Civil Rights on Film

The moving-image record of the Black freedom struggle has two strands: the "race films" made by Black filmmakers for Black audiences outside Hollywood, and the government footage of the movement itself. Both were largely ignored by the copyright system, which is why so much survives in the public domain.

Oscar Micheaux is the first strand's central figure. Within Our Gates (1920), his answer to The Birth of a Nation, was made five years after Griffith's film and rediscovered in a Spanish archive in the 1970s; Body and Soul (1925) gave Paul Robeson his first screen role; The Exile (1931) was the first Black-produced sound feature; Ten Minutes to Live (1932), Murder in Harlem (1935), Swing! (1938) and Lying Lips (1939) show him adapting to sound on almost no money. Within Our Gates and Body and Soul are on the National Film Registry.

Around him: The Scar of Shame (1927), the Colored Players Film Corporation's drama of colour prejudice within the Black middle class; The Emperor Jones (1933) with Robeson; The Duke Is Tops (1938), Lena Horne's first film; Herb Jeffries as the singing cowboy in The Bronze Buckaroo (1939); and Spencer Williams's The Blood of Jesus (1941, National Film Registry) and Go Down, Death! (1944), religious films made in Texas for the Southern church circuit.

The second strand begins in wartime. The Negro Soldier (1944) was the Army's own argument for integration; Brotherhood of Man (1946), UPA's cartoon for the auto workers' union, taught anti-racism in seven minutes. Then the movement: the National Archives' raw footage of The March on Washington (1963), James Blue's The March (1964), the U.S. Information Agency's documentary of the same day that the Registry added in 2008, Nine from Little Rock (1964), Charles Guggenheim's Oscar-winning account of the Little Rock Nine, and the Archives' silent footage of Selma to Montgomery (1965).

A note on rights: the government films are public domain, but the text of Dr King's "I Have a Dream" speech is separately copyrighted by his estate; Popcorn streams the government documentaries in full and does not extract the speech as a standalone clip.