This Little Light: An Evening with Directors/Producers Wendi Moore-O'Neal and Ada McMahon

Music Rising at Tulane presents Women and Movement #4: This Little Light: An Evening with Directors/Producers Wendi Moore-O'Neal and Ada McMahon. This event will include a film screening, Q&A with Wendi and Ada, and conclude with a Community Sing, led by Wendi Moore-O'Neal.

In the wake of Katrina and the levee failures, the Mennonite Central Committee was looking for boots on the ground to work in the rebuilding city, and Wendi Moore-O’Neal seemed like the perfect candidate: an activist and community organizer with roots in New Orleans. There was one problem: MCC policy requires its personnel to be celibate outside of heterosexual unions, and Wendi was in a committed same-sex partnership. In this diaristic film, Wendi looks back on the years she spent professionally closeted in order to do good, her decision to come out to her superiors, and the discrimination case that she pursued to the federal level. Throughout, she finds refuge in freedom singing, her spiritual link to a tradition of struggle.

Music Rising at Tulane is a program of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (Nola Gulf South). The Women and Movement series is also supported by Nola4Women (nola4women), the Newcomb College Institute Skau Art and Music Fund, and the Tulane University School of Liberal Arts.