Documentaries

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (PBS)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents a vital four-episode documentary. The series explores the transformative years following the American Civil War, when the nation struggled to rebuild itself in the face of profound loss, massive destruction, and revolutionary social change. The twelve years that composed the post-war Reconstruction era (1865-77) witnessed a seismic shift in the meaning and makeup of our democracy, with millions of former slaves and free black people seeking out their rightful place as equal citizens under the law. Though tragically short-lived, this bold democratic experiment was, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, a ‘brief moment in the sun’ for African Americans, when they could advance, and achieve, education, exercise their right to vote, and run for and win public office.

Available to view for free on PBS.
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13^th (Netflix)

A 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the “intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States;”[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime.

DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

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American Experience: The Vote (PBS)

This four-hour, two-part documentary series, tells the dramatic story of the epic — and surprisingly unfamiliar — crusade waged by American women for the right to vote. Focusing primarily on the movement’s militant and momentous final decade, the film charts American women’s determined march to the ballot box, and illuminates the myriad social, political and cultural obstacles that stood in their path. The Vote delves deeply into the animating controversies that divided the nation in the early 20th century — gender, race, state’s rights, racism, political power — and offers an absorbing lesson in the delicate, often fractious dynamics of social change.

Narrated by Kate Burton, the documentary features the voices of Mae Whitman as Alice Paul, Audra McDonald as Ida B. Wells, Laura Linney as Carrie Chapman Catt, and Patricia Clarkson as Harriot Stanton Blatch, some of the unsung warriors of the movement.

Available to view on PBS.
Click here to view.