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List of Documentary Films by Suggested Topics
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Documentary Films by Suggested Topics

We do not currently have those movies in italics BUT would purchase or borrow them if you expressed intersest in using any one of them.

Session 1: Slavery (2 or more sessions)
Documentary: Slavery and the Making of America (4 x 55min, 2005)
And/or: Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters (95 min, 2005)
And/or: Unchained Memories: Slave Narratives (75 min, 2003)
And/or: Nat Turner: Troublesome Property (55 min, 2004)
And/or: Frederick Douglass Biography (55 min, 2005)
Feature: Amistad (155 min, 1997)
Or: Roots  (6 x 90 min, 1977)
Or: Beloved (172 min, 1998)

Session 2: Underground Railroad
Documentary: The Underground Railroad (95 min, 1999)
Feature: A Woman Called Moses (200 min, 1978)

Session 3: Reconstruction
Documentary: Reconstruction – The Second Civil War (2x90 min, 2004)
Feature: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (110 min, 1974)

Session 4: Lynching
Documentary: Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (53 min, 1989)
Feature: Rosewood (142 min, 1997)

Session 5: The Ku Klux Klan
Documentary: Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History (50 min, 2005)
And: An Unlikely Friendship  (30 min, 2004)
Feature: The Birth of a Nation (187 min, 1915)

Session 6: Living in the Jim Crow South
Documentary: Take me to Chicago (V.1 of The Promised Land) (90 min, 1995)
Feature: Once Upon a Time when We Were Colored (113 min, 1996)

Session 7: Going North / The Great Migration
Documentary: A Dream Deferred (V.2 of The Promised Land) (90 min, 1995)
Feature: Go Tell it on the Mountain (100min, 1985)

Session 8: Black Labor / Unions
Documentary: Struggles in Steel (58 min, 1996)
Or: Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle (58 min, 1983)
Feature: 10,000 Black Men Named George (95 min, 2002)

Session 9: Lawyers in the CRM
Documentary: Mississippi, America (60 min, 1995)
Feature: Separate but Equal (193 min, 1991)
Or: Ghosts of Mississippi (130 min, 1996)

Session 10: School Segregation / Brown vs Board of Education
Documentary: With all Deliberate Speed (120 min, 2004)
Or: The Road to Brown (56 min, 1990)
Or:Fighting Back (V.2 of Eyes on the Prize) (55 min, 1987)
Feature: Separate but Equal (193 min, 1991)

Session 11: Montgomery Bus Boycott
Documentary: Rosa Parks: Modern Day Heroine (2004)
Or: Awakenings (V.1 of Eyes on the Prize) (55 min, 1987)
Feature: The Long Walk Home (98 min, 1991)
Or: Boycott (113 min, 2002)

Session 12: Power Structures
Documentary: Eyes on the Prize excerpts (55 min, 1987)
Or: The Murder of Emmett Till (53 min, 2003)
Feature: Murder in Mississippi (95 min, 1989)

Or: For Us, the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers(1995)

Session 13: Local Leadership / Women in the Movement
Documentary: Standing on my Sisters Shoulders (60 min, 2002)
Feature: The Rosa Parks Story(97 min, 2002)
Or: Freedom Song (2000)

Session 14: Birmingham / Youth in the Movement
Documentary: 4 Little Girls (120 min, 1997)
Or: No Easy Walk (V.4 of Eyes on the Prize) (55 min, 1987)
Feature: Ruby Bridges (89 min, 1998)
Or: Selma, Lord, Selma (94 min, 1999)

Session 15: Mississippi Freedom Summer
Documentary: Freedom on my Mind (110 min, 1994)
Or: Mississippi: Is this America (V.5 of Eyes on the Prize) (55 min, 1987)
Feature: Freedom Song (115 min, 2000)

Session 16: Voting Rights Act
Documentary: Bridge to Freedom (V.6 of Eyes on the Prize) (55 min, 1987)
Feature: Selma, Lord, Selma (94 min, 1999)

Session 17: Voter Registration
Documentary: Voting in America (ca 60 min, 2004)
Feature: Iron Jawed Angels (124 min, 2004)

Session 18: Non-violence
Documentary: A Force More Powerful (6 x 30 min, 2000)
Feature: Gandhi (188 min, 1982)
Or: Freedom Song (115 min, 2000)

Session 19: Armed Resistance
Documentary: Negroes with Guns: Robert F. Williams and Black Power (53 min, 2005)
Feature: Deacons for Defense (99 min, 2003)

Session 20: Malcolm X
Documentary: Malcolm X: Make it Plain (145 min, 1994)
Or: Malcolm X Biography (60 min, 1987)
Feature: Malcolm X (201 min, 1992)

Session 21: Black Power/ Black Panther Party
Documentary: All Power to the People (115 min, 1995)
Feature: A Huey P. Newton Story (86 min, 2001)

Session 22: FBI / COINTELPRO
Documentary: The FBI’s War on Black America (50 min, 1989)
Feature: The Spook Who Sat by the Door (102 min, 2004)

Session 23: Arts and Protest : Songs
Documentary: We Shall Overcome (58 min, 1990)
Or: Paul Robeson: The Tallest Tree in our Forrest (117 min, 1977)
Feature: Paul Robeson (?min, 2005)

Session 24: Billie Holiday and the power of a song
Documentary: Strange Fruit (57 min, 2002)
Feature: Lady Sings the Blues (143 min, 1972)

Session 25: Harlem Renaissance
Documentary: Harlem Renaissance: The Music and Rhythms that Started a Cultural Revolution (75 min, 2004)
Feature: Brother to Brother (2004, 90 min)

Session 26: Pop and Protest
Documentary: Get up Stand up: The Story of Pop and Protest (120 min, 2005)
Feature: Bound for Glory (146 min, 1976)

Session 27: Arts and Protest: Theater
Documentary: Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (114 min, 1978)
Feature: The Cradle Will Rock (134 min, 1999)

Session 28: Antiwar Movement
Documentary: The War at Home (100 min, 1979)
Feature: Born on the 4th of July (145min, 1989)

Session 29: SDS - Students for a Democratic Society
Documentary: Rebels with a Cause (109 min, 2000)
Feature: Medium Cool (110 min, 1969)
Or: Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 (117 min, 1987)

Session 30: Counterculture / Free Speech Movement
Documentary: Berkeley in the Sixties (117 min, 1990)
Feature: Alice’s Restaurant (111 min, 1996)

Session 31: Red Scare and Blacklist
Documentary: Scandalize my Name: Stories from the Blacklist (54 min, 2004)
Feature: The Front (95 min, 1976)

Session 32: The Sixties
Documentary: The Sixties – The Years That Shaped a Generation (115 min, 2005)
Feature: The Return of the Secaucus Seven (107 min, 1980)

Session 33: Bayard Rustin and Gay Rights
Documentary: Brother Outsider (83 min, 2002, CA Newsreel)
Feature: Boycott (113 min, 2002)

Session 34: Labor Organizing
Documentary: The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm workers’ Struggle (116 min, 1996)
Feature: Bread and Roses (105 min, 2000)
Or: Salt of the Earth (94 min, 1954)

Session 35: The Concept of Race / Racism
Documentary: Race: The Power of an Illusion (3 x 55 min, 2003)
Feature: Crash (113 min, 2005)

Session 36: Intersection of Civil Rights and Education
Documentary: You Got to Move (87 min, 1985)
Or: With all Deliberate Speed (120 min, 2004)
Feature: Walkout (115 min, 2006)

Session 37: Black Military History
Documentary: Benjamin Davis and the Tuskegee Airmen (30 min) and The 54th Massachusetts (25min)
Or: A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day (2007, 55 min)
Feature: The Tuskegee Airmen (106 min, 1995)

Session 38: Women’s Suffrage Movement
Documentary: Susan B. Anthony (45min)
Feature: Iron Jawed Angels (124 min, 2004)

 

 Civil Rights Movement through Feature Films


10,000 Black Men Named George (95 min, 2002)

First black labor union: A. Phillip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

Separate but Equal (193 min, 1991)

Brown v Board of Education (1954): Fight in the courts to end segregation in schools

The Vernon Johns Story: The Road to Freedom (1994, 92 min)
Dr King’s predecessor in Montgomery, paving the way

Boycott (113 min, 2002)

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956)

Freedom Song (2000) Growing up in Mississippi and civil rights organizing with SNCC (1961-1963)

Murder in Mississippi (95 min, 1989)Civil rights organizing in Mississippi, and murder of three civil rights workers (1964)
Deacons for Defense (99 min, 2003)
Black men in Louisiana arm themselves in defense against the violence of the Ku Klux Klan (1964)

Selma, Lord, Selma (94 min, 1999)
Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery to ask for voting rights is brutally repressed (1965)

Walkout (115 min, 2006)
Mexican-American high school students in LA stage a walkout to protest their treatment (1968)