If you’re interested in learning about the activist who co-founded CORE and helped to organize the 1961 Freedom Riders campaign, then my James Farmer Black History Short is for you.
Tag: <span>civil rights</span>
“40 Years a Prisoner” is a documentary about the events leading up to and following the 1978 Philadelphia police department’s raid of the MOVE organization’s home. There had been a period of increasing hostility between MOVE and the police which led to the raid and a stand-off that left one officer dead and another wounded. During the confrontation, police officers beat a then unarmed member of the organization and bombed the home leading to its destruction and the death of 11 people. Resulting trials would see allegations of police wrongdoing thrown out while several surviving MOVE members would be convicted and spend decades in prison.
A profile of James Weldon Johnson, composer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and prominent leader of the NAACP during the 1920s.
“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander tackles the complex issues of mass incarceration. Other sources have discussed how the raw figures have grown over time. But as a civil rights attorney and legal scholar, Alexander provides an intriguing exploration of the history of the policies, reforms, and social attitudes that have contributed to the creation of the prison industrial complex.
“4 Little Girls” is a 1997 Spike Lee documentary about the 1963 bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church which resulted in the deaths of four little girls. The device had been planted by four men who were members of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. But while this particular event was unfortunate, the documentary shows that it was one in a series of domestic terrorist attacks aimed at intimidating Birmingham’s Black community into remaining second-class citizens.