Summary: Traces the history of black America back to ancient African civilization, examining attempts by the white establishment in the U.S. to conceal this knowledge as a means of undermining African American identity. Presents theories of scholars and social commentators which comprise a history in which African Americans have been systematically oppressed as a people.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Filmmaker Byron Hurt looks at the past and future of soul food, covering its roots in Western Africa, its incarnation in the American South, and the role it plays in the health crisis in the African American community. Examines the socioeconomics of the modern American diet, and how the food industry profits from producing cheap calories while healthy options remain expensive and hard to find.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: PBS 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, and culminating with his assassination in Memphis in 1968. Including archival footage, this film is an indispensable primary resource of a pivotal moment in American and world history. Originally screened in theaters for only a single night in 1970.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Chronicling the riveting history and personal experiences, at once liberating and challenging, harrowing and inspiring, deeply revealing and profoundly transforming, of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond, it explores the deep background of a recent phrase rooted in realities that have been an indelible part of the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Explores the motivation behind European global subjugation, the history of rarely discussed vast West African empires, how germ warfare is used on melanted people, and the history of slave breeding farms in America.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Continues the history of people of African descent, including topics such as the global African presence, the science of melanin, the truth about the prison industrial complex, how thriving black economic communities were undermined in America, hidden truths about Native Americans, and more.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Dramatic biography of Rosa McCauley Parks, who in 1955 created the spark that began the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2002

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: This story begins on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 when a 34-year-old preacher galvanized millions with his dream for an America free of racism. It comes to a bloody end almost five years later on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. In the years since those events unfolded, the man at the center, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has become a mythic figure, a minister whose...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: PBS Home Video 2005

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Take an unprecedented look at the intersection of African American women artists, politics and entertainment and hear the story of how six trailblazing performers--Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier--changed American culture through their films, fashion, music, and politics.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Gain an unprecedented look at the experiences and accomplishments of African Americans in the military, and learn why such a group of heroic men and women would fight for the freedom of others that they themselves weren't able to enjoy.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Rockwell, Anne F.

Summary: The true story of James Lafayette, a spy in the American Revolution. After America won its freedom, James returned to slavery. But James's fight for freedom wasn't over.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "In the hot and deadly summer of 1964, the nation could not turn away from Mississippi. Over 10 memorable weeks known as Freedom Summer, more than 700 student volunteers joined with organizers and local African Americans in a historic effort to shatter the foundations of white supremacy in one of the nation's most segregated states ... even in the face of intimidation, physical violence, and...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented not the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement, but the beginning of a new, crucial chapter. Nowhere was this next battle better epitomized than in Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural, impoverished county with a vicious history of racist terrorism. In a county that was 80 percent Black but had zero Black voters, laws were just paper...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: The four-part series hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people beyond the reach of the "White gaze." The series recounts the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons in 1775 through the formation of all-Black towns and business districts, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, destinations for leisure, and the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: "With historic reenactments, expert interviews, and first-hand accounts, learn about the people, bloody wars, and undenieable truths that have brought us up from slavery to emancipation road on the march to freedom"--container.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2016

Copies Available at Fife Lake

Summary: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. embarks on a deeply personal journey through the last fifty years of African American history. Joined by leading scholars, celebrities, and a dynamic cast of people who shaped these years, Gates travels from the victories of the civil rights movement up to today, asking profound questions about the state of black America, and our nation as a whole.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: An adaptation of Alex Haley's "Roots", in which Haley traces his African American family's history from the mid-18th century to the Reconstruction era.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Warner Home Video 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Tells the story of the struggle for freedom by thousands of African-American ex-slaves who fled Southern plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. Follows their dream of a journey to freedom in bone-chilling Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. Features the stories of Englishman John Clarkson, a passionate advocate of the abolition of slavery, and two African men,...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: BBC Video 2008

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Trail of tears : Cherokee legacy: Documents the forced removal in 1838 of the Cherokee Nation from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma. Shows the suffering endured by the Cherokees as they lost their land and the difficult conditions they endured on the trail. Describes how thousands of Cherokees died during the Trail of Tears, nearly a quarter of the nation, including most of their...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Mill Creek Entertainment 2009

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Contains interviews with some of the protesters. In May of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked black people of Birmingham, Alabama to go to jail in the cause of racial equality. The adults were afraid to go to jail and so the school children marched and over 5000 of them were arrested. This lead to President Kennedy sponsoring the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the march on Washington. Portions of...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Southern Poverty Law Center 2005

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: Discover how the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague set off fear and anti-Asian sentiment in San Francisco.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

Summary: In 1860, as the American Experiment threatened to explode into a bloody civil war, there were as many as four hundred thousand slave-owners in the United States, and almost four million slaves. The nation was founded upon the idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The nation would pay a bloody...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere