‘History Is Everything’: Making a Film About Black Maternal Mortality

July 19, 2022

(New York Times) – In October 2019, her daughter Shamony Gibson died just two weeks after giving birth. Her death, at age 30, was another grim emblem of a national crisis: the epidemic of Black maternal mortality. The United States is the most dangerous industrialized country to give birth, with Black women dying at three times the rate of white women. Not long after Shamony’s death, her mother, along with her partner, Omari Maynard, held a celebration of her life that they called “Aftershock.” Ahead of it, Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee, the directors of a documentary that shares a title with that event, reached out to them. (Read More)