African-American Studies

This video presents the mission and practice of American midwives, explaining the benefits and advantages of natural childbirth through interviews with midwives and childbirth educators, the testimonies of new mothers, footage and photos of actual births, and many touching stories.

This video documents the Million Woman March in Philadelphia on October 25, 1997, when black women from all over America gathered to demonstrate their concerns for Black America and to express their sense of unity as a movement that can play an influential role in American society.

In this video, artist and art educator Betty LaDuke presents the lives and work of three American women artists of diverse heritages—Lois Mailou Jones, Mine Okubo, and Pablita Velarde.

This video profiles Frederick Brown, one of America’s most prolific expressionist painters, whose Soho loft studio in New York served as a gathering place for artists, musicians, writers, dancers and other creative personalities during the Sixties and Seventies.

This entertaining documentary features a variety of African-American poets from all over America, who have gathered to perform at Kafe Kuumba in Indianapolis, a local cultural center sponsored by the Midtown Writers Association.

Profiles the history of blacks in Canada and pays tribute to civil rights activists who struggled to change the country's discriminatory laws. Focusing on the 1930s to the 1950s, the video weaves personal stories of these African-Canadians into a broader chronicle of the hardships and victories of their struggle for civil rights, one which closely parallels that of kindred spirits in the U.S. during the same period.

Examines the training of young African Americans at the Health Professions Department at Morehouse College, the only all-black male college in America.

During the Sixties and early Seventies, banks, insurance companies, the City of New York, and many landlords drew a red-line around the Bronx and abandoned its neighborhoods. More than 12,000 fires burned each year, 300,000 people fled, and in the South Bronx 40% of the homes were destroyed.

An offbeat documentary portrait of Lily Dale, New York, one of America's oldest spiritualist communities, where just about everyone is a psychic or a medium who claims to be able to communicate with the dead. The video includes interviews with several mediums in Lily Dale and shows them as they give private readings, perform public healings, and take part in outdoor services where they receive messages "from the spirit side of life."

This video explores the issue of racial identity among Native Americans and African Americans, and the coalescence of these two groups in American history.

In the 1930s Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the U.S. faced an uncertain future. Confronted with anti-Semitism at American universities and a public distrust of foreigners, many sought refuge in an unlikely place-traditionally black colleges in the segregated South.

This historical documentary uses Civil War re-enactments, historical footage, photos and contemporary interviews to explore a controversial event in American and African- American Civil War history.