The Courage to Tell the Story

When filmmaker Ava DuVernay first came to The Huntington, she wasn’t here to speak— she was here to listen. On that initial visit, she came to interview Adam H. Domby, an associate professor of history at Auburn University and a long-term Research Fellow studying the overlooked role of Black sailors in the Union’s Civil War victory. 

That visit sparked a connection with Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence. They shared a conviction: storytelling grounded in research can shift how a nation understands itself. 

This fall, DuVernay returned—this time to a full Rothenberg Hall— for Why It Matters, The Huntington’s conversations series between Lawrence and cultural leaders on the ongoing relevance of the arts and humanities. The evening also previewed THIS LAND IS…, The Huntington’s multiyear initiative exploring the American experience through the lens of land as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. 

Before the program began, Lawrence presented DuVernay with a copy of a typed manuscript of Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again,” held in The Huntington’s C. E. S. Wood papers (1829–1980). The poem confronts the gap between American ideals and lived realities, insisting both on truth and on possibility. As Hughes writes: 

“America never was America to me, 
 And yet I swear this oath— 
 America will be!” 

The gesture linked DuVernay’s work to a lineage of artists and witnesses who have insisted, across generations, on the courage to tell a fuller American story. 

Why It Matters

Lawrence opened the conversation by noting that the “it” in Why It Matters evolves with each guest. Past dialogues have featured former Library of Congress Director Carla Hayden, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, and the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Carol T. Christ. 

DuVernay smiled as she recounted how their collaboration began. “Most people don’t follow up on things,” DuVernay quipped from the stage. “Karen—she follows up.” 

DuVernay is an Emmy, BAFTA, and Peabody Award-winning writer, director, and producer whose credits include Selma, 13th, When They See Us, Colin in Black & White, and Origin. She became the first Black woman to direct a feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (for Selma). In 2012, she became the first Black woman to win the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival for Middle of Nowhere. Earlier in 2025, she received the Smithsonian Great Americans Medal for her contributions to American ideas and ideals. 

DuVernay’s humanities foundation began at UCLA, where she majored in English and African American studies. After graduating, she built a career in film publicity—work she pursued because it was, as she put it, “the closest I thought I’d ever get to film.” Promoting movies allowed her to support other storytellers until one day, while visiting the set of Michael Mann’s Collateral, she had a revelation. “I watched him shoot,” she recalled. “And I thought, I want to do that.” 

The Archive as Catalyst 

During a subsequent visit, Lawrence and colleagues showed DuVernay the Octavia E. Butler papers—the most frequently requested collection in the Library’s rare book reading room. Holding Butler’s drafts felt “thrilling,” DuVernay said. “I felt it in my whole body.” The marginalia and revisions made tangible the labor of a visionary imagining futures that now seem prescient. 

The Butler archive—spanning the author’s career and personal life—includes manuscripts of all her published works, drafts of unfinished projects, correspondence with writers, editors, and friends, as well as photographs, research files, and ephemera. 

While Butler’s works remain of great interest to researchers, they are also consistently sought by the public, and The Huntington prioritizes their inclusion in ongoing exhibitions. A selection of her notebooks will be featured in “Stories from the Library: From Brontë to Butler,” on view from Dec. 13, 2025 through June 15, 2026, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at two centuries of the everyday lives of women writers through ephemera, letters, and journals.  

Lawrence noted that The Huntington also stewards a Langston Hughes collection, acquired from the family of Hughes’ attorney and friend Loren Miller. The small but substance-heavy cache—containing a 1932 pocket diary, handwritten drafts, and personal correspondence—illuminates Hughes’ politically charged years during the 1930s and his deep ties to California intellectual life. 

DuVernay described her own research approach as a blend of institutional archives and “untraditional spaces”—family albums, answering-machine tapes, and objects of daily life. “History lives in the eyes that witness and the ears that hear,” she said. “Both belong in the record.” 

In discussing how she draws from everyday history, DuVernay pointed to When They See Us, her limited series about the Exonerated Five. Alongside legal transcripts and news footage, she relied on the photographs and memories kept by the boys’ families—visual records of childhoods interrupted by injustice—including a voicemail recording. It was a reminder that archives are not only official repositories of history —they also include kitchen drawers and living-room shelves. 

A Day That Holds a Century 

Back at Rothenberg Hall, the conversation turned to August 28: A Day in the Life of a People, the 24-minute film DuVernay created for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Lonnie G. Bunch III, then the director of NMAAHC, called DuVernay directly—“an extraordinary call,” she said—to offer her the role of sole filmmaker introducing the museum. “Anything you want,” he told her, promising complete artistic freedom. One requirement: lasting resonance. “It will be the film in residence,” she recalled. “We are building a special room just to show the film.” 

It was designed exclusively for that place—projected in a theater just inside the entrance, welcoming visitors into the story the museum exists to tell. 

At the time of this writing, Smithsonian museums—including the National Museum of African American History and Culture—are closed due to the federal government shutdown, and many Smithsonian employees have been furloughed.  

The film traces a single date—Aug. 28—across six pivotal moments in American history: 

• The Slavery Abolition Act in the United Kingdom in 1833
• The murder of Emmett Till in 1955
• Motown’s first No. 1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” in 1961
• The March on Washington and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963
• The eve of Hurricane Katrina’s Louisiana landfall in 2005
• Barack Obama’s presidential nomination acceptance in 2008 

Each vignette draws on poetry and literature as well as narration, emphasizing language and witnessing. During the Hurricane Katrina sequence, actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, portraying a woman whose home is flooding, delivers a voiceover of Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”—a voice of history rising with the water around her. That creative decision exemplifies what DuVernay has often said about her work: She is interested in the seam that stitches joy and devastation together. Lawrence echoed the point, quoting DuVernay back to herself—that her lens keeps the focus on ordinary people— “the people whose presence made history matter.” 

Contested and Common Ground 

Lawrence linked DuVernay’s approach to The Huntington’s THIS LAND IS… initiative—an exploration of how land shapes American identity as the nation’s 250th anniversary approaches. Launching in fall 2025 and continuing through 2027, the initiative spans gallery reinterpretations, a major exhibition and companion publication, a renovated garden space, and a robust program of public engagement. 

Anchored by the tagline “Reflections for America at 250,” the initiative draws on the breadth of The Huntington’s collections—including its rare, annotated 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence—to reflect on land as both promise and contradiction, common and contested ground.  The ellipses in the title of the initiative signals the unfinished nature of American democracy  

DuVernay embraced the metaphor of the ellipsis: 

“I’ve learned that it’s okay to dissent and it’s okay to resist.” 
 “What we know the land is—its labor, its betrayals, its beauty—can’t be denied.” 

“It’s a plan to be courageous. What will you do? 
 How will you defend the land that we call ours 
 and each other and ourselves?” 

In polarized times, she said, courage becomes discipline. 

Blending Fact and Film 

Midway through the evening, the lights dimmed for a clip from Selma, DuVernay’s 2014 historical drama about King’s campaign for voting rights in 1965. The six-minute sequence—depicting King leading the third and final march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and onward to Montgomery—transitions from dramatized reenactment to archival footage. DuVernay said that including the black-and-white footage was a matter of integrity. “Nothing’s as good as the real footage,” she said. “You can’t match the grit of the actual faces.” Using historical film, she added, is an act of returning the image to its source.  

That approach carries through her other projects, including her documentary 13th and her feature Origin, both grounded in research and shaped by emotion. “The question is always how to tell it so that it connects,” she said. “How do you mix … that institutional archive with the mother’s photo albums and stir that pot and create a stew that feels good and sticks to your ribs?”  

Toward the Next Generation 

Asked what she hopes for the next generation of storytellers, DuVernay described a moment from earlier that evening: A young staff member had approached her backstage to say he had “learned” her in school—that his understanding of American history had come, in part, from her films. The comment stayed with her. She looked out at the audience and said, “We need to make work people learn from.” 

Once wary of being labeled a “social-justice filmmaker,” she now embraces the responsibility that comes with shaping how people understand their country and themselves. “If these films help people remember who we really are,” she said, “that’s enough.” 

She encouraged emerging artists to trust their ideas, to finish what they start, and to let pauses be productive. Procrastination isn’t failure, she noted—it can be incubation. 

And courage, she added, does not always appear bold. Often it is quiet—a choice to speak up in a meeting or a classroom, to keep going when self-doubt says stop. “Every little thing,” she said, “matters.” 

The Ellipsis Continues 

As the audience rose in Rothenberg Hall, Lawrence reflected on the partnership between evidence and empathy that defines the humanities. The stories we preserve—and the voices we elevate—shape what comes next. 

DuVernay left the audience with a challenge: 

“What will you do? How will you defend the land that we call ours and each other and ourselves?” 

She asked the room: “What did Octavia say?” 

Many quoted back affirmations about change, which Lawrence echoed: 

“All that you touch / You Change.” 

The ellipsis continues—sustained by the courage to keep telling the story. 

Watch the full recording of President Karen R. Lawrence and Ava DuVernay here.