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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This inspiring documentary chronicles the extraordinary life of Ruby Duncan, an activist who fights the welfare system and becomes a White House advisor.

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.

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.

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.

When one’s sole focus is to provide for their children, the stakes are extremely high. The need for multiple jobs to make ends meet has become a common reality for many families in this country, which leads to a very important question: who looks after the children while their parents work? Through the Night examines the economic and emotional toll affecting some American families, told through the lens of a 24-hour daycare center in Westchester, New York. At the center of it all is Nunu, the primary caregiver and a hero to many families in need of a safe space to bring their children.

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.

The story of a defiant movement of women of color transforming American politics from the ground up. Filmed during the historic 2018 midterm elections, the series follows organizers and candidates as they fight on behalf of black, brown, immigrant and poor communities–long neglected by politicians and pundits alike.

The film explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of a Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist and one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders. Throughout the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer established a legacy of civil rights and human rights activism that remains relevant to this day – especially among Black youth.

Chicago 1969: Activists from the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots united African Americans, Latinos, and poor whites to confront police brutality and unfair housing practices in one of America’s most segregated cities. A timely story of collective action, The First Rainbow Coalition tells this little-known chronicle of political struggle with insight and urgency using archival footage and interviews with those who lived it.

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.

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

Beautifully layered and expressionistic, After Sherman is a story about inheritance and the tension that defines our collective American history, especially Black history. The filmmaker follows his father, a minister, in the aftermath of a mass shooting at his church in Charleston, South Carolina to understand how communities of descendants of enslaved Africans use their unique faith as a form of survival as they continue to fight for America to live up to its many unfulfilled promises to Black Americans.

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.