A Time for Burning is the story of one pastor’s unsuccessful efforts to integrate Omaha’s Augustana Lutheran Church in 1966. The movie’s central figure is Bill Youngdahl, the socially conscious white clergyman driving the church’s reforms, but its most compelling may be a young Ernie Chambers, then as now a fiery and uncompromising voice for North Omaha. Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey’s searing postcard from the front lines of the civil rights movement aired nationally on television and was nominated for the Best Documentary Picture Academy Award. Though not explicitly presented as a microcosm of the tensions gripping the country at large, A Time for Burning remains an indelible document of a time when things seemed set to burst.

Join us for a post-screening discussion with the film's director Bill Jersey and Mark Hoeger, Adjunct Professor in Film History and Criticism at UNO. In partnership with Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.