RESOURCES
LEARN. EXPAND. KNOW.
Black Lives Matter Town Hall Live Streams
June 18, 2020
July 9, 2020
July 30, 2020
Books on Anti-Racism Allyship
Documentaries
Black history documentaries offer a lens into Black lives and Black experience.
The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
This 2013 film explores different religious and social perspectives, a multiplicity of cultural perspectives, and the evolution of the African American people, this series spans five hundred years and two continents as Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers on a journey of the Black experience throughout the United States.
Freedom Riders
Based on Raymond Arsenault’s book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, this two-hour documentary tells the story of the summer of 1961 when more than 400 Black and white Americans risked their lives traveling together in the segregated South to protest segregation. Committed to the cause of justice and determined to attract attention to the pursuit of civil rights, they boarded buses and trains, calling themselves “Freedom Riders.”
Slavery by Another Name
Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters
Eyes on the Prize
This documentary series covers all of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954-1985, including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the birth of the Black Power Movement, and the courageous acts of the crusaders that contributed along the way.
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
The Black Power Mixtape tells the story of the Black Power Movement through the eyes of Swedish journalists. Drawn to America in the late 1960s by stories of revolution and urban unrest, the journalists recorded interviews with activists like Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Steale, Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver.
Soundtrack for a Revolution
This film features the powerful music from the Civil Rights movement. Focusing on the freedom songs sung by protesters on picket lines, in mass meetings, in paddy wagons and in jail cells, this film celebrates the vitality of the music and the infectious energy that it provided. Freedom songs evolved from slave chants, the labor movement, and from the Black church, and were a vital tool as protestors stood up against adversity.
Dark Girls
This documentary offers a searing examination on what it means to be dark skinned in America. Filmmakers D. Channsin Berry and Bill Duke capture moving interviews with women who open up about their experiences being dark, Black women in America. They share painful stories about things their mothers, sisters and friends have said, in addition to what they’ve taken away from mass media. Overwhelmingly these interviews reveal the same thing: To them, Black is not beautiful.
The Black List: Volume One
The Black List: Volume One features interviews from a variety of voices in contemporary Black America using a technique where the interviewer is never seen or heard on camera. The result is a living portrait of stories from leading voices across a variety of disciplines including arts, sports, politics, business and government.
13th Amendment
Ana DeVernay – Netflix
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.
BOOKS:
| Black and Deaf in America: Are we that different? by Ernest Hairston and Linwood Smith (1983) The actual book seems difficult to find, but here’s a review of it by Leroy Moore “An in-depth look at some of the problems of the Black Deaf community, including undereducation and underemployment.” |
| Hidden Treasure of Black ASL by Carolyn McCaskill, Ceil Lucas, Robert Bayley, and Joseph Hill (2011) “Based on the findings of the Black ASL Project, which undertook this unprecedented research, Hidden Treasure documents the stories and language of the African American Deaf community.” |
| Sounds like Home: Growing up Black and Deaf in the South By Mary Herring Wright (1999) “ Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students.” |
| Black Deaf Students: A Model for Educational Success by Carolyn E. Williamson (2007) “…searches out ways to develop, reinforce, and alter the factors that encourage resilience in African American deaf and hard of hearing students.” |
| Roar of Silence: Trial & Triumph Through Deafness by Bob Schaller (1999) “Deaf since suffering meningitis at age 2, Kenny went on to become an All-American at the University of Nebraska before playing five years of professional football, including two with the Denver Broncos in the NFL.” |
| On the Beat of Truth: A Hearing Daughter’s Stories of Her Black Deaf Parents by Maxine Childress Brown (2013) “As an African American woman born in 1943, Maxine Childress Brown possessed a unique vantage point to witness the transformative events in her parents’ lives.” |
| Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson by Susan Burch (2015) “Using legal records, institutional files, and extensive oral history interviews–some conducted in sign language–Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner piece together the story of a deaf man accused in 1925 of attempted rape, found insane at a lunacy hearing, committed to the criminal ward of the State Hospital for the Colored Insane, castrated, forced to labor for the institution, and held at the hospital for more than seven decades.” |