Watch history Documentaries

Documentaries can open windows to our past. Through the lens of talented filmmakers, we can re-live iconic moments in history like the 1963 March on Washington or climb aboard a Greyhound bus to join the Freedom Riders on their journey through the Jim Crow South. Documentaries offer rich insight into our society and culture, connect us to some of our proudest and most shameful moments in American history, and remind us of how far we’ve come. What follows is a list of powerful documentaries exploring Black history and culture in America.

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

This Emmy Award-winning series premiered in 2013 and looks at more than just Black history, it explores Black identity and what it means to be an African American in the U.S. today. Unveiling different religious and social perspectives, a multiplicity of cultural perspectives, and the evolution of the African American people, this series spans five hundred years and two continents as Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes viewers on a journey of the Black experience throughout the United States. On the way, he visits historic sites, engages in passionate debates with America’s top historians on African American history, and interviews eyewitnesses who have been on the frontlines of change.

Throughout the series, Dr. Gates highlights tragedies, triumphs and contradictions throughout Black history, revealing that the African American community has never been a uniform entity and sheds new light on what it means to be African American.

Preview | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Freedom Riders

Based on Raymond Arsenault's book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, this two-hour documentary tells the story of the summer of 1961 when more than 400 Black and white Americans risked their lives traveling together in the segregated South to protest segregation. Committed to the cause of justice and determined to attract attention to the pursuit of civil rights, they boarded buses and trains, calling themselves “Freedom Riders.” Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders were met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way. Still, they continued to ride and find new ways to sustain and expand the movement.

Featuring testimony from the Freedom Riders themselves, government officials, and journalists who witnessed the Rides firsthand, this documentary gives viewers a front row seat to the Rides that changed history. "The lesson of the Freedom Rides is that great change can come from a few small steps taken by courageous people, ” says filmmaker Stanley Nelson, “And that sometimes to do any great thing, it's important that we step out alone."

Slavery by Another Name

Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.