At the age of 14, Colorado native Terrance Roberts joined the Denver Bloods street gang in his hometown of Park Hill. He did so, Roberts said, because he loved his neighborhood and wanted to protect it from rival gangs.
“I didn’t become a Blood because I liked wearing red,” Roberts said. “I became a Blood because that was how I could represent the community I was from.”
Eventually, Roberts’ path led him to receive a 10-year prison sentence. When he got out, Roberts dedicated his life to anti-gang and anti-violence activism. He found some inspiration from reading the autobiographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. while incarcerated.
Roberts’ subsequent life story involves multiple moving parts: the often-dangerous nature of community activism, Roberts’ attempt to redevelop a square block in Park Hill known as The Holly, and the Black community’s struggle against gentrification in America. (Gentrification describes the process of incoming wealthy residents changing the character of a poor urban area, typically displacing current residents.)
As part of an ongoing film series called “Black, Bold and Brilliant,” the Utah Film Center held a free screening of the 2022 feature-length documentary “The Holly” (referencing the square block of the same name) on Wednesday, Feb. 7, at the Salt Lake City Library. The film covers Roberts’ journey and the Black community in and around Park Hill.
Each film in the center’s series address issues like the disenfranchisement of marginalized groups in cities across the United States, particularly Black Americans. Through film critique and post-screening discussions, audiences uncover truth and different perspectives at every collaborative event.
Program Manager for the series, Russell Roots, said the idea to show “The Holly” originally came from Denver native Gavin Dahl, executive director of the local nonprofit radio station KRCL 90.9 FM. Both Roots and Dahl agreed that the story told in “The Holly” was fitting for the series.
“The film is about urban development … [in] neighborhoods that are seen as not as valuable or that are under-resourced, which is not necessarily by accident,” Roots said. “These neighborhoods are perpetually the way they are for a reason, and that’s essentially what [‘The Holly’] is about.”
Writer and director of “The Holly,” independent journalist Julian Rubinstein, attended last Wednesday’s screening for a post-Q&A discussion. The film is based on Rubinstein’s book of the same name and follows Rubinstein as he documents eight years of Roberts’ life.
“Black, Bold and Brilliant” programmers Aja Washington and Risshan Leak joined Rubinstein and posed questions of their own for him as well as Roberts, who appeared via Zoom on a large screen. Roberts now lives in California, but he said he has done work in Los Angeles, San Francisco and even Haiti, helping communities that wish to resist systemic disenfranchisement.
“Many people probably don’t know this, but Denver is the number two most gentrified city in America, behind San Francisco,” Roberts told the audience at one point.
During the Q&A, Roberts repeatedly described the city government in Denver as a “good ol’ boys club,” where money wins and Black culture in places like Holly Square is often shoved aside in the name of “urban development.”
Roberts ultimately left Denver after clashes with law enforcement when he organized massive protests over Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died from a lethal dose of ketamine while detained by police in Aurora, Colorado, in 2019.
After that, Roberts said, is when he became outspoken against police brutality and rebranded himself from an “activist” to a “revolutionary.” Roberts prefers “revolutionary,” he told the audience, because he believes the word “activist” has recently become something of a catchphrase or trend.
Throughout the Q&A, the panelists also discussed the merits of independent journalism. For instance, panelists brought up how local news stations in Denver prematurely reported Roberts as guilty when he went to trial in 2013 for shooting a younger gang member in self-defense. A jury later found Roberts not guilty.
Beyond gleaning a deeper understanding of the complex interactions between criminal injustice, city governments and urban development, audience members of last Wednesday’s screening wanted to know how they could apply what they learned from the film and discussion to the situations here in Salt Lake.
“There are disenfranchised communities here [in Salt Lake],” Roots said. “Whether they be Black, Brown, Asian, Polynesian, immigrant … any community that’s facing gentrification and redevelopment [is] in the crosshairs of what happens in ‘The Holly.’”
“These are the marginalized communities that are not held up in the same ways that a lot of other communities are,” Roots continued. “They don’t get the same legislative representation, they don’t have the same judicial leniency, so, as someone says in the film, you get ‘one strike’ and you’re done, rather than five or 10 or however many.”
The next screening in the “Black, Bold and Brillian” film series is set for March 6 at 7 p.m., again at the Salt Lake City Library (210 E. 400 S.). Visit the Utah Film Center website to reserve free tickets.
