All black-cast silent drama plays out against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Norman Studios Silent Film Museum and the Hotel Indigo® Jacksonville will screen 1927’s The Scar of Shame at the next Silent Sundays event March 3, 4pm.

One of the earliest examples of race film produced by the conspicuously white-owned, black-cast Colored Players of Philadelphia, The Scar of Shame features romantic entanglements, family squabbles, hidden secrets and one fateful dance that all further frustrate the upward movement of African Americans in the early 20th century, fueled by the emergence of a bourgeois black class. The film debuted during the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, social and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, NY, spanning the 1920s. Known as the "New Negro Movement" and named after 1925’s The New Negro, it’s said to have been inspired in party by the bravery of black soldiers in World War I. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson often called the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924 when the academic journal, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance, and 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.

Jacksonville University's Tony Steve and the Silver Synchro Sounds will provide live musical accompaniment. Tickets are $5 and available at the door (cash or credit) and online.

Silent Sundays proceeds support efforts of the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing public knowledge of Northeast Florida's early film industry and the preservation and restoration of Jacksonville’s only remaining silent film studio. The Norman Studios was among the nation's first to produce films starring all African American casts. Find out more at normanstudios.org.

Located on the lake in upscale Tapestry Park, the Hotel Indigo® Jacksonville is a boutique-style, lakefront property with interior design elements that recall Jacksonville's film history.