NSCC Library: Anti-Racism Resources : Explore More

Streaming Documentaries from the NSCC Library

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is a six-part documentary miniseries written and presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr. The series chronicles the full sweep of the African-American experience, from the origins of the transatlantic slave trade to the reelection and second inauguration of President Barack Obama and "explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed — forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds. Commencing with the origins of slavery in Africa, the series moves through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to the present — when America is led by a black president, yet remains a nation deeply divided by race."

You can stream all six episodes through our AVON streaming video database.

Eyes on the Prize Full Series
Watch the full 14 part documentary series "Eyes on the Prize" and follow the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 through the 1980s. Eyes on the Prize recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people — young and old, male and female, northern and southern — who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality — in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans.
John Lewis: Good Trouble
Good Trouble is an account of legendary U.S. Representative John Lewis’ life, legacy and more than 60 years of extraordinary activism. After Lewis petitioned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help integrate a segregated school in his hometown of Troy, Alabama, King sent “the boy from Troy” a round trip bus ticket to meet with him. From that meeting onward, Lewis became one of King’s closest allies. He organized Freedom Rides that left him bloodied or jailed, and stood at the front lines in the historic marches on Washington and Selma. He never lost the spirit of the “boy from Troy” and called on his fellow Americans to get into “good trouble” until his passing on July 17, 2020.

E-Books from the NSCC Library

Color Blind Justice by Mark Elliott
Call Number: NSCC E-Book
Publication Date: 2008-11-30
Civil War officer, Reconstruction "carpetbagger," best-selling novelist, and relentless champion of equal rights, Albion Tourgee battled his entire life for racial justice. In this biography, Mark Elliott offers an insightful portrait of a fearless lawyer, jurist, and writer, who fought for equality long after most Americans had abandoned the ideals of Reconstruction.Elliott provides an account of Tourgee's life, from his childhood in the Western Reserve region of Ohio, to his years as a North Carolina judge during Reconstruction, to his memorable role as lead plaintiff's counsel in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson . Tourgee's coined the phrase that justice should be "color-blind," and his career was one long campaign to made good on that belief.Through the lens of Tourgee's life, Elliott illuminates the war of ideas about race that raged through the United States in the nineteenth century, from the heated debate over slavery before the Civil War, through the conflict over aid to freedmen during Reconstruction, to the backlash toward theend of the century, when Tourgee saw his country retreat from the goals of equality and freedom and utterly repudiate the work of Reconstruction.
Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power by Simon Balto
Call Number: NSCC E-Book
Publication Date: 2019
In July 1919, an explosive race riot forever changed Chicago. For years, black southerners had been leaving the South as part of the Great Migration. Their arrival in Chicago drew the ire and scorn of many local whites, including members of the city's political leadership and police department, who generally sympathized with white Chicagoans and viewed black migrants as a problem population. During Chicago's Red Summer riot, patterns of extraordinary brutality, negligence, and discriminatory policing emerged to shocking effect. Those patterns shifted in subsequent decades, but the overall realities of a racially discriminatory police system persisted. In this history of Chicago from 1919 to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s, Simon Balto narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression.
The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the Soith by Brian Purnell Komozi Woodard' Jeanne Theoharis
Call Number: NSCC E-Book
Publication Date: 2019
Did American racism originate in the liberal North? An inquiry into the system of institutionalized racism created by Northern Jim Crow Jim Crow was not a regional sickness, it was a national cancer. Even at the high point of twentieth century liberalism in the North, Jim Crow racism hid in plain sight. Perpetuated by colorblind arguments about "cultures of poverty," policies focused more on black criminality than black equality.
Black Power and the American People: The Cultural Legacy of Black Radicalism by Rafael Torrubia
Call Number: NSCC Ebook
Publication Date: 2016
Beginning with the folk-narratives told through song by slaves in the plantations, through the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and 30s, the era of Malcolm X, the African-American art and fashion of the late sixties and 'soul music' and politics in the 1970s, Black Power and the American People will be the first comprehensive cultural history of the movement.