Director Marlon Riggs' documentary reveals the recent history of racial stereotyping in the United States. His film uses original footage and other artifacts from the 19th and early-20th centuries to illustrate the most common ways whites chose to view Blacks, helping viewers understand how dangerous these cultural representations were, and still are, to the Black community.

Actors Victor Love, Matt Dillon, Elizabeth McGovern, and Oprah Winfrey star in this film adaptation of Richard Wright's novel about a young Black man in 1930s-Chicago caught in an inescapable web of poverty, racism, and aggression.

Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about a young Black woman growing up in rural Georgia in the early-20th century. In sharp contrast to Richard Wright's Native Son, The Color Purple explores some of the unique challenges faced by African-American women during the Jim Crow era.

Set in the 1930s, the film tells the story of James Allen, a white veteran of World War I, who's wrongfully accused of robbery and sentenced to serve ten years in a Southern chain gang. Based on the autobiography of Robert Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, the film was highly controversial for its gritty—and largely accurate—portrayal of the conditions in forced prison labor camps and chain gangs. So much that the state of Georgia insisted that "Georgia" be removed from the film's title and then refused to show it in any theater within its borders.

The hero in director D.W. Griffith's cinematic masterpiece—a record-breaking, box-office hit from the early-20th century—is a white Southerner who helps organize the Ku Klux Klan to free the South of its supposed oppression by Reconstruction-era Blacks. The film captivated white audiences and drew vigorous protests from African-American civil rights organizations like the NAACP.