African-American Studies

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.

Chronicles one season in the life of the Morningside High School basketball team, the defending California state champs, whose school is situated in a crime-ridden L.A. neighborhood.

Part of the Who Built America? series, this video tells the vivid tale of the African-American exodus from the rural South to northern industrial cities during World War I.

This video features a fugitive woman slave describing life, work, and day-to-day resistance to slavery on a North Carolina cotton plantation during the 1840s and 1850s.

Examines Pulaski, Tennessee, the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded right after the Civil War, and where today its memory still runs very deep.

Examines the Anti-Apartheid Movement at the University of California at Berkeley during 1985-86, which led to similar student protests nationwide.

This docudrama explores the little known situation of African slaves in Latin America in the 19th century, depicting life in runaway slave communities.

Filmed at the Harlem Fall Mobilization March in 1967, this video lets people in the streets, as well as black Vietnam vets, speak out about social protest, life in New York's black ghetto, and the connection between racism and war.

Dramatizes a real-life incident involving a fight between two high school girls--one white, one black-and then traces in parallel fashion the response of the two families to the incident, revealing the real feelings underlying racial tensions as well as the existence of common interests.

A contemporary portrait of the small southern town where, in June 1964, three young civil rights workers were murdered for registering blacks to vote. In the thirty years since, Philadelphia, Mississippi has retained its infamous reputation as a racist backwater.

Features the musical traditions and verbal recollections of eight retired African-American railroad track laborers, whose occupational folk songs were once heard along the railroad lines that crisscross the South.

Examines the experience of black students on predominantly white college campuses and how they cope with feelings of alienation, frustration, and discrimination.