TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing is a biography of the influential writer, filmmaker and cultural worker who – with humor and deep insight –  inspired a generation of artists to dedicate themselves to community empowerment.

The film is structured as a series of lessons on cultural organizing, gleaned from Bambara’s life and shared by her friends, colleagues and students.

Directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henrique  (2025, 105 minutes)

This screening is presented by Express Newark’s Community Media Center, in partnership with The Newark Black Film Festival and Community Movement Builders – Newark.

The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Louis Massiah and Salamishah Tillet

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe VideoCenter in Philadelphia, He has developed production methodologies that assist first time makers in authoring their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 150 documentaries; Muslim Voices of Philadelphia; The Great Migration – A City Transformed, and The Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets. Massiah’s documentaries include The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, Cecil B. Moore, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown and TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing.

Salamishah Tillet is a scholar, writer, and activist was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022 for her work as a contributing critic at large for The New York Times. She is the author of In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021), and Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). She is the Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Africana Studies and the former director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design at Rutgers University – Newark. Upon arriving at Rutgers, she founded New Arts Justice, a public art studio in the City of Newark.