Best movies like Assata aka Joanne Chesimard
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Assata aka Joanne Chesimard Starring Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver, Pat Dempsey, Charles Everett, and more. If you liked Assata aka Joanne Chesimard then you may also like: 13th, 4 Little Girls, Uptight, The Watermelon Woman, Native Son and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Through dramatic re-creation, archival newsreel footage and revealing interviews, director Fred Baker's docudrama explores the controversial murder case centered on Black Panther activist and political exile Assata Shakur. In 1977, Shakur was dubiously convicted for the shooting death of a New Jersey state trooper and was sentenced to life in prison, only to escape two years later and seek refuge in Cuba.
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4 Little Girls
On September 15, 1963, a bomb destroyed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were there for Sunday school. It was a crime that shocked the nation--and a defining moment in the history of the civil-rights movement. Spike Lee re-examines the full story of the bombing, including a revealing interview with former Alabama Governor George Wallace.
The Watermelon Woman
A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.
Native Son
In 1940s Chicago, a young black man takes a job as a chauffeur to a white family, which takes a turn for the worse when he accidentally kills the teenage daughter of the couple and then tries to cover it up.
Night Catches Us
After growing up during the tumultuous 1960s, ex-Black Panther Marcus returns to his home in Philadelphia in 1976 and reconnects with Pat, the widow of a Panther leader. Marcus befriends Pat's young daughter and attempts to conquer his demons. Interfering with Marcus's good intentions are the neighborhood's continuing racial and social conflicts, as well as old enemies and friends -- both with scores to settle.
Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored
This film relates the story of a tightly connected Afro-American community informally called Colored Town where the inhabitants live and depend on each other in a world where racist oppression is everywhere, as told by a boy called Cliff who spent his childhood there. Despite this, we see the life of the community in all its joys and sorrows, of those that live there while others decide to leave for a better life north. For those remaining, things come to a serious situation when one prominent businessman is being muscled out by a white competitor using racist intimidation. In response, the community must make the decision of whether to submit meekly like they always have, or finally fight for their rights.
One Way Ticket
A convict marries the warder's daughter after his escape and she eventually persuades him to finish his sentence.
R.P.M.
R.P.M. stands for (political) revolutions per minute. Anthony Quinn plays a liberal college professor at a west coast college during the hedy days of campus activism in the late 1960s. Radical students take over the college, the president resigns, and Quinn's character, who has always been a champion of student activism, is appointed president. As the students continue to push the envelope of revolution, Quinn's character is faced with the challenge of restoring order or abetting the descent into anarchy.
BaadAsssss Cinema
With archive film clips and interviews, this brief look at a frequently overlooked historical period of filmmaking acts as an introduction rather than a complete record. It features interviews with some of the genre's biggest stars, like Fred Williamson, Pam Grier, and Richard Roundtree. Director Melvin Van Peebles discusses the historical importance of his landmark film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. For a contemporary perspective, the excitable Quentin Tarantino offers his spirited commentary and author/critic bell hooks provides some scholarly social analysis.
Black Girl
An aspiring dancer and her two wicked sisters resent their mother's love for a foster daughter.
Black Like Me
Black Like Me is the true account of John Griffin's experiences when he passed as a black man.
Black Mama, White Mama
When two troublemaking female prisoners (one a revolutionary, the other a former harem-girl) can't seem to get along, they are chained together and extradited for safekeeping. The women, still chained together, stumble, stab, and cat-fight their way across the wilderness, igniting a bloody shootout between gangsters and a group of revolutionaries.
The Butler
A look at the life of Cecil Gaines who served eight presidents as the White House's head butler from 1952 to 1986, and had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made.
Betty and Coretta
The widows of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and how they carry on as single mothers after the assassination of their husbands.
BlacKkKlansman
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
Dead Presidents
On the streets they call cash dead presidents. And that's just what a Vietnam veteran is after when he returns home from the war only to find himself drawn into a life of crime. With the aid of his fellow vets he plans the ultimate heist -- a daring robbery of an armored car filled with unmarked U.S. currency!
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black male prostitute goes on the run from "the man" with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.
The Intruder
A man in a gleaming white suit comes to a small Southern town on the eve of integration. He calls himself a social reformer. But what he does is stir up trouble--trouble he soon finds he can't control.
The Great White Hope
A black champion boxer and his white female companion struggle to survive while the white boxing establishment looks for ways to knock him down.
Fight for Your Life
A minister dispenses justice on three convicts who take his family hostage.
Ghosts of Mississippi
A Mississippi district attorney and the widow of Medgar Evers struggle to bring a white supremacist to justice for the 1963 murder of the civil rights leader.
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
The story of the Black Panthers is often told in a scatter of repackaged parts, often depicting tragic, mythic accounts of violence and criminal activity; but this is an essential story, vibrant, human; a living and breathing chronicle of a pivotal movement that birthed a new revolutionary culture in America.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Bill O'Neal infiltrates the Black Panthers on the orders of FBI Agent Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover. As Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton ascends—falling for a fellow revolutionary en route—a battle wages for O’Neal’s soul.
Envy: A Seven Deadly Sins Story
Gabrielle seems to have it all - a devoted husband, a beautiful daughter, and a successful career in public relations. However, she soon stands to lose everything when she meets Keisha, her devious half sister who wants everything Gabrielle has.
Brotherly Love
West Philadelphia basketball star Sergio Taylor deals with the pressures of fame while his brother and sister have their own issues with ambition.
Prison Song
Elijah has been bounced from group home to group home throughout his turbulent young life. What has sustained him is his art. After a promised scholarship is taken away, Elijah ends up in a fight that result in the death of another boy. Now, sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, the young man must find a way to keep his soul alive behind bars or turn into a hardened bitter criminal.
Freedom Song
Freedom Song (2000) is a made-for-TV film based on true stories of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s. It tells the story of the struggle of African Americans to register to vote in the fictional town of Quinlan. In the midst of the Freedom Summer, a group of high school students in the small town are eager to make grassroots changes in their own community. The young activists meet resistance not only from white southerners, but from their parents, who have experienced firsthand the violence that can result from speaking out.[1] As high school students band together with the support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, they make strides in registering African-American voters and gaining awareness for their cause.
Ruby Bridges
When six-year-old Ruby Bridges is chosen to be the first African-American to integrate her local elementary school, she is subjected to the true ugliness of racism for the first time.
Murder in Mississippi
In 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered three Civil Rights workers who had traveled to the South to encourage African-American voter registration. Examines the last three weeks in the lives of the slain activists.
And the Children Shall Lead
Mississippi in the early '60s is the setting for this story of a 12-year-old African-American girl who, along with her white friends, tries to ease increasing racial tensions.
A Huey P. Newton Story
The story of how the radical Huey P. Newton developed the Black Panther Party based on his 10-point program for social reform.
Freedom Road
Ex-slave and former Union soldier Gideon Jackson represents other ex-slaves at the constitutional convention, and is soon elected to the U.S. Senate despite opposition from white landowners, law enforcement and the KKK. He unites with sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite ex-slaves and white tenant farmers.
Instinct to Kill
Escaped serial killer James Becket, who killed his own father whose expectations he never fulfilled, but now especially targets his wife Theresa 'Tess' and her family, is too good at disguising himself and other deceit for detective Diffs task force. Only one man proves able to fight back in his league: former cop J.T. Dillon, who was already training Tess in self-defense and becomes her lover. Becket decides to find hiding place by kidnapping Diffs wife, and thus enforce a final show-down.
The Loving Story
This documentary film tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court Case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history.
The Black Klansman
After his daughter is killed by the KKK, a black man seeks revenge by passing as white and becoming a Klansman.
The Murder of Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was the leader of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. This film depicts his brutal murder by the Chicago police and its subsequent investigation, but also documents his activities in organizing the Chapter, his public speeches, and the programs he founded for children during the last eighteen months of his life.
A Place Called Today
Racial tensions arise when a black lawyer runs for mayor of a racially divided town.
Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
Through first person accounts and searing archival footage, this documentary tells the story of the local movement and young Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizers who fought not just for voting rights, but for Black Power in Lowndes County, Alabama.
Death of a Prophet
After breaking ties with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X became a man marked for death...and it was just a matter of time before his enemies closed in. Despite death threats and intimidation, Malcolm marched on - continuing to spread the word of equality and brotherhood right up until the moment of his brutal and untimely assassination. Highlighted by newsreel footage and interviews, this is the story of the last twenty-four hours of Malcolm X. Featuring the music of jazz percussionist Max Roach.
The Bad Bunch
A white ex-GI goes to a black ghetto to deliver a letter from his buddy, a black soldier who died in Vietnam. When he arrives there he encounters hostility and trouble from all sides.
Berkeley in the Sixties
A documentary about militant student political activity at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s.
13th
An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.