African Americans and the Arts (2024 Theme)
"In the fields of visual and performing arts, literature, fashion, folklore, language, film, music, architecture, culinary and other forms of cultural expression, the African American influence has been paramount. African American artists have used art to preserve history and community memory as well as for empowerment. Artistic and cultural movements such as the New Negro, Black Arts, Black Renaissance, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism, have been led by people of African descent and set the standard for popular trends around the world. In 2024, we examine the varied history and life of African American arts and artisans."
Music and Musicians
- Ragtime and Jazz
- Blues and Soul
- Rap and Hip-Hop
An Autobiography of Black JazzBlack singers, musicians, comedians, and performers reminisce about their lives and careers, their fellow entertainers, and famous jazz clubs
- Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies
Black Music Matters: Jazz and the Transformation of Music Studies is among the first books to examine music studies reform through the lens of African American music, as well as the emergent field of consciousness studies. It is inspired by conversations on race and a rich body of literature on the place of black music in American culture.
From her stage debut in 1922 to her final professional appearance in 1996, Elisabeth Welch was an important figure in the world of popular song. In 1923 she launched the Charleston and throughout the Jazz Age, she was associated with some of the great names of the Harlem Renaissance, including Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, and Ethel Waters. n Elisabeth Welch: Soft Lights and Sweet Music, author Stephen Bourne celebrates the stage, screen, and radio career of this sophisticated African American actress and singer, who always defied categorization. Spanning almost a century of popular music, she did not fit the definition of jazz, torch, pop or ballad singer but defined her art quite simply as "telling a story in song."
In 1919, the world stood at the threshold of the Jazz Age. The man who had ushered it there, however, lay murdered--and would soon plunge from international fame to historical obscurity. It was a fate few would have predicted for James Reese Europe; he was then at the pinnacle of his career as a composer, conductor, and organizer in the black community, with the promise of even greater heights to come. James Reese Europe is one of the important transitional figures in American music. As a composer at the height of ragtime, he had a strong influence on the first generation of jazz musicians who were to follow. Europe's life reveals much about the role of black musicians in American culture in a period when it was presumed they had little place.
Music Is My Life is the first comprehensive analysis of Louis Armstrong's autobiographical writings (including his books, essays, and letters) and their relation to his musical and visual performances. Combining approaches from autobiography theory, literary criticism, intermedia studies, cultural history, and musicology, Daniel Stein reconstructs Armstrong's performances of his life story across various media and for different audiences, complicating the monolithic and hagiographic views of the musician. The book will appeal to academic readers with an interest in African American studies, jazz studies, musicology, and popular culture, as well as general readers interested in Armstrong's life and music, jazz, and twentieth-century entertainment.
The authors of this volume present Beale street as a living microcosm of determination, survival, and change -- from its early days as a raucous haven for gamblers and grafters and as a black show business center to its present-day languishing. The book is presented in two parts; a well researched history that is richly complemented by the rare, extensive interviews that constitute the second half of the volume.
- Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith -- published here in their entirety for the first time -- Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a consciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory.
Nelson George's chronicle of Motown Records' rise and fall remains a classic account of an essential American music company and its dynamic founder Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy's uncanny instinct for finding extraordinary talent--from performers and musicians to songwriters and producers—packed the label's roster with a who's who of historic artists and hitmakers. Here is the story of the Supremes and superstar Diana Ross, of the towering solo acts Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, of vocal groups led by the Temptations and Four Tops, of the phenomenal Jackson Five and Michael Jackson, and of singer/songwriter and Motown executive Smokey Robinson. Up front about Gordy's manipulative and complex relationships with his artists, George reveals the inner workings of how Motown conducted its business.
Portrays America's foremost blues singer, from his Mississippi sharecropper boyhood to the sixties' worldwide recognition of "Blues Boy" King, with many illustrations documenting the history of the blues.
In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death, and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. Drawing from these interviews, Gaye's life is recounted in his own words and the words of those who knew him best: his family, friends, and colleagues. What emerges is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul. Here is Marvin's story from his early years in the slums of Washington, D.C., to is rise to the top of the Motown industry, his fall from grace, his comeback, and finally his sudden, shocking end at the hands of his own father. The definitive biography of an enormously gifted and sensitive man, Divided Soul takes us deep into the life and music of one of America's most passionate--and most troubled--composers and singers.
Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg's remarkable, highly acclaimed, and genre-defying screenplay and is widely considered to be one of the foremost books on Robert Johnson's life and legacy and an extraordinary exercise in American mythmaking.
Briefly portrays the life of the influential blues singer, Ma Rainey, discusses the development of her music, and analyzes the theme of love in her music.
Rap has emerged as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time. In this work, the editors demonstrate that rap is also a wide reaching and vital poetic tradition born of beats and rhymes. This pioneering anthology brings together more than three hundred lyrics written over thirty years, from the "old school" to the "golden age" to the present day.
Examining rap history's most memorable lyricists and their inimitable techniques, literary scholar Adam Bradley argues that we must understand rap as poetry or miss the vanguard of poetry today. Book of Rhymes explores America's least understood poets, unpacking their surprisingly complex craft, and according rap poetry the respect it deserves.
Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created. Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture.
Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time. In Decoded, Jay-Z writes a combination of autobiography and analysis of his own lyrics.
- Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity
This is the first book to discuss in detail how rap music is put together musically. Whereas a great deal of popular music scholarship dismisses music analysis as irrelevant or of limited value, the present book argues that it can be crucial to cultural theory. It is unique for bringing together perspectives from music theory, musicology, cultural studies, critical theory, and communications. It is also the first scholarly book to discuss rap music in Holland, and the rap of Cree Natives in Canada, in addition to such mainstream artists as Ice Cube.
This newly expanded and revised second edition of That's the Joint! brings together the most important and up-to-date hip-hop scholarship in one comprehensive volume. With pedagogical features including author biographies, headnotes summarizing key points of articles, and discussion questions, That's the Joint! is essential reading for anyone seeking deeper understanding of the profound impact of hip-hop as an intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural movement.
In 1996 Tupac Shakur, one of the most talented artists of his time, was murdered by an unknown gunman. Fred L. Johnson and Tayannah Lee McQuillar examine the theories surrounding his death and the story of Tupac's lost legacy in this definitive biography.
Streaming Media
Ashanti has graced the cover of nearly every major magazine and won numerous awards for writing and performing her own music. She has certainly come a long way since performing in the living room in front of her family. Take a ride with us as we explore the life of Ashanti-how she found music, and how music found her.
Traveling through four continents and six countries, The Furious Force of Rhymes is a fascinating look at Hip-Hop as trans-national protest music. Over the course of the eighty-four-minute voyage, the viewer encounters characters as diverse as Israeli Jews, marginalized French Arabs, East German skinhead punks and West African feminists, all of whom share a common musical language. Originating from the ghettos of New York, Rap has found adherents in every country in the world. Recognizing themselves in the oppression of U.S. Blacks, people everywhere have adapted the American street music to their own causes.
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
A look at the conceptualization of masculinity in hip-hop culture. Includes interviews with prominent rappers, music industry executives, and social critics.
In a hip-hop and r&b world dominated by men and noted for misogyny, the unstoppable female lyricists of SAY MY NAME speak candidly about class, race, and gender in pursuing their passions as female emcees. This worldwide documentary takes viewers on [a] vibrant tour of urban culture[s] and musical movement[s], from hip hop's birthplace in the Bronx, to grime on London's Eastside and all points Philly, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, and L.A. in between. From emerging artists filled with new creativity, to true pioneers like MC Lyte, Roxanne Shante, and Monie Love, these are women turning adversity into art
VH1's And You Don't Stop: 30 Years of Hip-Hop
And You Don't Stop: 30 Years of Hip-Hop is a five-part documentary series directed by Richard Lowe and Dana Heinz Perry, written by Bill Adler, and released by VH1 in 2004. The series recounts the development of hip hop culture from its birth in New York City in the 1970s through its flowering into a global phenomenon in the 21st Century.
Literature
- Antebellum Authors
- Harlem Renaissance
- Black Arts Movement
- Afrofuturism and Contemporary Authors
- Complete Writings of Phillis Wheatley
The extraordinary writings of Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl turned published poet. In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave.This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions--including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country's condition to her own. With her contemplative elegies and her use of the poetic imagination to escape an unsatisfactory world, Wheatley anticipated the Romantic Movement of the following century.
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Published in 1845, this autobiography powerfully details the life of the internationally famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838 - how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die.
- The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells
Published for the first time in its entirety, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells tracks the young Ida through her transition from schoolteacher to a fearless crusader against lynching in the late 19th century. This unique document provides rare insight into the lives of 19th-century African-American women.
- Maria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer
In gathering and introducing Stewart's works, Richardson provides an opportunity for readers to study the thoughts and words of this influential early black female activist, a forerunner to Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and the first black American to lecture in defense of women's rights, placing her in the context of the swirling abolitionist movement.
- The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.
This self-described meditation on the life of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes addresses the possible, possibly imagined, life of the author as a gay man. Both documentary and fantasy, it blends archival footage with black and white paeans to a life that might have been--a Harlem nightclub from the 1920s, a London nightspot from the late eighties, various dream sequences--foregrounding gay sexual desire, constructed of a mélange of materials. Looking for Langston is not a mainstream film, but a short film, an avant-garde film, a gay film, and a black British film.
Color (1925) is a collection of poems by Countee Cullen. Published the same year Cullen entered Harvard to pursue a masters in English, Color was a brilliant debut by a poet who had already gained a reputation as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Deeply personal and attuned to poetic tradition, Cullen’s verses capture the spirit of creative inquiry that defined a generation of writers, musicians, painters, and intellectuals while changing the course of American history itself.
"Comedy: American Style, " Jessie Redmon Fauset's fourth and final novel, recounts the tragic tale of a family's destruction. The story of a mother who denies her clan its heritage. Originally published in 1933, this intense narrative stands the test of time and continues to raise compelling, disturbing, and still contemporary themes of color prejudice and racial self-hatred.
- The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen
Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.
Claude McKay (1889-1948) was one of the most prolific and sophisticated African American writers of the early twentieth century. A Jamaican-born author of poetry, short stories, novels, and nonfiction, McKay has often been associated with the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American art, culture, and intellectualism between World War I and the Great Depression.
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Intended to cut clean through the oppression imposed upon the mainstream by society's "intellectual superstructure," this collection of revolutionary essays by literary and cultural legend Amiri Baraka raises numerous issues concerning contemporary African American life. The socially conscious will appreciate the creative analyses and stimulating critiques on display here, buoyed by Baraka's distinctive, bold, and aggressive opinions about the ways our culture bestows ignorance upon the ignorant merely to exploit them.
Collected poems that serve as a companion to Giovanni's 1997 Love Poems. That book--romantic, bold, and erotic--expressed notions of love in ways that were delightfully unexpected. In the years that followed, Giovanni experienced losses both public and private. A mother's passing, a sister's, too. A massacre on the campus at which she teaches. And just when it seemed life was spinning out of control, Giovanni rediscovered love--what she calls the antidote. Here romantic love--and all its manifestations, the physical touch, the emotional pull, the hungry heart--is distilled as never before by one of our most talented poets.
This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach "exploding in the universe," the "blue hallelujahs" of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta "thundering out of the earth." Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning. There are intimate verses here for family and friends, verses of profound loss and silence, of courage and resilience.
The first oral history to fully explore the contributions of black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance reclaims a vital yet under-researched chapter in African American, women's, and theater history
In California in the year 2025, a small community is overrun by desperate scavengers, as an eighteen-year-old African American woman sets off on foot on a perilous journey northward.
In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history.and more!
Experience the rich imagination and genre-defying writing of multiple-award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson with this special volume, which includes both her epic novel spanning time and place, and her first collection of short fiction. When an Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love is manifested on a nineteenth-century Caribbean island, she explores her newfound powers by traveling through time and space, inhabiting a midwife, a mixed-race Parisian dancer, and an enslaved prostitute in ancient Alexandria. With works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, this story collection illustrates why Hopkinson received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Entertaining, challenging, and alluring, Skin Folk is not to be missed.
- Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, works hard to earn a degree from Oxford and becomes an investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class. Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative and fast-moving form that borrows from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that reminds us of everything that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart
Dance and Dancers
- Dance History and Style
- Famous Dancers
- African-American Concert Dance
African-American Concert Dance significantly advances the study of pioneering black dancers by providing valuable biographical and historical information on a group of artists who worked during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to legitimize black dance as a serious art form. John O. Perpener sets these seminal artists and their innovations in the contexts of African-American culture and American modern dance and explores their creative synthesis of material from European-American, African-American, Caribbean, and African sources.Perpener begins with Hemsley Winfield, a versatile performer and director whose company, the New Negro Art Theatre, launched the careers of Edna Guy, Randolph Sawyer, and Ollie Burgoyne, among many others.
This pictorial history of African American dance traces its roots back to slavery and lists its characteristics. The photographs offer compelling glimpses into the world of slavery, minstrel show, the honky-tonk, the vaudeville stage, dance halls, nightclubs, movies, and more. Most images are culled from hundreds of rare items in the author's collection of black dance memorabilia.
The American Dance Festival's Dancing in the Light: Six Dances by African-American Choreographers
The American Dance Festival presents Dancing in the Light presents a one-hour modern dance television program showcasing 6 historic dance compositions by African American choreographers. All of the dances were originally recorded for the Emmy Award-winning series Free to Dance, a three-hour documentary that aired on PBS in 2001 as part of the Great Performances: Dance in America series. Dancing in the Light features six dances in their entirety or in the case of one work, a complete section.
What is the essence of "black" dance in America, and what is the black dancing body? To answer these questions, Brenda Dixon Gottschild charts an unorthodox history by mapping the geography of the black dancing body and showing its central place in our culture. From feet to buttocks, hair, skin, face and beyond to soul and spirit, the author explores the endeavors, ordeals and triumphs of this body with some of the major dancers and choreographers of our time.
Film produced from dance productions of the Black American Dance Festival, April 21-24, 1983, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The film includes major contemporary Black dancers and dance companies in the context of a historical survey which indicates the African and Caribbean heritage upon which Black American dance is based.
An intimate, completely fresh portrayal of inner city youth who have created art where before there was none. Surrounded by drug addiction, gangs and impoverishment, they have developed a unique style of dance that evolves on a daily basis.
Iconic ballerina Misty Copeland made history when she became the first African-American woman to be named principal dancer of the legendary American Ballet Theater. Get the incredible, behind-the-scenes story of how she overcame outmoded ballet culture stereotypes and near career-ending injuries to become one of the most revered dancers of her generation.
Pearl Primus (1919-1994) blazed onto the dance scene in 1943 with stunning works that incorporated social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. In The Dance Claimed Me, Peggy and Murray Schwartz, friends and colleagues of Primus, offer an intimate perspective on her life and explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. They trace Primus's path from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was "Dance is a weapon"), and a pioneer in dance anthropology.
Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure. Her commanding physical presence, elegant manner, and extraordinary technique have made her not only a true superstar of American dance and an historic innovator in her field, but also a beacon of inspiration to African-Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Dancing Spirit presents this phenomenal woman's story in her own direct and uncompromising voice. Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance, and whose life and career are a monument to her passion, her pride, and her vision.
- Josephine Baker in Art and Life
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world. Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker s life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced.
Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in Los Angeles, soared high over the color line as the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. Night's Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet.
The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.
Films by Black Directors
- Black Women Directors
- Horror Films
- Coming of Age Films
- Set in NYC or LA
- Historical or Based on a True Story
Directed by Dee Rees. Focuses on Bessie Smith's transformation from a struggling young singer into 'The Empress of the Blues',
Directed by Julie Dash. At the dawn of the 20th century, a multi-generational family in the Gullah community on the Sea Islands off of South Carolina - former West African slaves who adopted many of their ancestors - Yoruba traditions - struggle to maintain their cultural heritage and folklore while contemplating a migration to the mainland, even further from their roots.
Directed by Kasi Lemmons and Samuel L. Jackson. Roz Batiste is a beautiful and dedicated mother of three, who is forced to admit that her family is falling apart due to her philandering husband Louis.
Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
Directed by Leslie Harris. A black teenage girl living in Brooklyn dreams of medical school, a family, and an escape from the generational poverty of the inner city. Her dreams are put on hold when she becomes pregnant by her boyfriend.
Directed by Kathleen Collins. The story of a marriage at a crossroads.
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. "From the playground to the pro leagues, Monica and Quincy taught each other how to play the game. Now, their commitment to the sport will force them to make a choice between each other and the game ... between family and team ... between Love and Basketball"--Container.
Directed by Tanya Hamilton. In 1976, complex political and emotional forces are set in motion when a young man returns to the race-torn Philadelphia neighborhood where he came of age during the Black Power movement.
Directed by Dee Rees. Alike is a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents and younger sister in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. She has a flair for poetry, and is a good student at her local high school. Alike is quietly but firmly embracing her identity as a lesbian.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historical struggle to secure voting rights for all people. A dangerous and terrifying campaign that culminated with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1964.
Directed by Cheryl Dunye. Twenty-something black lesbian working as a clerk in a video store is struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, an obscure black actress from the 1930's.
Directed by Jordan Peele. A Black man discovers a sinister conspiracy while visiting his white girlfriend's family.
Directed by Jordan Peele. Two siblings who run a California horse ranch discover something wonderful and sinister in the skies above, and the owner of an adjacent theme park tries to profit from the mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon.
Directed by Boots Riley. A black telemarketer reaps professional success after adopting a "white voice," but soon begins to examine his conscience.
Directed by John Singleton. Three friends struggle to survive in South Central Los Angeles where friendship, pain, danger and love form a true picture of life in "the hood."
Directed by Michael Schultz. Fun-loving and warm movie about high school life in the 1960's. Preach, a serious-minded writer and Cochise, a basketball hero headed for college, are best friends at Cooley High in Chicago.
Directed by Denzel Washington. Based on August Wilson's play about a Black garbage collector who--bitter that baseball's color barrier was only broken after his own heyday in the Negro Leagues--is prone to taking out his frustrations on his loved ones.
Directed by Carl Franklin. Adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel about a WWII vet who is trapped in a web of intrigue when he agrees to look for a politician's girlfriend.
Directed by Spike Lee. Racial tensions grow in a Brooklyn neighborhood on the hottest day of the summer.
Directed by Robert Townsend. Comedy about Bobby Taylor, a young black actor trying to get a foothold in Hollywood but running into problems of stereotyping at every turn.
Directed by Barry Jenkins. A timeless love story set in early 1970s Harlem, based on a novel by James Baldwin.
Directed by Charles Burnett. A realistic portrait of a black, urban Los Angeles community. Stan, a slaughterhouse worker, struggles to provide for his family, love his wife, and maintain responsibility to his community.
Directed by Gordon Parks. Detective John Shaft is hired by a Harlem mobster to find his kidnapped teenage daughter and finds himself up against some Mafia chieftains who want to take over a chunk of the black underworld's uptown territory.
Directed by Gordon Parks Jr. Priest is a cocaine dealer who is just smart enough to know that there's no real future in dealing co*ke, and makes a proposal to his partner Eddie that would leave them with a million dollar profit each.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles. A young hustler's aimless pleasure-seeking turns to radicalism after witnessing the beating of a black revolutionary by two white cops.
Directed by Ryan Coogler. Drama centered on the tragic shooting of Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), a vibrant 22-year-old Bay Area father who was senselessly gunned down by BART officers on New Year' Day in 2009, and whose murder sent shockwaves through the nation after being captured on camera by his fellow passengers.
Directed by Ezra Edelman. An essential examination of the rise and fall of Orenthal James Simpson, and parallels between his incredible story with that of race in America.
Directed by Marlon Riggs. His essay film gives voice to communities of black gay men, presenting their cultures and perspectives on the world as they confront racism, hom*ophobia, and marginalization.
Directed by Oscar Micheaux. In this early silent film, kindly Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) takes a fundraising trip to Boston in hopes of raising money to keep a Southern school for impoverished black children open to the public.
