Movies: Civil rights

A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany after settling there in 1973....

A little girl leaves home with her pet dog and rabbit to escape abuse and find the ocean in the hopes of feeling closer to her father who has passed away....

Mississippi in the early '60s is the setting for this story of a 12-year-old African-American girl who, along with her white friends, tries to ease increasing racial tensions....

Chronicles the Mississippi voter registration drive from 1961-1964....

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Documentary about the final five, turbulent years in the life of civil rights activist Martin Luther King. The story begins at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, when a 34-year-old preacher galvanized millions with his dream for an America free of ...

On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters...

When Georgia Tech came to Michigan in 1934, the Wolverines were forced to bench their best play, Willis Ward, because he was an African-American. The incident infuriated Ward’s best friend on the team, a future president by the name of Jerry Ford, wh...

An archival documentary about the U.S. military’s response to the political and racial injustices of the late 1960s: take a military base, build a mock inner-city set, cast soldiers to play rioters, burn the place down, and film it all....

The Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the May events in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the Prague Spring, the Chicago riots, the Mexico Summer Olympics, the presidential election...

50 years on, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is the oldest continuing protest occupation site in the world. Taking a fresh lens this is a bold dive into a year of protest and revolutionary change for First Nations people....

From his Memphis studio, Ernest Withers’ nearly 2 million images were a treasured record of Black history but his legacy was complicated by decades of secret FBI service revealed only after his death. Was he a friend of the civil rights community, or...

Weaving together the voices of women entangled in the criminal justice system, along with leading scholars on prison abolition, this film provides a critical analysis of the disfunctionality and violence of the prison system....

In this open-letter style documentary, Ruby Dee & Ossie Davis' rich lives guide their grandson on his personal quest to master lasting love, conscious art, and undying activism....

A documentary on funk and P-funk and the bands and artists that made it all happen: James Brown, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Maurice White and his Earth Wind & Fire, Average White Band, Kool & The Gang and lots more. It tells the story...

The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington...

Using government documents, archive footage and direct interviews with activists and former FBI/CIA officers, All Power to the People documents the history of race relations and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the 1960s and 70s....

The real dream of the American pastor Martin Luther King was never limited to civil rights. He hoped for a just America, where poverty would no longer have a place. Social equality was for him the only guarantee of a true emancipation. During the las...

The story of four pioneering lesbian politicians and the battles they fought to pass a wide range of anti-discrimination laws....

The moment where American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved hands in defiance on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics is one of the most memorable images in sports history. But there is a third man in the photo, the wh...