YONKERS, NY.- Brick by Brick: A Civil Rights Story, a one-hour documentary about an American community, Yonkers, and its citizens in pursuit of civil rights will be screened January 24 at 2 pm at Yonkers’ Riverfront Library, 1 Larkin Plaza. The program, co-sponsored by the Hudson River Museum and the Yonkers Public Library, will be followed by a discussion with the film’s producer Bill Kavanagh, as well as Winston Ross, former President of the Yonkers NAACP, and Gene Capello, a Yonkers resident. Both Ross and Capello participated in the film. The program is free and open to the public.

Yonkers Library and the Hudson River Museum have partnered to present several programs to the community, among them an annual Hispanic celebration of spring. This January the Library/ Museum collaboration presents Brick by Brick during the week of the historic inauguration of Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States, and its first of African American heritage. The link between the nation’s leadership to be assumed by an African American and the civil rights struggles of Yonkers is significant.

Brick by Brick premiered in 2007 on Thirteen/WNET. Filmed over a decade, it shows three families during these years confronting racial discrimination in housing and in Yonkers schools, and how integration, mandated by the landmark litigation 1985 U.S. v. Yonkers, changed this New York City suburb. Brick by Brick also focuses on the larger implications of the nation’s continuing pursuit of fair housing and equal opportunity.