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Roots 6 Video Box Set
: essential video:From the moment the young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is stolen from his life and ancestral home in 18th-century Africa and brought under inhumane conditions to be auctioned as a slave in America, a line is begun that leads from this most shameful chapter in U.S. history to the 20th-century author Alex Haley, a Kinte descendant. The late Haley's acclaimed book Roots was adapted into this six-volume television miniseries, which was a widely watched phenomenon in 1977. The programs cover several generations in the antebellum South and end with the story ...
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Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry
: essential video:From the moment the young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is stolen from his life and ancestral home in 18th-century Africa and brought under inhumane conditions to be auctioned as a slave in America, a line is begun that leads from this most shameful chapter in U.S. history to the 20th-century author Alex Haley, a Kinte descendant. The late Haley's acclaimed book Roots was adapted into this six-volume television miniseries, which was a widely watched phenomenon in 1977. The programs cover several generations in the antebellum South and end with the story ...
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The Piano Lesson (1995)
: :The only one of August Wilson's plays to be filmed (and for television, at that), this 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winner is an amazing piece of work. Adapted by Wilson and directed by Lloyd Richards, who staged it on Broadway, the play deals not just with racism and its effects but with the ongoing legacy and curse of slavery on modern blacks. Set in 1920s Pittsburgh, the story deals with the arrival of Boy Willie (Charles Dutton) from Mississippi, to claim a family heirloom from his sister Berniece (Alfre Woodard): the piano, carved by their ...
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Mama Flora's Family
: :The only one of August Wilson's plays to be filmed (and for television, at that), this 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winner is an amazing piece of work. Adapted by Wilson and directed by Lloyd Richards, who staged it on Broadway, the play deals not just with racism and its effects but with the ongoing legacy and curse of slavery on modern blacks. Set in 1920s Pittsburgh, the story deals with the arrival of Boy Willie (Charles Dutton) from Mississippi, to claim a family heirloom from his sister Berniece (Alfre Woodard): the piano, carved by their ...
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My Sweet Charlie
: :The only one of August Wilson's plays to be filmed (and for television, at that), this 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winner is an amazing piece of work. Adapted by Wilson and directed by Lloyd Richards, who staged it on Broadway, the play deals not just with racism and its effects but with the ongoing legacy and curse of slavery on modern blacks. Set in 1920s Pittsburgh, the story deals with the arrival of Boy Willie (Charles Dutton) from Mississippi, to claim a family heirloom from his sister Berniece (Alfre Woodard): the piano, carved by their ...
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Don King - Only In America
: :Made for HBO, this film biography of boxing promoter Don King is solid entertainment, thanks to a startlingly real performance at its core by Ving Rhames (who won a Golden Globe award for the role, then gave it away to Jack Lemmon on the TV broadcast). Rhames has the shuck-and-jive, but also the canny intelligence, as the film follows King from small-time numbers runner and concert promoter to ex-con to self-created fight mogul. The movie, based on a book by Jack Newfield, doesn't pull punches in outlining King's extralegal shenanigans and strong-arm tactics, ...
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The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
: essential video:This 1973 television movie about 110 years of American history as seen through the eyes of a black woman from Louisiana (Cicely Tyson) is a terrific achievement, a window onto racism from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. Tyson gives a career performance as the title character, whose personal life is inextricably woven into the fabric of the African American struggle for equality. A mixture of the sentimental and the unflinching, this is the kind of educational experience that fully engages a viewer. --Tom Keogh
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Tuskegee Airmen
: :This true story of the black flyers who broke the color barrier in the U.S. Air Force during World War II is a well-intentioned film highlighted by an excellent cast. Proud, solemn, Iowa-born Laurence Fishburne and city-kid hipster Cuba Gooding Jr. are among the hopefuls who meet en route to Tuskegee Air Force Base, where they are among the recruits for an 'experimental' program to 'prove' the abilities of the black man in the U.S. armed services. Fighting prejudice from racist officers and government officials and held to a consistently higher level of ...
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Miss Evers Boys
: essential video:Laurence Fishburne helped shepherd this Emmy Award-winning exposé from American medical history books to the small screen. Anchored in the 1973 Senate inquiry into the infamous Tuskegee Study, the film uses a flashback structure to take us back 40 years as Nurse Eunice Evers (played with honest conviction by Alfre Woodard, who also earned an acting Emmy for her powerful performance) describes how a program designed to treat syphilis among blacks in the South was twisted into an inhuman study. Evers's conscience is torn between leaving her position on principle or ...
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Lesson Before Dying
: essential video:On a bright sunny day in 1948, Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer) sets off down the road to go catch some fish; by the end of the movie's opening sequence, he is the one who's been caught, and wrongly accused of the murder of a white shopkeeper. Racial inequality, at the time, is so pervasive in Louisiana that the white defense lawyer's argument at Jefferson's trial is that his client is not worthy of conviction: 'You might just as soon put a hog in the 'lectric chair as this,' he declares. Outraged by ...
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