Blackside

This documentary special honors Henry Hampton’s masterpiece Eyes on the Prize and conjures ancestral memories, activates the radical imagination and explores the profound journey for Black liberation through the voices of the movement.

Narrated by actress Alfre Woodard, this trenchant, eye-opening doc traces the radical civil rights leader’s life from his tumultuous childhood, through his rise in the ranks of the Nation of Islam, to his 1965 assassination.

Just before the advent of the Great Depression, Henry Ford controlled the most important company in the most important industry in the booming American economy. His offer of high wages in exchange for hard work attracted workers to Detroit, but it began to come apart when Ford hired a private police force to speed up production and spy on employees. After the depression hit in 1929, these workers faced a new, grim reality as unemployment skyrocketed.

Teen pregnancy short drama, mixed with a real Planned Parenthood group session of women, and excerpts from a lecture by Reverend Jesse Jackson.

A documentary produced by Blackside, Inc. as part of an effort to recruit minority youth into the health care fields.

The Unemployment Test is presented as a quiz to judge the audience’s knowledge about the welfare system, albeit one backed by a funky disco synth soundtrack. The viewers of the film take the test alongside people in a classroom who are evenly split between those who have benefited from unemployment insurance and others who have not. Short dramatized scenes with non-professional actors play out in two phases. Each skit ends with a question by the narrator. The audience’s an- swers are scored at the end of each phase.

Code Blue is one of the earliest existing films created by Henry Hampton’s Boston-based documentary company Blackside Inc., which produced the Emmy Award-winning civil rights series Eyes on the Prize. Blackside became the largest African American-owned film production company of its time and was home to many filmmakers from diverse backgrounds, including African Americans, immigrants, and women.