JSM CULTURE’s guide to the Hunterfly Road Houses and planning a Weeksville visit. True North offers another reason to go: to see Black Brooklyn as one point in a much larger geography of resistance.