African American Movies and DVD's

African American movies have often focused on the troubling history of blacks in America. As most people know, Africans were taken from their homeland and transported to the United States where they were forced to work as unpaid laborers and were frequently abused and subjected to inhumane treatment. It was not until Abraham Lincoln composed his famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that slaves were officially set free. African Movies

Although African Americans were considered free under the law, many US states (most of them in the south) continued to discriminate against black people and treated them as second-class citizens. In fact, Jim Crow laws were established in many southern states with the tacit intention of keeping whites separate from blacks.

This meant that whites and blacks were forced to attend separate schools, drink from different water fountains and even had to eat in different restaurants. This unequal treatment was not seriously challenged until Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. This single seminal event put in motion the civil rights movement, which was spearheaded by exceptional human beings like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Many African American movies have chronicled the experiences of blacks in American and have attempted to make sense of the discrimination that they have suffered. One of the most popular African American movies was called Roots. The movie was actually one of the first miniseries to appear on network television and it remains one of the highest-rated programs in network history. The program would go on to win nine Emmy awards as well as a number of Golden Globes and Peabody Wards.

The movie tells the story of an African warrior named Kunta Kinte who is taken from his home and forced to work on an American plantation. The series follows the protagonist for several generations until his great grandchildren finally gain their independence after the Civil War.

To this day Roots ranks as one of the most respected African American DVDs. Perhaps that is because it centers on an oppressed group of people fighting for their freedom, which is clearly a universal theme. The miniseries was based on a book by renowned author and journalist Alex Haley

Nowadays, however, most African American movies no longer focus on slavery or even on the civil rights movement. Rather, they concern themselves with the plight of blacks in urban environments. These movies tend to portray characters that are surrounded by drugs and crimes and are desperately trying to fight their way out of the ghetto.

One of the most powerful African American DVDs of the past twenty years was the film "Boyz n the Hood". This movie tells the story of a young man who is trying to survive on the violent streets of South Central, Los Angeles. The film is set in the early Nineteen Nineties when violent gangs roamed the streets of the city and young men frequently turned up dead for no other reason than that they were wearing the wrong color clothes. The movie remains a powerful example of the seemingly intractable problems in the African American community.