Wednesday, February 15, 1:30 pm The Little Theater, main campus, Port Angeles
Peninsula College will welcome director Dru Holley to campus for a screening of the film Buffalo Soldiers: Fighting on Two Fronts and a discussion.
Many African American men enlisted as Buffalo Soldiers in exchange for full citizenship as promised by the 14th Amendment but were denied this right by the Jim Crow laws in the Reconstructionist South. These soldiers built and guarded the Pacific Railroad and served as park rangers in places like Yosemite before the U.S. government established the National Park Service. These soldiers fought for the U.S. army during westward expansion, and they fought in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I and World War II. They were patriots and served with immense bravery at great risk to their own lives.
But, as Holley explains in the press materials, "the Buffalo Soldiers also participated in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States appropriated tribal land, the persecution of striking silver miners in Idaho, and against Filipinos fighting for independence during the Spanish-American War, resulting in a complicated legacy."
By combining a multitude of diverse perspectives, the film examines the profound and often-contradictory roles played in American history by The Buffalo Soldiers, and how they fought on two very different sets of front lines: military conflicts abroad and civil rights struggles at home.
Dru Holley graduated from the Art Institute of Colorado, where he specialized in video broadcasting. Holley was selected by Stanley Nelson, the iconic African American filmmaker, for the prestigious 2020 Firelight Documentary Lab Fellowship, Black Public Media 360 Incubator, and 2022 Better Angels Levine fellowship.
