Best movies like The Summer of Ben Tyler
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like The Summer of Ben Tyler Starring James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Len Cariou, Julia McIlvaine, and more. If you liked The Summer of Ben Tyler then you may also like: Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored, A Raisin in the Sun, Carbon Copy, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Driving Miss Daisy 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.
Set early during World War II, the film has a lot to say about love, honor, relationships, commitment and power. Keeping their promise to their dying black housekeeper, a white family takes in her teenage mentally-slow son. The movie details the joys and conflicts the family faces as a result of their decision.
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A Raisin in the Sun
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.
Carbon Copy
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.
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment
During a two-day period before and after the University of Alabama integration crisis, the film uses five camera crews to follow President John F. Kennedy, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, Alabama governor George Wallace, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and the students Vivian Malone and James Hood. As Wallace has promised to personally block the two black students from enrolling in the university, the JFK administration discusses the best way to react to it, without rousing the crowd or making Wallace a martyr for the segregationist cause.
Driving Miss Daisy
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.
For One Night
Their town always had two proms, one for the whites and one for the blacks. When both proms wanted the same DJ, Brianna McCallister suggested combining the proms, which would also mean more money for decorations. However, her idea shook the town up, especially after a white student was let off for the same offense that a black student was suspended for. Can the town overcome racial tensions and finally combine the two proms?
Mississippi Burning
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
A couple's attitudes are challenged when their daughter brings home a fiancé who is black.
Hurry Sundown
Following the Second World War, a northern cannery combine negotiates for the purchase of a large tract of uncultivated Georgia farmland. The major portion of the land is owned by Julie Ann Warren and has already been optioned by her unscrupulous, draft dodging husband, Henry. Now the combine must also obtain two smaller plots - one owned by Henry's cousin Rad McDowell, a combat veteran with a wife and family; the other by Reeve Scott, a young black man whose mother had been Julie's childhood Mammy. But neither Rad nor Reeve is interested in selling and they form an unprecedented black and white partnership to improve their land. Although infuriated by the turn of events, Henry remains determined to push through the big land deal. And when Reeve's mother Rose dies, Henry tries to persuade his wife to charge Reeve with illegal ownership of his property, confident the the bigoted Judge Purcell will rule against a Negro.
Mischief Night
Everyone has Halloween, but in Yorkshire, they have Mischief Night, where madness and mayhem rule. In the course of one night, the barriers that separate two families—one white, one Asian—come tumbling down in a blaze of crime, clubbing, love and fireworks—changing all their lives forever.
Black or White
A grieving widower is drawn into a custody battle over his granddaughter, whom he helped raise her entire life.
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.
Shadrach
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.
The Long Walk Home
Two women, black and white, in 1955 Montgomery Alabama, must decide what they are going to do in response to the famous bus boycott led by Martin Luther King.
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.
Crisis at Central High
The historic federal-state controversy over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as seen through the eyes of Elizabeth Huckaby, one of the teachers and girls' vice principal.
The Sky Is Gray
Drama - From Ernest J. Gaines, author of "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," comes a deceptively simple, yet emotionally complex tale of a young boy's discovery of what it's like to be black in Louisiana during the 1940's. James, the boy in question, has a raging toothache that necessitates a trip to the dentist. His mother (played by Emmy-winner Olivia Cole), accompanies James to town on an eye-opening odyssey where the boy gains valuable insights into poverty, racism - and his own sense of pride. With an exciting musical score by Webster Lewis, this multi-award winning film explores a child's discovery that the world is a complicated place... where things are never truly black or white... only shades of gray. - Olivia Cole, James Bond III, Margaret Avery
The Ernest Green Story
Follows the story of Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine who were the first blacks to integrate into an all white school.
Ruby's Bucket of Blood
A Louisiana juke joint owner loses her star entertainer and hires a white singer to fill in.
Good Fences
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.
Bopha!
In this story of a black policeman during South African apartheid, Danny Glover plays the cop, who believes he's trying to help his people, even while serving as a pawn of the racist government. When his son gets involved in the anti-apartheid movement, he finds himself torn between his family and what he believes is his duty.
The Tuskegee Airmen
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.
10,000 Black Men Named George
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.
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.
Flame in the Streets
Flame in the Streets is a 1961 British drama film directed by Roy Ward Baker. Racial tensions manifest themselves at home, work and on the streets during Bonfire Night in the burgeoning West Indian community of early 1960s Britain. Trades union leader (Mills) fights for the rights of a black worker but struggles with the news that his own daughter is planning to marry a West Indian, much against his own logic and the prejudice of his wife.
Prom Night in Mississippi
A high school in a small-town in Mississippi prepares for its first integrated senior prom.
Paris Trout
Paris Trout is a vile Southern bigot. He owns a store and is a loanshark. He often sues people, and so his lawyer, Harry Seagraves, eventually meets Paris' wife Hannah. A former schoolteacher, she made the mistake of her life when she married Paris, who brutalizes her. Soon Paris goes beyond the overgenerous bounds of what a man in his position can get away with even in the segregated South, leading to a spiral of perverse insanity.
Sister, Sister
Heated confrontations and revelations result when a divorcee returns with her young son to the home of her two sisters.
Resting Place
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.
The Secret Path
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.
The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson
A film about the early life of the baseball star in the army, particulary his court-martial for insubordination regarding segragation.
As Summers Die
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.
Free, White and 21
A motel owner in Texas is accused of raping a civil-rights worker from Sweden.
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.