TRAVELING WHILE BLACK
Synopsis
​
Academy Award winner Roger Ross Williams and Emmy Award-winning Felix & Paul Studios' film transports you to historic Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington DC. The viewer shares an intimate series of moments with several of the patrons of Ben's as they reflect on their experiences of restricted movement and race relations in the U.S.
Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, Traveling While Black highlights the urgent need to not only remember the past but to learn from it, and facilitate a dialogue about the challenges minority travelers still face today.
​
-Synopsis from website
Curriculum
Basics
​
Experience: 360 VR Narrative
VR Type: Sedentary, you cannot move in the 360 space provided.
Time: 30 min
Repeatability: None
Recommended Ages: 13+
Rated Teen
​
​
Walkthrough
​
Description
This was a technically well done experience, the highlight of which was sitting in a booth with people being interviewed as if you were in a sat next to with the interviewer and interviewee (though ignoring you completely and talking to each other). The experience contrasts the historical experiences of travelling while black with modern experience highlighting how far is still yet to go.
Anticipatory Set
Civil Rights Movement
​
Specific Events/Locations
Ben's Chili Bowl
Samaria Rice
Green Book
Standards
​
Technology: 1.7(a-d) Students use digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally.
Social Studies: SSS2, SSS4, G1-G3​
SEL: 4a-b
VR HIGHLIGHTS
​
In “Traveling While Black VR,” the immersion of 360° footage draws viewers into living history lessons told around a booth in Ben’s Chili Bowl. The Washington, D.C., restaurant has been a mainstay of the African American community since 1958, bearing witness to significant Civil Rights milestones that are woven into the film in powerful snippets of footage. From the stirring memories of Civil Rights leader Courtland Cox to the heartbreaking words of Samaria Rice, whose young son Tamir was killed by police in 2014, VR allows Williams to connect the parallels of the past to the present.
Williams depicts how the dangers and difficulties that African Americans navigated generations ago still linger. “‘Traveling while black’ is a term people use to illustrate that in America when you are black and you are going from point A to point B, you are always at risk,” Williams says.
For three decades, an alternate atlas called The Green Book guided African American travelers through Jim Crow-era America to safe spaces such as gas stations, restaurants and hotels. Victor Green, the book’s creator, anticipated that the guide would someday become unnecessary. When Williams was a child, his family would pack everything into their car and drive the 14-hour journey from Philadelphia to Charleston, SC, in one shot. As a kid, Williams never understood why. “They did this because they had to,” he says. “This was the way black people traveled in America.”
​
Virtual Reality Experience, “Traveling While Black,” comes to McLean Community Center in December
​