Catalog Search Results
Visit the Civil Rights Room
The Civil Rights Room is a space for education and exploration of NPL's Civil Rights Collection. The materials exhibited here capture the drama of a time when thousands of African-American citizens in Nashville sparked a nonviolent challenge to racial segregation in the city and across the South.
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In 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a military-grade explosive on a residential building to end a standoff with Black liberation group MOVE, setting a new standard for institutionalized violence and the dehumanization of Black bodies. 11 people, including 5 children were killed. TARGET: PHILADELPHIA explores the rise of police militarization within the parallel contexts of Black nationalism and the systemic disenfranchisement that incubates movements...
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Chronicling the history and personal experiences of African Americans on the road from the advent of the automobile through the seismic changes of the 1960s and beyond – Driving While Black explores the background of a phrase rooted in realities that have been a part of the African American experience for hundreds of years – told in part through the stories of the people who lived through it.
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Post-Hiroshima, the US Army engaged in classified open-air studies on the effects of aerosol radiation. Low-income African-Americans in St. Louis were the unwitting subjects of that testing, by design. TARGET: ST. LOUIS investigates historical catalysts for these events, tracing firsthand accounts and questions from survivors to subsequent Federal legislation requiring informed consent by human subjects. Official Selection at **Los Angeles Cinefest**...
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In 1877, the Ponca people were exiled from their Nebraska homeland to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. To honor his dying son's last wish to be buried in his homeland, Chief Standing Bear set off on a grueling, six-hundred-mile journey home. Captured en-route, Standing Bear sued a famous U.S. army general for his freedom--choosing to fight injustice not with weapons, but with words. The Chief stood before the court to prove that an Indian...
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When the horrific murder of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 sparks a national reckoning around the meaning of the Confederate flag, battle lines are drawn in Mississippi to determine the fate of the last state flag with the most powerful and divisive symbol of the Confederacy. In Look Away, Look Away, director Patrick O’Connor introduces us to an array of activists from both sides of the debate over Confederate symbols,...
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"In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy-and explores why some of this country's oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who...
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A chronicle of the struggles and triumphs of the African-American and Latino players who followed Jackie Robinson into white professional baseball. Playing their minor-league ball in small, remote towns where racial segregation remained a fact of life well into the 1960s, these were the men who, before they could live their big-league dreams, first had to beat Jim Crow. "*González helps shatter the myth that baseball was an inviting place once [Jackie]...
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What is it like to be Black in predominantly white "small-town America"? Through a series of interviews, Crossroads Stories uncovers how six Columbus, IN natives feel navigating life as Black Americans in their hometown. Al Tucker, John Bundick, Celeste Nudi, Nia Omega, Ridge Harris, and Alfonso Wadholm each share anecdotes that are woven together to tell an overarching story. Through an emotional yet hopeful exposition, these Black community members...
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This documentary was the first film to explore Frantz Fanon, the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, *Black Skin, White Masks* and *The Wretched of the Earth*, were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer. This innovative film biography restores Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions around post-colonial identity....
30) Father's Kingdom
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This is the untold story of a remarkable American civil rights pioneer, Father Divine, who at one time had over a million followers worldwide but whose story is little known because he claimed that he was God incarnate. Nominated for Best Documentary at the **Cleveland International Film Festival**.
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This adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi's "Stamped From the Beginning" explores the history of racist ideas in America by examining the lives of notable historical figures, from Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis. Discusses how racist ideas spread and how they are also discredited.
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"Winner of the 2017 Asian American International Film Festival Audience Choice Award, Documentary, PROOF OF LOYALTY: KAZUO YAMANE AND THE NISEI SOLDIERS OF HAWAII tells the story of a Japanese American who played a crucial strategic role in World War II. He and his fellow Nisei from Hawaii combatted prejudice and discrimination to loyally serve their country. Their extraordinary service, mostly untold, ultimately changed the course of U.S. history....
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Bram Dijkstra's new book, ten years in work, is a stunning inquiry into the idea of woman as seductress: how, in many areas of twentieth-century high and popular culture, the female came to be portrayed as a regressive, primitive force whose sexuality could destroy the social order, undermining the supremacy of the white male -- and shows the devastating historical effects of this portrayal. Dijkstra begins his analysis with the 1915 silent film A...
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A unique tour through the South reveals the power of place-based learning in understand the Civil Rights Movement. Does the arc of history truly bend towards justice? And what does justice mean, when the problems of our past are only a grandparent away? How can we heal as a nation without honestly engaging with our history? THE ROAD TO JUSTICE follows two groups on a civil rights tour through the American South as they reckon with the country’s...
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The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords is the first film to chronicle the history of the Black press, including its central role in the construction of modern African American identity. It recounts the largely forgotten stories of generations of Black journalists who risked life and livelihood so African Americans could represent themselves in their own words and images. The Black Press takes viewers "behind the veil" of segregation to recover a...
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Winner of the Best Documentary at the Harlem International Film Festival 2021 and Best Documentary Feature at the National Black Film Festival 2021. Mamie Lang Kirkland was seven years old when she fled Ellisville, Mississippi in 1915 with her mother and siblings as her father and his friend, John Hartfield, escaped an approaching lynch mob. John Hartfield returned to Mississippi in 1919 and was killed in one of the most horrific lynchings of the...
37) Banished
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From 1860 to 1920 hundreds of US counties expelled all of their African American inhabitants. "Banished" visits three of these still all white towns today. Meanwhile the descendants of those displaced and disinherited seek redress. Banished vividly recovers the too-quickly forgotten history of racial cleansing in America when thousands of African Americans were driven from their homes and communities by violent, racist mobs. The film places these...
In Interlibrary Loan
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