http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_TV5vctEog
Please, pay attention to our exciting work-in-progress documentary “Black Russians: the Red Experience”, the story of Black American dreamers – Harlem Renaissance intellectuals – who left the United States in the 1920s and ‘30s in search of a better life in Stalinist Russia. Some were seeking artistic freedom, others economic gain, but all envisioned gaining the fundamental rights denied them in America. Some were interested in politics and eager to be part of the experiment of an emerging ‘color-blind’ society Impressed by what they saw, their experiences, now largely forgotten, fed into the civil rights movement in America. While many chose to stay, marry, and integrate into Soviet society, some returned home carrying their vision of what could be.
But they were naïve in putting their faith in a Stalinist government that was imposing gulags on its own people, while manipulating Black Americans with a veneer of respect that belied its hypocritical motive of using them to attack capitalism.
Their descendants still live in Russia and America today. They are the ones who along with the scholars, writers and journalists will tell their story.
Black Russians: The Red Experience 