Frederick O'Neal
A documentary look at the confluence of the Red scare, McCarthyism, and blacklists with the post-war activism by African Americans seeking more and better roles on radio, television, and stage. It begins in Harlem, measures the impact of Paul Robeson and the campaign to bring him down, looks at the role of HUAC, J. Edgar Hoover and of journalists such as Ed Sullivan, and ends with a tribute to Canada Lee. Throughout are interviews with men and women who were there, including Dick Campbell of the Rose McLendon Players and Fredrick O'Neal of the American Negro Theatre. In the 1940s and 1950s, anti-Communism was one more tool to maintain Jim Crow and to keep down African-Americans.
A reporter and a New York City cop team up to find out who is trying to assassinate a UN leader. Film was a re-edit of two Kraft Suspense Theatre episodes.
A motel owner in Texas is accused of raping a civil-rights worker from Sweden.
This pioneering film in the history of African-American cinema, released two years before "A Raisin In The Sun", is the coming-of-age story of a black high-school student living in a middle-class white neighborhood in the late '50s.
Anna Lucasta is a 1959 film directed by Arnold Laven. Based on the 1944 play by Philip Yordan, this drama follows the trials and tribulations of Anna Lucasta (Eartha Kitt), a young black woman who turns to prostitution after her father kicks her out of the house.
As Kenya's Mau Mau uprising tears the country apart, former childhood friends Kimani (Sidney Poitier), a native, and Peter (Rock Hudson), a British colonist, find themselves on opposite sides of the struggle in this provocative drama. Though each is devoted to his cause, both wish for a more moderate path -- but their hopes for a peaceful resolution are thwarted by rage, colonial arrogance and escalating violence on both sides.
Wandering around America, young Nick Adams encounters a washed-up punch-drunk boxer known as "The Battler".
The Biddle brothers, shot while robbing a gas station, are taken to the prison ward of the County Hospital; Ray Biddle, a rabid racist, wants no treatment from black resident Dr. Luther Brooks. When brother John dies while Luther tries to save him, Ray is certain it's murder and becomes obsessed with vengeance. But there are black racists around too, and the situation slides rapidly toward violence.
Pinky, a light skinned black woman, returns to her grandmother's house in the South after graduating from a Northern nursing school. Pinky tells her grandmother that she has been "passing" for white while at school in the North. In addition, Pinky has fallen in love with a young white doctor, Dr. Thomas Adams, who knows nothing about her black heritage.
