759: Boy Scouts of Harlem - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

759: Boy Scouts of Harlem is a family documentary directed by Jake Boritt and Justin Szlasa about Boy Scout Troop 759, which meets in Harlem

Harlem

Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...

.

The film is the first major documentary ever made about a Boy Scout troop. It premiered as a free community event on March 14, 2009 at the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem on Malcolm X

Malcolm X

Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...

Boulevard. Two weeks later it screened on board the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum

Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum

The Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum is a military and maritime history museum with a collection of museum ships in New York City. It is located at Pier 86 at 46th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. The museum showcases the World War II aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, the submarine , a Concorde...

in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

. On October 8, 2009 Senator Jeff Sessions

Jeff Sessions

Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III is the junior United States Senator from Alabama. First elected in 1996, Sessions is a member of the Republican Party...

and Senator Ben Nelson

Ben Nelson

Earl Benjamin "Ben" Nelson is the senior U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He is a member of the Democratic Party and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000....

sponsored a screening on Capitol Hill. The film aired on Public Television stations around the country starting in August 2010 as presented by Maryland Public Television

Maryland Public Television

Maryland Public Television is a non-profit, state-licensed Public Broadcasting Service non-commercial educational public television state network which serves U.S. state of Maryland. Its six transmitters cover nearly all of the state, plus Washington, D.C...

Plot

The film follows four Boy Scouts and two Scout leaders from the streets of Harlem to the woods of Camp Keowa on Crystal Lake in the Catskills. The newest Scout, eleven-year-old Keith Dozier, spends his first week at camp facing the challenges of the woods: the dock test in the deep lake, creatures of the night, the climbing tower, the raucous dining hall, and the kitchen. With help from his fellow Scouts and Scoutmaster Sowah, young Keith faces the challenges and earns his place as a Scout.

Subjects

The Scoutmaster of Troop 759 is Okpoti Sowah, who was born in what is now Ghana

Ghana

Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...

. Sowah came to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

to pursue his education and eventually earned a master's degree from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

. The assistant Scoutmaster is Ann Dozier and the featured Scouts are Keith Dozier, Devon Howard, Emmanuel Nortey and Colin "KC" Byers. Camp Keowa Staff include Andy Cabrera, John X. Restrepo and Marina Chernykh.

External links

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