Guides: Social Justice: Media

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Online Access

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Podcasts

Created Equal
"Hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Henderson, Created Equal explores the strings of inequality that run through the American experience. Each episode explores the question: How did we arrive at this moment in history?" From WDET.

Audiovisual Spotlight on Detroit

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
"What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American writer, activist, and philosopher in Detroit. Rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America's past and its potentially radical future. [This documentary presents] Boggs's lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond."

Watch Online

Freedom Riders: Could You Get On the Bus?
Historical documentary film based on the book Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault.

Popular DVDs in the Library

Blackkklansman
Spike Lee film tells the story of Ron Stallworth, an African-American police officer from Colorado who successfully managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan and became the head of the local chapter.
The Hate U Give
Based on the YA book by Angie Thomas. Starr Carter navigates the perilous waters between her poor, black neighborhood and her prestigious, mainly white private school. This all changes when she finds herself in the middle of racial activism after her best friend is shot by police officers, and she's forced to make a decision. Allow the media to skewer her friend to protect the status quo, or stand up and tell the truth in memory of Khalil?
Fruitvale Station
Oscar wakes up on New Years's Eve and decides to try and be a better person to those he cares about. The day goes well until an encounter with police officers puts him in the national spotlight.
Do the Right Thing
Traces the course of a single day on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It's the hottest day of the year, a scorching 24-hour period that will change the lives of its residents forever.
John Q
John Q. is a factory worker facing financial hardship as a result of reduced hours in his workplace. He and his wife soon discover that their child is in need of an emergency heart transplant. Although they have an HMO, they are informed that their policy doesn't cover such an expensive procedure. Unable to raise the money for the surgury himself and with no recourse but to take his son home to die, John snaps and holds the staff and patients of the hospital's emergency room hostage at gunpoint.
Dallas Buyers Club
Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof's free-wheeling life was overturned in 1985 when he was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Shunned and ostracized by many old friends and bereft of government-approved medicines, he decided to take matters in his own hands, tracking down alternative treatments from all over the world by means both legal and illegal. Bypassing the establishment, he joined forces with an unlikely band of renegades and outcasts and established a hugely successful "buyers' club."
Selma
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historical struggle to secure voting rights for all people. A dangerous and terrifying campaign that culminated with an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1964.
Milk
His life changed history, his courage changed lives. Harvey Milk is a middle-aged New Yorker who, after moving to San Francisco, becomes a Gay Rights activist and city politician. On his third attempt, he is elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977, the first openly-gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. The following year, both he and the city's mayor, George Moscone, are shot to death by former city supervisor, Dan White, who blames his former colleagues for denying White's attempt to rescind his resignation from the board. Based on the true story of Harvey Milk.
Hidden Figures
As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history. Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson crossed all gender, race, and professional lines while their brilliance and desire to dream big, beyond anything ever accomplished before by the human race, firmly cemented them in U.S. history as true American heroes.

Documentaries in the Library

An Inconvenient Truth
Former Vice President Al Gore explains the facts of global warming, presents arguments that the dangers of global warning have reached the level of crisis, and addresses the efforts of certain interests to discredit the anti-global warming cause. Between lecture segments, Gore discusses his personal commitment to the environment, sharing anecdotes from his experiences.

The Central Park Five
In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park. The Central Park Five tells the story of that horrific crime, the rush to judgment by the police, a media clamoring for sensational stories and an outraged public, and the five lives upended by this miscarriage of justice.
Fahrenheit 9/11
Through actual footage, interviews, and declassified documents, Michael Moore illustrates the connections President Bush has to the royal house of Saud of Saudia Arabia and the bin Laden's, how the President got elected in fraudulent circumstances and then proceeded to blunder through his duties while ignoring warnings of the looming betrayal by his foreign partners.
Food, Inc.
The film seeks to demonstrate how the incentive for corporate profit can overwhelm consumer health needs, as well as the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and the environment. Reveals various details of food ingredients and additives, and how contemporary mass production methods of food affects U.S. culture.
Titicut Follies
Filmed at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, Bridgewater, scenes of the daily life and treatment of the men are interspersed with shots from the inmates' talent show.
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
"...archival footage that puts the audience on the ground with the activists and the remarkably insightful interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project to explore ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from a grassroots perspective--how a small group of men and women of all races and classes, came together to change the world and save each other's lives..."