Directed by Gordon Quinn • Documentary • 2017 • 30 minutes
On October 22, 1963, more than 250,000 students boycotted the Chicago Public Schools to protest racial segregation. Many marched through the city calling for the resignation of School Superintendent Benjamin Willis, who placed trailers, dubbed ‘Willis Wagons,’ on playgrounds and parking lots of overcrowded black schools rather than let them enroll in nearby white schools. Blending unseen 16mm footage of the march shot by Kartemquin founder Gordon Quinn with the participants’ reflections today, ’63 Boycott connects the forgotten story of one of the largest northern civil rights demonstrations to contemporary issues around race, education, school closings, and youth activism.
“With footage shot a half-century earlier as a college student, director Gordon Quinn planned the boycott documentary for its 50th year. He missed the anniversary date. But with co-producers Rachel Dickson and Tracye A. Matthews, he reimagined it as a 30-minute short doc, and produced one packed full of facts.” —The Chicago Sun-Times
Up Next in African-American Docs
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Althea
Directed by Rex Miller • Documentary • 2014 • 83 minutes
Althea Gibson broke records on and off the tennis court. A truant from the rough streets of Harlem, Gibson emerged as a most unlikely queen of the highly segregated tennis world in the 1950s. A sharecropper's daughter, Gibson's family migr...
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Quest
Directed by Jonathan Olshefski • Documentary • 2017 • 105 minutes
Filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, Quest is the moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia.
Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher “Quest” Rainey and his wife Christine’a ...
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Myth of a Colorblind France
Directed by Alan Govenar • Documentary • With Tyler Stovall, Monique Y. Wells, Thomas Allen Harris, Karim Toure, Akin Babatunde • 2020 • 86 minutes
For more than a century, African American artists, authors, musicians and others have traveled to Paris to liberate themselves from the racism of th...
