California Newsreel (Firm).
Language
English
Description
American culture has stereotyped black Americans for centuries. Equally devastating, the late Marlon Riggs argued, have been the definitions of "blackness" African Americans impose upon one another which contain and reduce the black experience. In this film, Riggs meets a cross-section of African Americans grappling with the paradox of numerous, often contradictory definitions of blackness.
22) Out of obscurity
Language
English
Description
Details a little-known chapter in civil rights history. In 1939 five young men staged what is believed to be the nation's first sit-in at a public library just outside Washington, DC, to protest the "separate, but equal" treatment of African-Americans. Includes a dramatization of the 1939 sit-in and a look at the role of local civil rights activist Samuel Wilbert Taylor.
Language
English
Description
Discusses the struggle of Black Pullman porters to unionize, even though rebuked by white organized labor, and the eventual formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters under A. Philip Randolph. Explores the impact of this group on the American civil rights movement.
Language
English
Description
Four prominent African-American writers each narrate a period in the life of the sociologist and author W.E.B. Du Bois, and describe his impact on their work. They chronicle Du Bois' role as a founder of the NAACP, organizer of the first Pan-African Congress, editor of Crisis, a journal of the black cultural renaissance, and author of a series of landmark sociological studies. Anathematized during the McCarthy years, Du Bois immigrated to Ghana,...
Language
English
Description
Documentary of two 1968 events in the civil rights movement-- the sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Shows how the black community, local civil rights leaders, and AFSCME mobilized behind the strikers in mass demonstrations and a boycott of downtown businesses.
Language
English
Description
Biography of the African American labor leader, journalist, and civil rights activist, A. Philip Randolph. Randolph won the first national labor agreement for a black union, The Sleeping Car porters. His threat of a protest march on Washington forced President Roosevelt to ban segregation in the federal government and defense industries at the onset of WWII and again he forced Truman to integrate the military. Finally with the 1963 March on Washington,...
Language
English
Description
"Too long have others spoken for us". Presents a history of African-American newspapers and journalism from the mid-19th century through the 20th century. Tells of the struggles against censorship and discrimination and for freedom of the press, with commentary by historians, journalists, and photojournalists,
29) Blacks & Jews
Language
English
Description
Early in the 20th century black and Jewish Americans joined forces against bigotry and for civil rights but in the late 1960's each group turned inward and the coalition fell apart. This film examines the history of this collaboration and recent racial conflicts between Afro-Americans and Jews and attempts at understanding and reconciliation, with particular emphasis on events in New York City and Oakland, California.