Birth of the Black Butterfly is a short mixed animated film following a young film crew documenting the forgotten chaos that ensued when in 1910 a black lawyer, George McMechen dared to move into an all-white neighborhood. As they document the resulting white pushback including the nation’s first redlining laws, the filmmakers make the connections to the outright segregationist policies of 100 years ago to the housing inequalities and gentrification that is confronting their city of Baltimore today. In the process they discover a lost neighborhood of Cherry Heights (not Cherry Hill) that McMechen and Hawkins helped establish as a suburban counter to city living specifically marketed for African Americans. Cherry Heights has long been folded into Overlea. The Birth of the Black Butterfly, which derives its name by the book by Dr. Lawrence Brown, asks the question what can be done about some of the same prohibitive forces that were unleashed in the 19th century still prevalent today.