Best films about Civil Rights / Racism

On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone's hate and bigotry smolders and builds until it explodes into violence.

A chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965.

Biographical epic of the controversial and influential Black Nationalist leader, from his early life and career as a small-time gangster, to his ministry as a member of the Nation of Islam and his eventual assassination.

A documentary of the notorious racial terrorist 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of the African American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement, which killed four young girls.

Two FBI agents with wildly different styles arrive in Mississippi to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights activists.

Friends and family of a married Black architect react in different ways to his affair with an Italian secretary.

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.

A documentary of the successful career and assassination of San Francisco's first elected gay city supervisor.

A dramatization of author Alex Haley's family line from ancestor Kunta Kinte's enslavement to his descendants' liberation.

In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

Follows the lives of three young males living in the Crenshaw ghetto of Los Angeles, dissecting questions of race, relationships, violence, and future prospects.

The history of the depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood films.

A chronicle of the events surrounding a 1975 shootout at the Pine Ridge reservation in S. Dakota where two FBI agents were killed.

A documentary about the American Civil Rights Movement from 1952 to 1965.

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

The history of the Gay and Lesbian community before the Stonewall riots began the major gay rights movement.

Documentary/Historical retrospective of the Gay Rights movement from the 1969 Stonewall riots to the present.

A widowed lawyer in Depression-era Alabama defends a black man against a false rape charge while teaching his young children about the sad reality of prejudice.

A Mississippi district attorney and the widow of Medgar Evers struggle to finally bring a white supremacist to justice for the 1963 murder of the civil rights leader.

Story of a black woman in the South who was born into slavery in the 1850s and lives to become a part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.

A frustrated African-American TV writer proposes a blackface minstrel show in protest, but to his chagrin, it becomes a hit.

Never-before-seen testimony is included in this documentary on Emmett Louis Till, who, in 1955, was brutally murdered after he whistled at a white woman.

A substantial insurance payment could mean either financial salvation or personal ruin for a poor black family.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era when he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers and faces considerable racism in the process.