Film tells chapter in history

Students, instructors and community members learned about an important piece of Mexican-American history Thursday morning at a screeing of the “American Experience” documentary, “A Class Apart,” at Metropolitan Community College.

The film follows a landmark civil rights case in which underdog Mexican-American lawyers fought discrimination in post-World War II America using a small-town murder case, Hernandez vs. Texas, to battle Jim Crow-style injustice when no Mexican-Americans were allowed on Hernandez’s jury.

Creighton law professor Raneta Lawson Mack introduced the film and moderated a lively discussion that followed it.

The event was the first at Metro that marked Hispanic/Latino Heritage Month, said Barbara Velazquez, coordinator of international intercultural education at the college.

The 52 people who attended “represented different classes at the college as well as community members that came in,” she said

“I believe that diverse classrooms at Metro really feed into beautiful discussions,” she added.

Mack also was pleased with the audience’s involvement.

“I thought that the students and the public really understood what was going on in the film,” she said. “I thought there were some fundamental issues of struggle for civil rights that everyone universally can understand. So I think that many of them keyed off that.”

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