LibGuides: Black History Month: Films and Videos

Films

Fences
Adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a black garbage collector in 1950s Pittsburgh named Troy Maxson. Bitter about his lot in life, Maxson frequently takes out his frustrations on his loved ones.
Moonlight
MOONLIGHT is the tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.
The Color Purple
Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey star in director Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple. From 1909 to 1949, Celie (Goldberg--Ghosts of Mississippi), a Southern Black woman, gradually gains self-respect as she strives to educate herself and to find love--despite an abusive spouse and a society biased against her race and her sex.
Loving
Interracial couple fight Virginia's miscegenation laws, and their case reaches the Supreme Court.
Eclipse Theatre's 10by10
10by10 was developed and produced by Eclipse Theatre, Britain’s leading Black-led national touring company. Ten films by ten writers across ten different cities.
Nope
The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.
Get Out
In Universal Pictures’ Get Out, a speculative thriller from Blumhouse (producers of The Visit, Insidious series and The Gift) and the mind of Jordan Peele, when a young African-American man visits his white girlfriend’s family estate, he becomes ensnared in a more sinister real reason for the invitation.

Films on Demand

The History of Black Music
This program from Tony Brown's Journal looks at a vocal extravaganza by historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that creates a unique music history lesson on stage in Las Vegas. Choirs, groups, and soloists from the nation’s black colleges showcase their talents in riveting stage performances.
Thurgood Marshall: America’s First African American Supreme Court Justice The great grandson of a slave, Thurgood Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. At the age of 25, Marshall graduated first in his class from Howard Law and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization. As NAACP counsel, Marshall used the constitution to successfully argue for a slew of rights now taken for granted, and forced the University of Maryland Law School to admit its first black student, just five years after that same school had rejected Marshall due to his race. Between 1940 and 1961 Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, the most significant being the landmark case, Brown v Board of Education. Marshall argued that separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, violating the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In September 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson named Marshall the nation’s first black Solicitor General to conduct government legal action before the Supreme Court. Two years later on October 2, 1967 at the age of 59, Marshall became the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Lyndon Johnson who declared it was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place.
Rosa Parks: African Americans Who Left their Stamp on History Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born a granddaughter to former slaves, on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in December of 1955, spurred a city-wide boycott and unleashed nationwide efforts to end segregation of public facilities. Her brave and unwavering determination proved monumental. Rosa was prepared to sacrifice everything, making her the role model of Racial Injustice and The First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement. Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery Bus Boycott became the catalyst that helped launch important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. It inspired all freedom loving people to join together against oppressive laws and governments, racial discrimination and hatred. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. Her determination and perseverance became a focal point with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act - legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the NAACP's highest award the Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom the Congressional Gold Medal. Rosa died in 2005 and was chosen as the first woman ever to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.
Langston Hughes: African Americans Who Left their Stamp on History An American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist, Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance," a cultural movement made famous because of the number of emerging black writers, poets and scholars. Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations and was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Embracing the common experience of black Americans, he was the bard of his people because he felt their joys and suffering himself. Hughes lived in several US cities, then traveled abroad extensively, first as a seaman, later as a war correspondent. Renowned for his folksy humor, his work was well received by a black audience who saw themselves in his characters. In 1934 Hughes first short story collection The Ways of White Folks, was published. It looked at the humorous and tragic interactions between races, but was tinged with pessimism. He went on to write countless works of poetry, prose and plays and had a popular column for the Chicago Defender. Hughes was a literary giant, always faithful to his belief that "most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been." In 1960, the NAACP awarded Hughes the Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievement by a black American, calling him the "poet laureate of the Negro race."
King in the Wilderness
From award-winning director/producer Peter Kunhardt, King in the Wilderness follows Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the volatile last three years of his life, from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to his assassination in April 1968. Drawing on revelatory stories from his inner circle of friends, the film provides a clear window into the civil rights leader’s character, showing him to be a man with an unshakeable commitment to peaceful protest in the face of an increasingly unstable country