Best movies like The Sky Is Gray

John is a man of many talents, including one forbidden skill: he can read. When he teaches a young slave girl named Sarny to read and write, she learns an unforgettable lesson about the power of words and the true meaning of freedom.

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.

Focusing on the bonding between three female (an African American female, a half African American half Latino American female, and a Latino American female) high school members of Brooklyn's "Jackie Robinson Steppers Marching Band" and the choices the girls face once their school closes down because of the need for asbestos removal. This film is about a host of topics, not least of which is the hard-work involved in maintaining

Dreams can make a life worth living, but they can also be dashed by bad decisions. This is the crossroads whare the Younger family find themselves when their father passes away and leaves them with $10,000 in life insurance money. Should they buy a new home for the family? Perhaps a liquor store? While no choice is easy, life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s is even harder.

An aspiring dancer and her two wicked sisters resent their mother's love for a foster daughter.

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.

A middle-aged married wealthy white corporate executive is surprised to discover that he has a working-class black teen-age son who wants to be adopted into the almost-exclusively-white upper-middle-class community of San Marino, California.

A young, white school teacher is assigned to Yamacraw Island, an isolated fishing community off the coast of South Carolina, populated mostly by poor black families. He finds that the basically illiterate, neglected children there know so little of the world outside their island.

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 story of an old Jewish widow named Daisy Werthan and her relationship with her black chauffeur, Hoke. From an initial mere work relationship grew in 25 years a strong friendship between the two very different characters in a time when those types of relationships where shunned.

In a rural town in Louisiana, a black Master Sergeant is found shot to death just outside the local Army Base. Military lawyer, Captain Davenport—also a black man—is sent from Washington to conduct an investigation. Facing an uncooperative chain of command and fearful black troops, Davenport must battle with deceit and prejudice in order to find out exactly who really did kill the Master Sergeant.

Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.

A black champion boxer and his white female companion struggle to survive while the white boxing establishment looks for ways to knock him down.

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 story, set in Kansas during the 1920's, covers less than a year in the life of a black teenager, and documents the veritable deluge of events which force him into sudden manhood. The family relationships and enmities, the fears, frustrations and ambitions of the black teenager in small-town America are explored with a strong statement about human values.

The life of Blues and folk singer Huddie Leadbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly is recounted. Covering the good times and bad from his 20s to 40s. Much of that time was spent on chain gangs in the south. Even in prison he became well known for the songs he had composed and sung during and before the time he spent there.

"Selma," as in Alabama, the place where segregation in the South was at its worst, leading to a march that ended in violence, forcing a famous statement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that ultimately led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

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.

In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing a a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince school teacher go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.

An African American couple (Winfield and Alice) adopt two orphans from a Vietnamese refugee camp. After twenty-two years, the children are reunited with their birth mother, bringing deeply submerged resentments and misconceptions to the surface and forcing the characters to reexamine their identity and relationships in both comical and poignant situations.

In 1965 Alabama, an 11 year old girl is touched by a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and becomes a devout follower. But her resolution is tested when she joins others in the famed march from Selma to Montgomery.

In 1935, 99-year-old former slave Shadrach asks to be buried on the soil where he was born to slavery, and that land is owned by the large Dabney family, consisting of Vernon, Trixie and their seven children, and to bury a black man on that land is a violation of strict Virginia law.

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.

Earl Pilcher Jr., runs an equipment rental outfit in Arkansas, lives with his wife and kids and parents, and rarely takes off his gimme cap. His mother dies, leaving a letter explaining he's not her natural son, but the son of a Black woman who died in childbirth; plus, he has a half brother Ray, in Chicago, she wants him to visit. Earl makes the trip, initially receiving a cold welcome from Ray and Ray's son, Virgil. His birth mother's sister, Aunt T., an aged and blind matriarch, takes Earl in tow and insists that the family open up to him.

A number of slaves risk their lives to escape their masters with their only help coming from the famous secret slave escape network.

A regular day in a Louisiana sugarcane plantation changes course when a local white farmer is shot in self defense. A group of old, black men takes a courageous step by coming forward en masse to take responsibility for the killing of a white racist, whom one of their members has shot. As the sheriff confronts the suspects, the young plantation owner stands alone in her daring defense of this group of men, provoking racial tension that makes a compelling drama.

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.

The unintentional shooting by police of a star basketball player has profound personal, political and community repercussions in this acclaimed adaptation of the novel Hog Butcher by Ronald Fair. This was one of the more thoughtful urban dramas produced at the height of the "blaxploitation" craze. Also released under the title Hit the Open Man, it features the screen debut of Laurence Fishburne, who was barely a teenager at the time.

In February, 1962, as the civil rights movement reaches Bayonne, Louisiana, a New York journalist arrives to interview Jane Pittman, who has just turned 110. She tells him her story dating back to her earliest memories before slavery ended. In between the chapters of her life, the present-day struggles of Blacks in Bayonne, urged on by Jimmy, are dramatized.

In the aftermath of the terrible Civil War which has devastated the South, Amanda America Dixon returns home to find she has become the sole heir to a vast cotton plantation. But the dreadful secret which has blighted her life threatens to deprive her of the birthright which her beloved father David had struggled for so long to create. Raised by her father and grandmother to be the perfect white Southern Belle, Amanda's true mother was a black slave Julia. Confronted with the forces of greed and bigotry, Amanda has to face not only the hatred of a racist world, but the complex truth of a family whose lives have been built on a lie.

Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson are the greatest players in the Colored leagues, and everyone expects that one of them will make the leap to the Major Leagues, now that there is talk of integration. But, unexpectedly, it's the rookie with the army record, Jackie Robinson, that gets tapped to be the first.

A 21-year-old reformed gangster's devotion to his family and his future is put to the test when he is released from prison and returns to his old stomping grounds in Watts, Los Angeles.

Follows the story of Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine who were the first blacks to integrate into an all white school.

Set in the 1970s, Tom Spader is an attorney who is determined to end what he has dubbed "the colored man's losing streak." When his winning of a high-profile case thrusts him into the limelight, he decides to moves his wife and their two kids out of their mixed lower-middle-class town and into the posh enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut.

The true story of the US Government's 1932 Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments, in which a group of black test subjects were allowed to die, despite a cure having been developed.

During the Second World War, a special project is begun by the US Army Air Corps to integrate African American pilots into the Fighter Pilot Program. Known as the "Tuskegee Airman" for the name of the airbase at which they were trained, these men were forced to constantly endure harassement, prejudice, and much behind the scenes politics until at last they were able to prove themselves in combat.

An intimate look at life in the ghetto: Johnny Williams is a house painter who moonlights as a poet, struggling to financially and emotionally support his cancer-ridden wife Mattie. But times are tough and the poverty-troubled streets are even tougher, and it takes every ounce of Johnny's love and courage for the couple to make it through their strife, finding redemption in the River Niger.

In the 1920s, the rights of American workers to join a labor union was still considered an open question, and African-Americans were routinely denied their civil and economic rights. 10,000 Black Men Named George, the title, refers to the fact Pullman porters were often called "George" by white passengers, which was considered a racial slur.

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.

An all-black inner city school has to become an integrated school. Few dozen white kids are transfered there, but the black students are aggressively opposed to this. The school then approaches a tough black teacher for help.

Set in the 1940's, James Earl Jones as an an old clockmaker faces racism and is tried for murder when the racist is killed. However, Kevin Kilner comes forward and claims to have commmitted the crime in self defense. All the while, Kilner's family life is in disarray with various crises including his daughter catching meningitis.

A television movie set in Rockville, Georgia, in 1972. Major Kendall Laird, a Survival Assistance Officer, arrives in this sleepy little town with the body of Lieutenant Dwyte Johnson, a Vietnam war hero. It's Laird's job to help Johnson's parents bury their son. But since the dead hero was black, his parents are turned away by the white racists who maintain the town's "all-white" cemetery.

A young girl stuck in a horrific cycle of familial violence finds the power to build her own future from the place she least suspected in an inspiring tale of friendship and devotion starring Ossie Davis and Della Reese, and directed by Bruce Pittman. For years Jo Ann Foley (Madeline Zima) has suffered under the cruel hand of her ruthless grandfather. A chance meeting with kindly neighbors Honey (Reese) and her husband Too Tall (Davis) finds things looking up, however, as the nurturing couple provides Jo Ann with the support needed to break free of her grandfather's tyrannical grip. As the future lies before her ready to be molded however she sees fit, Jo Ann must now find the courage to let go of the past and seek the redemption needed to start life anew.

A film about the early life of the baseball star in the army, particulary his court-martial for insubordination regarding segragation.

Set in a sleepy Southern Louisiana town in 1959, a lawyer, searches for justice as he volunteers to help a black woman whose property is being threatened by the Holts, the first family of the town, after she refuses to sell her valuable land.

This made-for-TV movie dramatizes the historic boycott of public buses in the 1950s, led by civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A poor, elderly white woman living in a tenement in a black ghetto is befriended by a neighborhood boy, and the two of them form a mutually beneficial relationship: he provides her companionship and protection, and she becomes the mother he never had.

Set in the 1960s, Christmas in Canaan is a drama about a black family and a white family that learn to love each other out of their Christian beliefs.

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.

Out on the lacrosse pitch, wealthy but troubled Jesse and poor but driven Tosha form an easy and deep bond, but their relationship is threatened once they enter the hallways of an elite prep school they attend in Washington, D.C. There, they must work to overcome racial and other tensions in their classmates, and in themselves, if they hope to keep their friendship alive.