Movies: Ruby Dee

HBO (in association with the American Film Institute) presents this 1997 anthology, narrated by Liev Schreiber, which looks at sports in cinema from the earliest silent films until the nineties. Watch not for dramatic scenes but for the glimpse of hi...

Will Handy grows up in Memphis with his preacher father and his Aunt Hagar. His father intends for him to use his musical gifts only in church, but he can't stay away from the music of the streets and workers. After he writes a theme song for a local...

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....

A cantankerous widower (Garner) who is virtually living the life of a recluse is forced to rejoin his community when his Godchild (Skaggs) gets in trouble and a childhood friend (Cobbs), a black tenant farmer, refuses to belatedly accept a Congressio...

The widows of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and how they carry on as single mothers after the assassination of their husbands....

In this open-letter style documentary, Ruby Dee & Ossie Davis' rich lives guide their grandson on his personal quest to master lasting love, conscious art, and undying activism....

An aspiring dancer and her two wicked sisters resent their mother's love for a foster daughter....

From Amos 'n' Andy to Nat King Cole, from Roots to The Cosby Show, black people have played many roles on primetime television. Brilliantly weaving clips from classic TV shows with commentary from TV producers, black actors and scholars, Marlon Riggs...

A British woman marries an American writer in spite of her family's disapproval and goes to live with him on a tropical island....

Three women — a young coed, a forty-something single mother, and one a senior-aged widow — meet in the sauna of the local gym, where they gradually get to know one another and bond over their respective trials and tribulations....

The Madam of a brothel satisfies the erotic fantasies of her customers, while a revolution is sweeping the nation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2010....

Follows the story of Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine who were the first blacks to integrate into an all white school....

Tells the story of Sadie and Bessie Delany, two African-American (they preferred "colored") sisters who both lived past the age of 100. They grew up on a North Carolina college campus, the daughters of the first African-American Episcopal bishop, who...

Tuesday Morning Ride is based on the short story "A Summer Tragedy" by Arna Bontemps, a Harlem Renaissance writer. Set in the 1930s, the story depicts an old man and woman -- he a stroke victim, she blind -- who feel they have nothing to live for sin...

This documentary captures the sounds and images of a nearly forgotten era in film history when African American filmmakers and studios created “race movies” exclusively for black audiences. The best of these films attempted to counter the demeaning s...

Featuring the swinging sounds of the all-woman band The International Sweethearts of Rhythm and a young Ruby Dee, the 1946 musical showcases tenderness in romance and community through a series of musical numbers. The loosely connected plot follows f...

The murder of a journalist, coming shortly after the killings of a black teenager and a white cop, threatens to inflame passions in the city. To prevent a riot, Lieutenant Sam Danforth and District Attorney Leslie Washburn are determined to find the ...

The story of Abe Saperstein and the creation of the Harlem Globetrotters....

A young, idealistic man returns home to the plantation where he grew up in servitude. With him, he brings his fiance, Lutiebelle, in hopes of convincing the plantation owner that she is really his cousin in order to secure the family inheritance. To ...

The film chronicles the life and revolutionary times of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal....