Virtual Screening of Award-Winning Documentary Film “Ashes to Ashes”

he College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) at UMass Amherst will host a virtual screening of Ashes to Ashes followed by a discussion with Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker, a resident of Amherst whose work as an artist and activist are the driving force behind the film. Joining Dr. Whitaker in the post-film discussion will be Evan Lewis, assistant dean for community outreach in HFA. Those who wish to attend can register via Zoom.

Directed by Taylor Rees, Ashes to Ashes earned high praise as the “Best Documentary Short” at the 2020 River Run International Film Festival and received consideration for an Academy Award the same year. The film explores the pain and triumph of Winfred Rembert, the only living survivor of an attempted lynching, and chronicles his friendship with Dr. Whitaker, who is on a mission to memorialize the forgotten 4,000 African Americans lynched during the Jim Crow era. Together, their journeys of healing paint a powerful portrait.

More information about Ashes to Ashes and Dr. Whitaker’s work as a practicing physician and artist can be found at http://shirleywhitaker.com/index.html.

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Dr. Shirley Jackson Whitaker is the seventh child of Eddie and Charlie Mae Jackson from Waycross, Georgia. Dr. Whitaker did all of her early educational training in Waycross and then attended Clark Atlanta University where she graduated with honors with a BS in Biology. She later attended the Yale University School of Medicine-Department of Public Health. This experience enabled her to work as a community health provider and educator for the Auburn, Ga. community, an underserved area of Atlanta. She attended Emory University School of Medicine, obtaining her medical degree in 1979. She did her advanced medical training in Internal Medicine and Nephrology in Virginia, California and Oregon.

After completing her fellowship, she and her husband moved to Massachusetts Pioneer Valley where she worked for 10 years at the Springfield Southwest Community Health Center (now The Caring Health Center). While there, she designed a children's coloring book against drugs in four different languages (Vietnamese, Russian, Spanish and English), a community health newsletter called Springer, and worked with the UMass Amherst theater department to produce an imaginative drug prevention skit Monsters Among Us. This skit was thought to be the first children's rap opera ever produced. Dr. Whitaker went into private Nephrology practice in 2006 but she has continued to work in the Springfield community. In 2010, she designed a hypertension prevention project serving the Mason Square Area called Hypertension Intervention and Prevention Program (H.I.P.P.). Until July 2020 she served the community of western Mass by giving health information on the Denise Stewarts Gospel Program on WTCC every Sunday morning. She recently started a Facebook live health program centered on the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to his work in HFA, Evan Lewis is the Founding Executive Director of the Legacy Coalition, a national non-profit organization launched in collaboration with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University’s School of Law. The Legacy Coalition’s mission is to secure reparative justice for American citizens whose ancestors were lynched in acts of racial terror during the Jim Crow era. Lewis’s work has been featured by national and international media outlets including CNN, The BBC, National Public Radio and PBS and was chronicled in the award-winning PBS documentary, All the Difference, which earned rave reviews nationally and was heralded by both the U.S. Department of Education and the White House under President Barack Obama.