100 Years from Mississippi

Directors: Tarabu Betserai Kirkland
Run Time: 60 minutes
"[Ms. Kirkland is] the embodiment of the African-American experience of the 20th century, her life's long journey altered repeatedly by the racial violence and bigotry coursing through the United States. Lynchings, riots, the Ku Klux Klan -- she survived it all, and spent her centenarian years working to ensure that these realities never slipped from collective memory."
-Dan Barry, New York Times

The Massie Affair (2005)

Director: Mark Zwonitzer
Run time: 60 min.

"In the early years of the 20th century, at a time when the U.S. Navy dominated Hawai'i, Americans thought of the islands as their paradise in the Pacific. But in September 1931, an explosive incident shook the semblance of tranquility and exposed the racial tensions roiling beneath the surface.

Thalia Fortescue Massie, the troubled young wife of a Navy lieutenant, claimed that a group of Hawaiians had raped her on the Ala Moana, a lonely beach road leading from Waikiki to Honolulu.Five young men were arrested -- two Hawaiians, two Japanese, and one Chinese. Despite evidence that the defendants couldn't have committed the crime, a mixed race jury deadlocked and the suspects were released on bail. Hawaiians were outraged, believing the rape charges a sham. White sailors beat one of the rape defendants so badly he almost died.

Into this explosive atmosphere, Massie's strong-willed mother, Grace Hubbard Fortescue, made a dramatic entrance. When one of the rape defendants was found dead in the back seat of Fortescue's car, news of the "honor slaying" unleashed a torrent of racist invective from the mainland in support of Fortescue. Though she was eventually tried and convicted of manslaughter, her sentence was commuted to a single hour. The Massie affair inflicted a wound on the psyche of the Hawaiian people that has yet to heal."
—Publisher's description

The Trials Of Muhammad Ali (2013)

Director: Bill Siegel
Run Time: 94 min.
Call Number: GV1132.A45 T75 2013

Ali's life has been recounted so many times that you'd think no one could come up with a fresh angle on it; documentary maker Bill Siegel (The Weather Underground) succeeds, primarily by delving into the religious story, largely downplayed by the mainstream, that's been sitting there in plain sight for 50 years. Siegel mostly dispenses with the fighter's comic pronouncements, his verbal jousting with Howard Cosell, in fact his entire athletic career, choosing instead to explore his great political awakening in the Nation of Islam. "I know the real God!" shouts 22-year-old Cassius Clay after beating Sonny Liston in 1963, and the statement defines him for the rest of the decade as he becomes a vocal advocate of black nationalism and sacrifices his heavyweight title to protest the racism of the Vietnam war."
—J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary (2013)

Director: Stephen Vittoria
Run Time: 120 min.
Call Number: HV8701.A28 L66 2013
 
"[T]he movie begins rather bravely with a montage of right-wing pundits who object to Abu-Jamal being described as a 'political prisoner' and want to see him executed. But it quickly takes a detour from the haters to the fans, lining up such famous backers as Alice Walker, Cornel West, Angela Davis and Peter Coyote . . . Mumia gradually becomes a persuasive attempt to celebrate the content of his character, not the violence that apparently led to his imprisonment. Indicting the 'police state' created by Philadelphia’s leaders during the late 1970s/early 1980s, Vittoria creates a context that suggests how easily innocents could be railroaded."
—John Hartl, The Seattle Times

Freedom Riders (2011)

Director: Stanley Nelson
Run Time: 120 min.
Call Number:  E185.61 .F74 2011

"The filmmaker Stanley Nelson has a stunning accomplishment in 'Freedom Riders,' a documentary that chronicles a crucial, devastating episode of the civil rights movement, an episode whose gruesome visuals impinged on the perception of American liberty around the world. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides, the film . . . is a story of ennobled youth and noxious hatred, of decided courage and inexplicable brutality. In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality sought to challenge the segregation of interstate travel on public transport and sent forth activists, both black and white, and many of them students, on a bus journey through the South, where they were received with violence that law enforcers refused to tame. . . . It is hard to imagine a feature film conveying the events with a more vivid sense of drama or suspense."
—Ginia Bellafante, New York Times

Spies of Mississippi (2014)

Director: Dawn Porter
Run Time: 60 min. 
Call Number: E185.93.M6 S65 2014

"Founded in the 1950s as Supreme Court rulings began to chip away at Jim Crow, the Sovereignty Commission was an instrument of domestic intelligence-gathering whose stated mission was to preserve segregation. From a few operatives working under the governor, it grew into 'the Stasi of Mississippi,' generating upward of 160,000 pages of reports. It gave information to the police, many of whose officers belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. If the commission might have considered its activities technically, if whimsically, 'legal,' the Klan did not bother with such fine points; its tactics included bombings, kidnappings and murder, among other more run-of-the-mill forms of terrorism."
—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times