Black Public Media

On the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, one fearless black pioneer reconceived a Harlem Renaissance for a new era, ushering giants and rising stars of black American culture onto the national television stage. He was hip. He was smart. He was innovative, political, and gay. In his personal fight for social equality, this man ensured the Revolution would be televised. The man was Ellis Haizlip. The Revolution was soul!

In 1972, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan became the first Southern Black woman to join Congress, one of many firsts in her career as a trailblazing political leader. Looking at her life both in and out of the limelight, this insightful documentary explores how her voice still resonates today.

Explores a variety of underground hazing rituals that are abusive and sometimes deadly. The journey to understand hazing culture reveals a world of toxic masculinity, violence, humiliation, binge drinking, denial, and institutional coverups.

Explore the life and legacy of notable Black scholar and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois. From his birth, just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation; to his death, on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963, his legacy as an activist continues to resonate today.

When 17-year-old Lennon Lacy is found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014, his mother's search for justice and reconciliation begins while the trauma of more than a century of lynching African Americans bleeds into the present.

When director Jasmin Mara López sees a photo of her niece with her grandfather, she is flooded by painful memories of her own childhood sexual abuse at his hands—and the following 24 years of her silence. In this cinematically striking and poetic documentary, López bravely films her story as a willful act to accept difficult truths while finding beauty in the process of healing. As she defies the cultural silence that pervades her family and confronts her abusive grandfather, who is a Baptist minister, a world of generational abuse unfolds, and she quickly discovers she is not alone. Through archival family footage and intimate moments with her family, López has created a film about confronting painful truths and the beauty one can feel when they reach the other side of grief.

Dear Aloha is a short documentary profiling Diasporic Hawaiians living thousands of miles away from home. Dear Aloha shows how aloha sustains our people amidst distance, loss, and longing.

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California’s women’s prison system, they take to the courtroom to wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes - from dangerously inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. But no one believes them. This shocking legal drama captured over seven years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated women, demanding our attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.

Centers on the 1969 student protests against racism at Montreal’s Concordia University and their contribution to the story of Black liberation.

The story of a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer in Newark, NJ who takes two young men under his wing to teach them how to live better lives.

When Danielle Metz’s triple life sentence was commuted, she got a rare chance to regain the life and family that she’d been dreaming about in prison. But back home in New Orleans, she steps into a different reality. Commuted traces Danielle’s journey to find purpose and love, and to confront the wounds of incarceration that linger after release from prison.

While visiting his hometown of Milwaukee, father of three and aspiring attorney, Claude Motley, is shot in the face by 15-year-old Nathan, during a carjacking gone wrong. Two nights later, Nathan attempts to rob Victoria, who fires her gun in self-defense, partially paralyzing Nathan from the waist down. Three strangers tragically bound together by a weekend of gun violence on a five-year journey toward recovery and forgiveness.

With unfettered access, the film follows Baltimore's idealistic young mayor into office, where he puts his personal and political future on the line to save his beloved city from chronic violence.

Veteran riverkeeper, Dr. Jackie Echols, protects the environment and majority Black communities throughout the South River watershed in metro Atlanta. When the city begins construction on the largest police training facility in America (Cop City), she joins the growing resistance movement, revealing the hidden connection between corporate development, unchecked pollution, and environmental racism persistent throughout the region.

After a contentious race last fall, the runoff for mayor of New Orleans came down to two candidates: Desirée Charbonnet and LaToya Cantrell, two very different black women. The winner of this election would take office as the first female mayor of New Orleans and the city's fourth black mayor. Through news footage, campaign advertisements and archival audio and video, All Skinfolk Ain't Kinfolk is the unprecedented story of this mayoral runoff told through the eyes of black women living in this city.

When a thriving, top-ranked African American elementary school is threatened to be replaced by a new high school favoring the community’s wealthier residents, parents, students and educators fight for the elementary school’s survival.

Alvin Ailey was a visionary artist who found salvation through dance. Told in his own words and through the creation of a dance inspired by his life, this immersive portrait follows a man who, when confronted by a world that refused to embrace him, determined to build one that would.

A documentary exploring the life, career, art and legacy of Marian Anderson.

On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s 'A Raisin in the Sun' opened on Broadway and changed the face of American theater forever. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on Broadway, she did not shy away from richly drawn characters and unprecedented subject matter. The play attracted record crowds and earned the coveted top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. While the play is seen as a groundbreaking work of art, the timely story of Hansberry’s life is far less known.

An exploration of Black generational farmers in the American South reveals the fragility of legacy and the significance of owning land.