Join us for a screening and community conversation with Larry Gossett for “The First Rainbow Coalition.”

In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party formed alliances across ethnic and racial lines with other community-based movements in the city, including Latino group the Young Lords and southern whites the Young Patriots. Banding together in one of postwar America’s most segregated cities to confront issues like police brutality and substandard housing, they called themselves the Rainbow Coalition.

Featured Speaker: Larry Gossett is an American politician and activist from Seattle. He was a member of the nonpartisan King County Council, representing District 2 from 1993 to 2019. In the late 1960s, Gossett became a founder of the Black Student Union on the UW campus and helped to organize nearly a dozen high school and middle school Black Student Unions throughout Seattle. As a student activist, he was instrumental in bringing about the UW’s Educational Opportunity Program minority recruitment program. He graduated from the UW in 1970, receiving the university’s first-ever degree in African American studies. Before he had even formally received his BA, he became the first supervisor of the Black Student Division in the university’s Office of Minority Affairs. The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project describes him as having been, in the late 1960s, “one of Seattle’s best known young black radicals.” A former member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he worked as a community organizer in Seattle. While still working for the University of Washington, he was famously involved in the occupation of a former Seattle public school that ultimately became El Centro de la Raza. (Wikipedia)

Feb 25 SCHEDULE 

6PM – Join us for a group screening of “The First Rainbow Coalition”

7PM – Join us for a panel presentation and community conversation with small group breakout rooms on Zoom.

REGISTER HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/screening-community-conversation-the-first-rainbow-coalition-tickets-138349209209