AT THE MAJESTIC THEATRE, in collaboration with the Melanin Mountain Project, the Union Congregational Church in Crested Butte, and the Gunnison Congregational Church.

Read the book before or after the free documentary film!

True story out of Denver- wrestles with race, class, violence, and environmental issues. 

The Holly : Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood

An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future

On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an “invisible city” within a city, a cradle of civil rights activism in a historically white metropolis that in recent decades had struggled under the weight of gang violence and urban blight. While shootings weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter came as a shock to Denver’s mayor and members of the city’s donor class who had supported him. His name was Terrance Roberts, and he was a third-generation resident of the Holly, a former member of the Bloods, and the community’s most revered—and controversial—anti-gang activist.

In The Holly, the award-winning journalist and Denver resident Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events leading up to the fateful confrontation that left a local gang member paralyzed and sparked a two-year legal battle in which Roberts tried to clear his name by proving that he acted in self-defense. Much more than the story of a shooting, The Holly is a sociopolitical saga that explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens, as well as the fraught interactions of police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex-gang members trying—or not—to put their pasts behind them.

Above all, Rubinstein offers a nuanced and humane portrait of a man whose life is emblematic of a city, and a country, that at times supported him and at other times pinned him down. Full of urgent lessons at a time when American cities are under threat like never before, The Holly is an unforgettable, deeply affecting story about the triumphs and failures of an effort to transform a neighborhood.