Lynching: Selected Resources: Films

This documentary takes a historical look into the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” first made famous by Billie Holiday. Abel Meeropol’s (he used the pseudonym Lewis Allen) a school teacher from the Bronx wrote the poem, and later set it to music. The film examines the development of the song, as well as a look at the history of lynching.

This is the film that helped the United States Justice Department reopen the case in which a 14 year-old Chicago boy was lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Some argue that this lynching touched off the modern civil rights movement. Three months after Till's body was recovered, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy who whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, was a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. Although Till's killers were apprehended, they were quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury and proceeded to sell their story to a journalist, providing grisly details of the murder. Three months after Till's body was recovered, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

This film focuses on the 1955 lynching in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the 1955-56 bus boycott which took place in Montgomery, Ala.

Chronicles the life of Ida B. Wells, an early Afro-American activist who protested lynchings, unfair treatment of Afro-American soldiers, and other examples of racism and injustice toward Afro-Americans around the turn of the century.

In Jasper, Texas on June 7, 1998, James Byrd Jr., an African-American, was chained to the back of a truck and dragged three miles to his death. Three local white men were charged with his murder. Over the course of three separate murder trials, from January through December 1999, two producers documented the town of Jasper. A black crew filmed the black residents. A white crew filmed the white residents.

In August, 1930, a 16 year-old African-American named James Cameron survived a lynching. Now, 65 years later, Cameron tells his compelling story in vivid detail.

This film looks into various types of intolerance in the United States. Among them are religious, ethnic, and racial. The historical overview begins in the colonial times and continues to the present day. It does mention atrocities like the 19th century massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, the World War Two internment of Japanese-Americans, and the Leo Frank lynching in Georgia in 1913.

The earliest surviving feature directed by an African-American, Within our gates tells the story of a young African-American woman who seeks a Northern white patron for a Southern school for Black children. The scenes of lynching and attempted White-on-Black rape may be a response to D. W. Griffith's The birth of a nation.

Documents the history of lynching in the United States. The film is punctuated by reproductions of picture postcards depicting lynches, collected by James Cameron, who has created a museum in Milwaukee dedicated to keeping alive this memory of man's inhumanity.