Black Lives Matter: 15 Works of Film, Music, and Literature to Help You Better Understand

The shut up and sing crowd doesn’t like hearing it but art has never been about entertainment.

Sure, it can be. There’s a place in art for escapism and mindless enjoyment, but that’s never been the point. Art is a means of conveyance, a way to speak truth and to spread ideas. Art is a mirror into which the artist asks us to look and to reflect. Art expresses. Art moves. Art challenges.

And there are times in history during which we must all be challenged. Many of us have only to look outside our windows and into the streets we call home to see that. The current spate of protests raging across the country, arising out from the anger of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, signal the potential beginning of a new consciousness and new direction. For too long have the cries and horror of the black community gone unheard and unreflected upon.

America has produced generations of artists who have spoken up and spoken out over the centuries, and they’ve left behind a legacy of films, music, and literature at which we can look and from which we can learn. And it’s true, none of us with white skin can ever know, truly know, what it’s like to live as a black person in America. But for those who want the opportunity to learn, for those who seek to try, for those who wish to understand a little more, the arts, as always, have you covered.

Movies

Malcolm X

Malcolm X was and remains the civil rights leader most misunderstood by white America. His was an incendiary rhetoric that provoked and challenged. He called for civil disobedience and direct action. He encouraged not just his followers but all black Americans to stop asking for justice and start demanding it. Hearing him speak and reading his words can be difficult, but it’s also incredibly necessary. Director Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic, based on Malcolm X’s autobiography, is an eternal testament to the life and tribulations of this prophet of the justice movement. Starring Denzel Washington in the titular role, Malcolm X remains a tribute to one of the most important voices of the last century, a voice that too often is swept aside for fear of making people uncomfortable. Even now, almost 30 years since the film’s release, Malcolm X speaks to the necessity of standing up to injustice, “by any means necessary.”

Panther

Like Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party is another woefully misunderstood entity in the quest for civil rights. Director Mario Van Peebles, alongside his father, writer/director/actor/activist Melvin Van Peebles, brought a bit of clarity to the story of the Black Panthers with this film from 1995. Dramatizing the events that led to the founding of the Black Panther Party by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, Panther invites us to look at what was really said and promoted by the organization. We’re asked to look at the community organizing, the school lunch programs, the calls for justice, the cries for peace, and the quest for equality. At the same time, we’re asked to consider the fight against them, the demonization by the press and media, and the violence perpetuated against them by police and federal agents. At the end of the day, they were an organization that promoted peace on top of self-defense, encouraging all who fought—and fight—for justice to open their eyes and see what is—and has been—going on.

13th

Ava DuVernay’s incendiary documentary, which discusses the rise of the prison industrial complex in the United States of America, might be the single most important film produced so far this century. If you take away nothing from this article, watch no movie, listen to no song, read no book, please watch and reflect upon this film. DuVernay traces the rising tide of racism in post-slavery America and its ties to current practices of incarceration and militarization against black communities in recent decades. It would be impossible for me to overstate the importance of 13th and DuVernay’s work and anyone who is even a little bit serious of trying to understand where the rage is coming from would be well served in sitting down and paying attention to this remarkable, singular film.

Fruitvale Station

In the early morning hours of January 1, 2009, 22-year-old Oscar Grant III was shot and killed by BART police at Fruitvale Station. Footage of his death quickly hit news stations and the internet leading to mass outrage and protests in the Bay Area and beyond. Fruitvale Station, the debut from feature from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, and starring frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant, takes us through the emotional final hours of Grant’s life and examines the events leading up to his tragic death. It’s a hard, emotional film that forces us to confront the reality that black men and women and children across the nation have lived with for decades putting an emotional face on police brutality and its devastating consequences.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Based on the novel by legendary black writer James Baldwin, director Barry Jenkins’s follow up to Moonlight is an extraordinarily powerful and in depth exploration of the reality of police abuse, the kind of abuse that has taken place for centuries in this country. It follows a young woman’s struggle to find justice after the father of her child is wrongfully accused of a crime by racist police. Slow moving and deliberate, Jenkins manages to capture the raw power of Baldwin’s words, translating it beautifully for the screen. This is a film about the human cost of injustice and price paid when police show callous indifference to the communities they’re charged with protecting. Raw, emotional, and powerful, If Beale Street Could Talk allows us a glimpse inside an anguish so few of us ever have to worry about.

Music

Lead Belly, “The Bourgeois Blues”

Written in 1937 by legendary and influential blues musician Huddie William Leadbetter, better known as Lead Belly, “The Bourgeois Blues” is a powerful statement against the Jim Crow laws that prevailed across the nation at the time. Many of the lyrics, however, still ring true today. “Home of the brave, land of the free/I don’t want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie” he sings, echoing the calls for equality that have rippled across the near nine decades since its release. It’s hard not to hear it as a musical precursor to the cry of black lives matter that ring out today, one that screams at the callous indifference and horrific treatment the black community has experienced at the hands of the white power structure.

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

With lyrics coming from a poem by Russian Jewish immigrant Abel Meeropol, Billie Holiday released this incendiary anti-lynching track in 1939, and its lyrics are sadly as relevant today as they were back then. Meeropol’s words are powerful, pulling no punches. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hangs from the poplar trees.” Coupled with Holiday’s incomparable voice, and the mournful accompaniment, Holiday captures the rage and terror and fear that permeated the black community at the time. Hers is a voice that, too, echoes through history, giving voice to the anguish that still pervades across the nation.

Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

Written in response to the murder of activist Medgar Evers in 1963 and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that took the lives for four little girls, Nina Simone lends her powerful voice in anger and frustration. “Picket lines/school boy cots/they try and say it’s a communist plot/all I want is equality/for my sister, my brother, my people, and me,” she sings, before raging against the cries to “do it slow,” condemning the calls for incremental justice. Real justice has never been incremental, however. Not in 1964, and not in 2020. And today, just as then, the cries for justice and the cries for peace aren’t part of organized subversion. These are grass roots efforts raising their voices to speak out against the injustices that plague our nation—and have always plagued our nation. This is musical activism as only Nina could do it, and it remains a transcendent piece of protest art to this day.

Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come”

Also released in 1964, Sam Cooke’s classic, considered by many to be one of the best American songs ever written, was written, in part, out of the outrage felt by Cooke when he and his entourage were denied admittance into a motel in Louisiana. Cooke’s soulful voice sings heartbreaking lines like, “I go to the movie, and I go downtown/somebody keep tellin’ me don’t hang around.” Throughout the song, however, Cooke also channels a sense of hope, reminding us that even though, “it’s been a long time coming” he still believes that “a change is gonna come.” And he’s right. The winds have progress have never been stopped. They’ve been slowed down, they’ve been muddled, and they’ve been obfuscated, but change has always come. And it always will. Sometimes it takes a lot to fight the forces that would seek to quiet the winds, and sometimes that’s not pretty, but the winds of change can never be stopped for long. That’s something we all need to remember.

Labelle, “What Can I Do For You?”

The legendary Patti Labelle’s first group, Labelle, released their album Nightbirds in 1974. Largely remembered today for the hit song, “Lady Marmalade,” the album also featured this raucous, funky, powerful call for equality. “They talk about love, love, love,” Labelle and co-members Nora Hendryx and Sarah Dash sing. “They lie about love, love, love,” they continue, admonishing those who talk of peace and love without living up to their words. In an emotional call to arms they harmonize, “we need power,” reminding us that it’s not just about acceptance, and that it’s about paying more than lip service. If change is truly gonna come, it needs to start at the top, with the dismantling of power structures that work not for the many but for the few.

Books

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

First published in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by a fugitive slave, is a sort of novel/memoir hybrid, so written to keep the identity of its author a secret. Within the pages are one of the most moving, gut wrenching portraits of life on the slave plantations ever written. While the book was first used as a motivator for abolitionist organizations and groups, the 160 years since its release has seen Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl achieve a new status as a foundational work of black literature and a testament to the importance of hearing the black experience.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

One of the cornerstones of works written during the Harlem Renaissance, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a brutal exploration of the legacy of violence endured by the black community for centuries. It tells the story of Janie Crawford, a black woman searching for a place in a world that doesn’t want to make one for her, and the trials and tribulations she both lives through and witnesses over the course of her life. Hurston’s novel is often horrific and heartbreaking, but it stands as a powerful testament to the generational injustices inflicted upon black Americans.

Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class

This concise work from activist Angela Davis breaks down the history of women’s liberation movements to show how racism and classism always work to keep poor women of color on the margins. This is a powerful work of intersectionality that takes an unflinching look at how, “Black women…were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage.” It stands today as an indictive against the forces who claim to want justice but still work to suppress black voices and expression.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the best writer working in America today. The eight essays collected here, written for The Atlantic during the years of Barak Obama’s presidency, cover topics from the mass incarceration of blacks to Michelle Obama, and includes Coates’s convincing call on the necessity of reparations for slave labor. Coates’s writing sings off the page and is backed by heavy documentation and research. Anyone looking to understand the perspective of modern life as a black American absolutely needs to read this book, in addition to everything else Coates has ever written.

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning

In Stamped from the Beginning, historian Ibram X. Kendi examines the history and proliferation of the racism and its intellectual justification. This towering book explores how racist ideals regarding the inferiority of the African race translated to supposedly scholarly and scientific arguments that propped up and justified those beliefs. Far from sticking only to the past, however, Kendi follows that threat into the present day, exploring the rhetoric of being tough on crime or fighting the war on drugs shares the same inherent ideas of inferiority that were used to justify slavery. Throughout it all, Kendi challenges readers to confront their own thoughts to find their own biases and racism. It’s difficult, but necessary. Because the truth is that none of this can end until we examine ourselves to untangle our own preconceived notions and ideas. It’s not just essential reading for anyone seeking to understand, it’s absolutely requisite.

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