About the Documentary

When Hurricane Katrina ripped the roof off of New Orleans, the world was riveted by images of the city’s primarily black and poor residents left to fend for themselves. Shocked by suddenly visible abject poverty and subhuman conditions, voices cried out against the injustice. But such conditions—poverty, lack of opportunity and poor education—and the violence they spawned are nothing new.

July ’64 tells the story of a historic three-day race riot that erupted in two African American neighborhoods in the northern, mid-sized city of Rochester, New York. On the night of July 24, 1964, frustration and resentment brought on by institutional racism, overcrowding, lack of job opportunity and police dog attacks exploded in racial violence that brought Rochester to its knees. Directed by Carvin Eison and produced by Chris Christopher, JULY ’64 combines historic archival footage, news reports and interviews with witnesses and participants to dig deeply into the causes and effects of the historic disturbance.

In the 1950s, millions of African Americans from the Deep South packed their belongings and headed north in search of a better life. The city of Rochester, New York, with a progressive social justice history and a reputation for manufacturing jobs, drew people like a magnet. Between 1950 and 1960, Rochester’s black population swelled by 300 percent. The city—dubbed “Smugtown USA” by a local journalist—groaned under the weight of unprecedented growth. City fathers ignored newcomers’ housing and education needs. The only openings for blacks at companies like Kodak and Bauch and Lomb, were “behind a broom.”

On the night of July 24, 1964, what community leader and minister Franklin Florence calls the African American community’s “quiet rage” exploded into violence. What began as a routine arrest at a street dance in a predominantly black neighborhood in downtown Rochester ended with the National Guard being called to a northern city for the first time during the era of the Civil Rights Movement. The uprising, which later came to be known as the Rochester Riot, sparked a series of summertime riots in small and mid-sized northern cities. As in many of those cities, the three days of unrest and civil disobedience in Rochester provoked actions and sentiments that reverberate to this day.

The score for July ’64 features a never-before-released live recording of Duke Ellington performing “Night Creature” with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in August 1964, less than two weeks after the riots. Filmmakers Eison and Christopher discovered the recording in the archives of the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music Sibley Library after learning that Ellington’s 1964 summer tour had included a stop in Rochester.

With narration by Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated actor Roscoe Lee Browne, July ’64 reveals new information about the Rochester Riots and provokes the question of why race, and the entitlement it does or does not carry, remains a potentially destructive issue today.

The Filmmakers

Carvin Eison
Carvin Eison is the creative director of ImageWordSound, an independent production company, the general manager of Rochester Community Television and an associate professor at SUNY College at Brockport. Eison has nearly 30 years of experience directing feature-length video, series television and commercials for a wide array of corporate and not-for-profit clients, including the Dupont Corporation and Eastman Kodak. Eison also has extensive experience directing live concert video, including the Frontline Festival concert in Zimbabwe for UNICEF. Since 1978, Eison has been the videographer for Garth Fagan Dance and has toured internationally with the company. His work is included in the collection of the National Dance Archive and the Library of Congress. As a videographer, coordinating producer and producer/director for Rochester PBS affiliate WXXI for eight years, Eison was responsible for a number of public affairs/news programs and special presentations. He is the winner of two National Black Programming Consortium awards for work produced in association with WXXI and was the recipient of Rochester’s Communicator of the Year award for film and video and a Red Ribbon from the American Film Festival.

Eison and Producer Chris Christopher’s documentary, JULY ’64, garnered two New York State Emmy nominations for Best Director and Historic/Cultural Programming. Other ImageWordSound productions have won national recognition including a 25th anniversary Classic Gold Telly and three Bronze Tellys, gold and silver medals at the Houston International Film and Video Festival and honorable mention at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival. Eison has also been honored with an Award of Excellence from the Broadcast Education Association, two “Prized Pieces” awards from the National Black Programming Consortium and a Dance on Camera Award.

Chris Christopher
Chris Christopher is the managing director of ImageWordSound, an independent production company; and the owner of Christopher Communications. She specializes in working with not-for-profits on public education media campaigns, and Democratic candidates for political office.

With Carvin Eison, Christopher produced two seasons of WXXI’s Perfectly Clear—a weekly news and current affairs program. Guests included President George H.W. Bush, former Senator Bill Bradley, Governor George Pataki, U.S. Secretary for Transportation Norman Mineta and Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. They also created The Home Show, a 12-part television series on affordable homeownership and home buying, as part of a national pilot project of the Fannie Mae Foundation.

Roscoe Lee Browne
Roscoe Lee Browne is an OBIE and Emmy Award winning actor, a Tony nominee and narrator of two Oscar-nominated films. Browne, who launched his theater career with the inaugural season of the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park, has appeared in plays by authors from Shakespeare and Sartre to contemporary masters including Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson. Browne created and directed A Hand Is On The Gate, a chronicle and celebration of the African-American experience in poetry and song, which garnered two Tony nominations during its Broadway run. Browne’s television work includes the role of Frederick Douglass in Steve Allen’s Meeting of Minds as well as guest appearances on Barney Miller, The Cosby Show, Law & Order, ER, The Shield and HBO’s Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, among many others. Browne’s film roles include The Liberation of L. B. Jones, The Cowboys, The Comedians, Uptown Saturday Night, Topaz, The Mambo Kings, Babe, Babe: Pig in the City and Hamlet. He is also the narrator of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Ra Expeditions and the Discovery Channel’s Galapagos: Beyond Darwin. Browne has appeared as a speaker in performances by the Boston Pops, L.A. Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and with the St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans symphonies. Browne tours the U.S. annually with actor Anthony Zerbe in Behind the Broken Words, their critically acclaimed celebration of 20th-century poetry and drama.

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