Black History Month: Films on Demand

Commencing with the origins of slavery in Africa, the series moves through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to the present -- when America is led by a black president, yet remains a nation deeply divided by race. By highlighting the tragedies, triumphs, and contradictions of the black experience, the series reveals to viewers that the African-American community has never been a uniform entity, and that its members have been actively debating their differences from their first days in this country. Throughout the course of the series, viewers will see that the road to freedom for black people in America has not been linear, but more like the course of a river, full of loops and eddies, slowing, and occasionally reversing the current of progress.

Filmed on the set of Two Trains Running, one of America’s leading playwrights traces his work back to a troubled childhood in a Pittsburgh ghetto. His ongoing project to write a play on African American life set in each decade of the 20th century is one of the most ambitious endeavors in American theatrical history.

In the last year of his life, Dr. King announced the Poor People’s Campaign to demand an “economic bill of rights” for all Americans, regardless of color. But nearly a half-century later, that dream is still a dream deferred. In this edition of Moyers & Company, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch and author and theologian James Cone join Bill to discuss Dr. King’s vision of economic justice…and why so little has changed for America’s most oppressed. Also on the show, poet Kyle Dargan, whose poetry provides a window into the humanity that Branch and Cone say is essential to get people working towards justice, visits Bill to talk about and read from his work. Broadcast date: April 5, 2013. (57 minutes)

For 20 years, during wartime and the Depression, Marshall had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles through the Jim Crow South of the United States, fighting segregation case by case, establishing precedent after precedent, all leading up to one of the most important legal decisions in American history. Along the way, he escaped the gun of a Dallas sheriff, was pursued by the Ku Klux Klan on Long Island, hid in bushes from a violent mob in Detroit, and even survived his own lynching. In this impossible environment, Thurgood Marshall won more Supreme Court cases than any lawyer in American history, and set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Marshall, who went on to become the first black Supreme Court justice in 1967, made the work of civil rights pioneers like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks possible, by laying the groundwork to end legal segregation and changing the American legal landscape.

Distributed by PBS Distribution.

The film uses the March 3, 1970, incident at Lamar High School in Lamar, South Carolina, where a group of white parents rioted against desegregation, as a backdrop for the discussion. From the National Archives and Records Administration. (23 minutes)