Documentary chronicles LeMoyne Center history
LeMoyne Community Center campers dance to “I Like to Move It” during the Parent Showcase on Friday, Aug. 9. Each age group of Camp Challenge performed a different dance routine, and the audience of family and friends were asked to vote for their favorite performance.
Two campers of the LeMoyne Community Center break away from the choreography to dance together during their performance at the Camp Challenge Parent Showcase on Friday, Aug. 9.
Campers of the LeMoyne Community Center’s summer program, Camp Challenge, watch the documentary about the program, created by Amberly Ellis and Richard T. Fields, during the Parent Showcase Friday. Above, campers break into dance.
Joyce Ellis, director of the LeMoyne Community Center in Washington, smiles as she watches the documentary about the LeMoyne Center made by Amberly Ellis and Richard Fields presented at the Camp Challenge Parent Showcase Friday.
Danyelle Levy, mother of Tayshawn and Unique Levy, records her children’s performances at the LeMoyne Community Center Camp Challenge Parent Showcase Friday.
The sound of children playing slowly became audible over a small screen inside the LeMoyne Community Center gymnasium, but the nearly 200 children watching were silent – at least much quieter than you’d expect from that many giddy children. Friends, parents and their children, who were taking a break from some spirited dancing, watched the premiere of “Revealing LeMoyne,” a short documentary about the center’s history.
Even though Joyce Ellis has been executive director of the center for six years, she felt overwhelmed with emotion when she saw the children on-screen.
“Just to see it all brought together, it was too surreal,” said Ellis. “It didn’t seem like a real thing. It was like I was watching someone else’s life.”
Half of the 20-minute documentary, which was co-directed by Ellis’ niece, Amberly Ellis, and her boyfriend, Richard Fields, was screened during the final day of Camp Challenge during a parent showcase last week. Amberly Ellis and Fields, both graduate film students at American University in Washington, D.C., decided to create “Revealing LeMoyne” to show the rich history of the center.
The documentary started with the year 1926 when Robert Forrest, a wealthy carriage maker, devoted nearly 30 acres of land to the black community in Washington. In the mid-1930s, Washington Steel Corp. founder Thomas Fitch developed a deed to ensure that Forrest’s land would not be sold. The Forrest Center, which was used for education and recreation, was renamed the LeMoyne Community Center in 1956 after abolitionist Julius LeMoyne.
When the center opened that year, two special guests attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony – Jackie Robinson, the first black Major League Baseball player, and his manager, Wesley Branch Rickey.
“The thing about the center that was so important and why Jackie Robinson would have been here was because this was the only place that blacks could swim,” said Amberly Ellis. “There was still segregation in Washington, and this was the only place that blacks were allowed to go.”
The center had a fair amount of success for several decades until a fire ravaged the building in 2004. The abandoned building was reclaimed by drug dealers and prostitutes, and the walls were covered with spray paint and gang signs.
Before transforming the LeMoyne Center, Joyce Ellis ran her own dance studios for 37 years. She said she received a call from God to leave all that behind in order to change young lives. When she first reopened the center, she received anonymous phone calls from enraged members of the community who urged her to give up.
“Nobody wanted this to happen, not even the black community,” said Ellis. “Now that’s when it gets bad, when your own community is fighting you. They were so used to people coming in with broken promises.”
Yet, as the documentary chronicled, the community started to offer support once they saw that the LeMoyne Center could empower underserved children in Washington.
Amberly Ellis and Fields spent two weeks filming the documentary and one week editing. The pair continued to tweak the film at the last minute, even leading up to the morning of its debut at the LeMoyne Center.
“What’s mind-baffling to us is that … this is the length of a thesis film, and people spend a year (working on it),” said Amberly, who, like Fields, just completed her first year of graduate school.
The couple hopes to submit the film to festivals, but more importantly, to educate others about the impact of the LeMoyne Center.
“Everybody agrees that this center belongs in the community and is benefitting the community 100 percent,” Fields said. To watch the documentary, visit Fields’ Vimeo page at www.vimeo.com/richardtfields.