Movies in the last few years that taught me more about America’s history than any classroom in high school or community college or university.

Fame doesn’t stop Racism. Takes place over a couple days but culminates with one evening where four black successful famous men talk about their struggles and privilege or weight that came with it. The first scene with Jim Brown shows psychotic casual racism of the time.

The Tulsa Massacre. Honestly even as a fictional series, that first episode should be shown in classrooms. The whole series bends and twists with shades of racism and the desires of white America and US aggression.

The Central Park Five. This show is heartbreaking. It’s the racist justice system. It’s the racist news. It’s racist child abuse by politicians, police, prosecutors, reporters, and judges.

How the Stapleton Sisters became revolutionary in the civil right movement. How music empowers and evolves into something so much more.

Black Americans, women, and men working as studio musicians paid hourly wages to not just play music for hits but write them. They fixed songs, added signature sounds and basically made decent songs into memorable hits but received no writing credit.

James Baldwin in interviews and narrated by Samuel Jackson where he talks about civil rights, the hypocrisy and intellectual way white America calmly discussed on our TVs whether other humans should be equal. Enraging moments.

Sundown laws, black travel guides (for safety), redlining white neighborhoods and the casual terrorism of everyday white Americans when someone Black moves in. There is a lot of science fiction but based in a truthful narrative about the times.

The old white establishment vs anti war demonstrators who ‘rioted’ and Fred Hampton (mentioned separately because he wasn’t even there during the riot but was tried with them at first. This judge, his attitude, his entitlement...will make you boil.

Story of the inside man the Feds had on the Panthers and the story of Fred Hamptons rise - uniting black, brown, and white men and women in to fight a racist, classist, violent police state. He was building a movement that could have changed America. Good insight on Panther actions in community building, education, breakfast programs and more.

13th talks about the amendment that ended slavery but created a whole new version of slavery with the school to prison pipeline of mass incarceration. The 13th amendment failed so badly, that the 14th amendment had to be passed just to make Black Americans human in the eyes of the Law...and even then...

This one is about the 14 amendment. It was pretty clear that all persons in the United States (whether born or just visiting) were supposed to be entitled to equal protection under the law. But decades of bad and good Supreme Court cases then had to try and prove who qualified as a person. Of the many standouts on gender, civil rights, LGBTQ, immigration and more, the Chinese Exclusion act and the end of Reconstruction were both dark stains on our history.

The things about these shows are what you see when you look beyond the drama. The music industry took the talents and songs of Black Americans and bought them for a few hundred dollars or less and then had white jazz bands play them and took all the profits. This was one more way a racist music industry to stoke and profited off Black artists.