The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed African-American self-defense group founded in November 1964, during the civil rights era in the United States, in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana. On February 21, 1965—the day of Malcolm X's assassination—the first affiliated chapter was founded in Bogalusa, Louisiana, followed by a total of 20 other chapters in this state, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. It was intended to protect civil rights activists and their families, threatened both by white vigilantes and discriminatory treatment by police under Jim Crow laws. The Bogalusa chapter gained national attention during the summer of 1965 in its violent struggles with the Ku Klux Klan.
James Oliver Cromwell is an American actor and activist. Known for his extensive work as a character actor, he has received a Primetime Emmy Award as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Babe (1995). Other notable roles include in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997), Deep Impact (1998), The Green Mile (1999), Space Cowboys (2000), The Longest Yard (2005) The Queen (2006), W. (2008), Secretariat (2010), The Artist (2011), Still Mine (2013), Marshall (2017), and Emperor (2020). He has also voiced roles in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), and Big Hero 6 (2014).
Kary Antholis is an American publisher and editor of CrimeStory.com, former executive at the television network HBO and documentary filmmaker best known for the Oscar-winning short One Survivor Remembers, which was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2012. Antholis serves on the Board of Visitors of the Georgetown University Law Center and formerly served as co-chair of board of directors for Young Storytellers.
The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.
4 Little Girls is a 1997 American historical documentary film about the murder of four African-American girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The film was directed by Spike Lee and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The Children's Crusade, or Children's March, was a march by over 1,000 school students in Birmingham, Alabama on May 2–10, 1963. Initiated and organized by Rev. James Bevel, the purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. Many children left their schools and were arrested, set free, and then arrested again the next day. The marches were stopped by the head of police, Bull Connor, who brought fire hoses to ward off the children and set police dogs after the children. This event compelled President John F. Kennedy to publicly support federal civil rights legislation and eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Robert "Bobby" Houston is an American filmmaker and actor. He made his acting debut in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) before becoming a film director and screenwriter. His films include Shogun Assassin (1980) and Bad Manners (1984). Later in his career, Houston became a successful documentarian. He won an Emmy Award for the film Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks (2002) and an Academy Award for the film Mighty Times: The Children's March (2004) in 2005.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Rodrigo Dorfman is a film director, producer, cinematographer, multimedia artist, film critic and commentator living in Durham, North Carolina. He has worked with P.O.V., HBO, Salma Hayek's Ventanazul and the BBC among others.
A Time for Justice is a 1994 American short documentary film produced by Charles Guggenheim. In 1995, it won an Oscar for Documentary Short Subject at the 67th Academy Awards.
Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks is a 2002 American short documentary film directed by Robert Houston and produced by Robert Hudson about the 1955/56 Montgomery bus boycott led by Rosa Parks.
Ezra Benjamin Edelman is an American documentary producer and director. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming for directing O.J.: Made in America (2016). He has also directed an unreleased documentary on the musician Prince.
Andrew Rossi is an American filmmaker, Emmy nominated for directing, writing and producing The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022), Ivory Tower (2014) and Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011).
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement is a 2011 documentary film about James Armstrong, one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306 is a 2008 documentary short film created to honor the 40th annual remembrance of the life and death of Martin Luther King Jr. Directed by Adam Pertofsky, the film received a 2008 Oscar nomination in the "Best Documentary Short Subject" Category at the 81st Academy Awards.
Leo Igwe is a Nigerian human rights advocate and humanist. Igwe is a former Western and Southern African representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and has specialized in campaigning against and documenting the impacts of child witchcraft accusations. He holds a Ph.D. from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, having earned a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Calabar, in Nigeria. Igwe's human rights advocacy has brought him into conflict with high-profile witchcraft believers, such as Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, because of his criticism of what he describes as their role in the violence and child abandonment that sometimes result from accusations of witchcraft.
China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province is a 2009 documentary film co-directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill of the Downtown Community Television Center, and produced by MZ Pictures for HBO Films.
The history of the 1954 to 1968 American civil rights movement has been depicted and documented in film, song, theater, television, and the visual arts. These presentations add to and maintain cultural awareness and understanding of the goals, tactics, and accomplishments of the people who organized and participated in this nonviolent movement.
Den Tolmor is a Moldova-born American film producer, director, and writer, whose work includes feature films, television series, and documentaries. Tolmor is best known for producing Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, a 2015 documentary film about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and 2014, which earned him an Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary Feature and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination in the Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking category in 2016. Throughout his career, Tolmor has frequently collaborated with Oscar-nominated Israeli-American director Evgeny Afineevsky, also producing the 2017 documentary film Cries from Syria about the Syrian civil war. Narrated by Helen Mirren, the film was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival where it premiered in 2017 and was acquired by HBO. Tolmor produced Francesco, a 2020 documentary film about Pope Francis that tells the story of hope inside the darkness of our times. Righetto, Tolmor's most recent feature film, entered pre-production in Italy in 2020.
13th is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Ava DuVernay. It explores the prison-industrial complex, and the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States". The title refers to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude, except as punishment for convicted criminals. The film argues that this exemption has been used to continue the practice of involuntary servitude in the form of penal labor.
