OUR FUTURE VISION: FILM+BARBERSHOP = COMMUNITY ORGANIZING, EDUCATION & GET OUT THE VOTE
The Barber of Birmingham will be the centerpiece of an exciting new media outreach and engagement strategy, including a web-based “virtual barbershop” with enhanced content, interactive curriculum, and social networking tools. These components will be dynamic enough to appeal to a broad range of users, while aiming to engage and educate students from middle school through college age. Studies have shown that these students are using the web predominantly for research and education, as well as entertainment. The overall goal is to provide an experience that immerses the user into the power of the barbershop.
Interactive Components
Virtual barbershop as a portal to additional content, a photo gallery and chatroom
Voting Rights Timeline with time travel interactive game and curriculum
Voter Engagement and Voting Rights Action Center that includes a downloadable ARMSTRONG APP that can be used to educate, motivate and get-out-the-vote viral video, for online social networks, Facebook and hand-held phones
A Virtual Barbershop
The barbershop is often a cultural hub in African American communities. Mr. Armstrong’s Birmingham barbershop was (and continues to be at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a living memorial to the voting rights movement). Using Mr. Armstrong’s barbershop as a real-life model, our virtual barbershop will invite viewers to navigate its vibrant red-painted walls and click on its civil rights memorabilia, photos and newspaper clippings, which will open into short videos, a photo gallery of the movement, and user generated content/chatroom for visitors to join the barbershop conversation.
Educational Curriculum Program with interactive game
An interactive timeline plotting important events in the rights voting movement will be the basis for the Educational Curriculum Program. Users will be able to zoom in and read in-depth information about the event, follow links to further information, and relate the history to modern day issues. An interactive game will encourage students to connect the history to contemporary issues and their own lives, while time traveling on a scavenger hunt. Accompanying standards-based lesson plans will enable teachers to use the film and website as an educational module.
Voter Engagement and Voting Rights Action Center
In spite of the heroic achievements of the Civil Rights foot soldiers, voting participation in the U.S. is the lowest in the industrialized democracies. While the blatant disenfranchisement depicted in The Barber of Birmingham seems shocking, similar strategies to limit voter participation are in use today. Our web-based Voter Engagement and Voting Rights Action Center will be an online resource with information and links to voter registration drives and ways to get involved in voting rights efforts, providing another way to engage with the film not just as history, and inspiring increased participation today.
