Libraries Offer Videos for Black History Month

LeeAnna Ta Thao

In celebration of Black History Month, the University Libraries Multimedia Department has compiled a list of streaming videos available to all students, staff and faculty. Physical items are also available on display in the Multimedia Department, located in the Mullins Library Hodges Reading Room. 

Movies 

Bouncer Tony Lip is hired by African-American musician Don Shirley to chauffeur him around the Jim Crow South in 1962 for an eight-week concert tour in the movie Green Book. The mismatched men form a friendship as Tony learns first-hand the racism Don must endure to perform. 

A Black family living in a cramped Chicago tenement in the 1940s has the opportunity to improve their social standing via an insurance policy check but are in disagreement about how best to spend the windfall in A Raisin in the Sun. 

A superhero known as Black Panther defends Wakanda, a technologically advanced country in Africa that has hidden itself away from the rest of the world.  

Harriet is the true story of Harriet Tubman — from her escape from slavery to the dangerous missions she led, setting free hundreds of slaves through the Underground Railroad. 

In Remember the Titans, a football coach tries to promote racial harmony among the players of a newly integrated high school team in early 1970s Virginia. 

Documentaries 

Teach Us All examines how the present day United States education system fails to live up to the promise of desegregation as it slides back into a re-segregation of its modern schools. 

The Central Park Five tells the story of the five Black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989. 

The Souls of Black Girls documentary explores how media images of beauty can undercut the self-esteem of African American women. 

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices offers unique insights into an eventful century in African American history. 

Freedom Riders tells the story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. 

Black Boys illuminates the full humanity of Black men and boys in America. 

A new PBS documentary, Slavery by Another Name, tells the story of the adapted forced labor practices that helped extend slavery long after the end of the Civil War. 

The marches from Selma to Montgomery to secure voting rights for Black Americans are depicted in the Selma docudrama, set during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Databases 

Check out the streaming databases Kanopy Streaming Services and AVON: Academic Video Online to find more Black History Month films.