Welcome to Black History Database's Friends & Allies Content

In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists, and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom. 

Professor Gates describes the history of African American people by talking to historians, authors, and the people who made history. 

Writer James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America with his unfinished novel, Remember This House. 

A chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. 

World-renowned civil rights defense attorney Bryan Stevenson works to free a wrongly condemned death row prisoner. 

The film explores Georgia representative's, 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health care reform, and immigration. 

The story of Thurgood Marshall, the crusading lawyer who would become the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, as he battles through one of his career-defining cases. 

Twenty-five years after the verdict in the Rodney King trial sparked several days of protests, violence and looting in Los Angeles, filmmakers examine that tumultuous period through rarely seen archival footage. 

The story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay area resident, who crosses paths with friends, enemies, family, and strangers on the last day of 2008. 

After his arrest at age 16, Kalief Browder fought the system and prevailed, despite unthinkable circumstances. He became and American hero. 

In the spring of 1989, five boys of color are arrested, interrogated and coerced into confessing to the vicious attack of a woman in Centra Park. 

The story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple whose arrest for interracial marriage in 1960s Virginia began a legal battle that would end with the Supreme Court's historic 1967 decision. 

This thought-provoking look at the history and expansion of American policing is "perhaps the most frightening film you'll watch all year," says Decider. 

Chris Rock, Jeffrey Wright, Glynn Turman and Audra McDonald jon star Colman Domingo in this stirring portrait of unsung Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin. 

A straight-talking schooltecher from Brooklyn -- and the first Black woman elected to Congress -- makes an against-all-odds run for US President in 1972. 

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigiou NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. 

Since its first edition in 1947, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans has inserted the black experience squarely into American history--a narrative that previously denied black contribution or at best dismissed its importance. An ever-growing mountain of scholarship on African American informs the book's discussion of several topics, from the development of metallurgy in ancient African civilizations to the story of black life in the British colonies to the emergence of social movements and activism in communities across the United States in the mid-twentieth century. The latest edition incorporates new historical actors, including the role of women throughout history, particularly in slavery, abolitionism, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights/black power movement. 

As a young man Frederick Douglas (1818 - 1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners; with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. 

For nearly ten years, Ben Rhodes saw almost everything that happened at the center of the Obama administration--first as a speechwriter, then as deputy national security advisor, and finally as a multipurpose aide and close collaborator. He started every morning in the Oval Office with the President's Daily Briefing, traveled the world with Obama, and was at the center of some of the most consequential and controversial moment of the presidency. Now he tells the full story of his partnership--and ultimately, friendship--with a man who also happened to be a historic president of the United States. 

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father and his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built and empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? 

Biological races do not exist--and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today.