Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

Sharits/ Titles for “Declarative Mode”/ 3

(Titles fill wide screen format—more or less as shown below; hold for about 8 seconds and then text begins to move upwards—at a reading rate: when end of statement comes into place on screen, hold for 4 seconds and then fade out in 40 frames).

Wide Screen Format:

1968       Civil Rights Act bans racial discrimination in housing and real estate in the United States of America.

1965       Voting Rights Act attempts to ensure equal voting rights by placing Federal observers at polls.

1964       Most comprehensive Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of color, race, religion, or nationality in places of public accommodation covered by interstate commerce. Schools are to be desegregated. Discrimination in employment banned on basis of race, religion, or sex.

1962       President Kennedy signs an executive order prohibiting discrimination in housing connected with Federal government programs.

1960       Civil Rights Act establishes the commission on Civil Rights, to investigate charges that discrimination exists in voting.

1955       Supreme Court bans segregation in public recreational facilities.

1954       Supreme Court declares school segregation unconstitutional.

1875       Civil Rights Act of this year the last Federal Legislation for 82 years.

1870

1866       Civil Rights Acts of these years are the first Legislation attempts to grant blacks political and legal status equal to whites; these acts give blacks the rights to sue (and be sued), to give evidence and to hold real estate and personal property.

1863       The Emancipation Proclamation issued but is highly limited and qualified; total freedom of black slaves must be achieved in other ways.

1776       Thomas Jefferson, in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, denounces slavery; however, this visionary passage is deleted from the final draft of the Declaration by Congress. It is to this omitted statement that this film is addressed—the film is a color-sound-energy eulogy to Jefferson’s declaration of human liberty.