Cultural Lens
Films, Music, Literature & Visual Culture
Creative works that illuminate the African diaspora experience — from the screen and stage to the canvas, recording, and page.
92 Works
12 Years a Slave
Steve McQueen · 2013
Based on Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir, this Oscar-winning film offers an unflinching depiction of American slavery and the brutal dehumanization of enslaved people.
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13th
Ava DuVernay · 2016
Examines the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States, tracing the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed involuntary servitude to continue.
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1619
Nikole Hannah-Jones · 2019
The Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine project that reexamines the founding of the United States by centering the year 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia.
Learn moreA Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Cooke · 1964
Cooke's soul classic became a rallying cry of the civil rights movement, expressing hope and resilience in the face of racial injustice — often called the greatest civil rights song ever written.
Learn moreAmerican Gothic, Washington, D.C.
Gordon Parks · 1942
Parks photographed Ella Watson, a Black government employee, standing beside the American flag and symbols of domestic labor. The image uses portraiture to ask questions about citizenship, work, patriotism, and the meaning of American democracy.
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American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding
Faith Ringgold · 1967
Ringgold's American People series examined race, identity, and American life during the Civil Rights and Black Power era. The Flag Is Bleeding asks students to consider who is represented by national symbols and who gets to claim them.
Learn moreBeloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel confronts the psychological and spiritual trauma of slavery through the haunting story of Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman in post-Civil War Ohio.
Learn moreBetween the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates reflects on the history of racial violence in America and the vulnerability of Black bodies, drawing on Du Bois, Baldwin, and Malcolm X.
Learn moreBlack Panther
Ryan Coogler · 2018
Marvel's groundbreaking film imagines the fictional African nation of Wakanda as a technologically advanced civilization never colonized, sparking global conversations about Afrofuturism, Pan-Africanism, and diaspora identity.
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Blues
Archibald Motley · 1929
Motley's Blues depicts Black urban leisure and musical life in Chicago, helping students see the Great Migration as the creation of vibrant communities and cultural worlds, not simply a movement away from the South.
Learn moreCouple in Raccoon Coats
James VanDerZee · 1932
VanDerZee documented Harlem's residents, celebrations, families, businesses, and social life during the Harlem Renaissance. His photographs are valuable evidence of Black modernity, style, aspiration, and community self-representation.
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Ethiopia
Meta Warrick Fuller · 1921
Fuller’s Ethiopia was created for the 1921 America’s Making Exposition and connected African American identity with African history, Ethiopian independence, and the emerging Pan-African cultural movement. The Smithsonian notes that permission is required for image use.
Learn moreEyes on the Prize
Henry Hampton · 1987
The landmark PBS documentary series chronicling the American civil rights movement from 1954 to 1985 through first-person accounts and archival footage.
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Forever Free
Edmonia Lewis · 1867
Edmonia Lewis’s marble sculpture depicts emancipation as a moment of Black liberation and dignity. Created shortly after the abolition of slavery in the United States, the work is an important early example of Black self-representation in American art.
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Frederick Douglass, 1870s Portrait
Unknown photographer · 1870
A nineteenth-century portrait of Frederick Douglass, one of the most photographed people of his era. The image provides an opportunity to examine photography, Black self-presentation, abolitionist leadership, and the deliberate construction of public identity.
Learn moreHidden Figures
Theodore Melfi · 2016
Celebrates the Black women mathematicians at NASA — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — whose calculations were essential to the Space Race, centering Black women's intellectual labor.
Learn moreI Am Not Your Negro
Raoul Peck · 2016
Using James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript on Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., this documentary draws direct connections between historical racial violence and the present.
Learn moreInto Bondage
Aaron Douglas · 1936
Douglas used silhouettes, rhythmic forms, and African and African American visual references to create a modern language for Black history. Into Bondage connects the history of the transatlantic slave trade to the cultural awakening of the Harlem Renaissance.
Learn moreLemonade
Beyoncé · 2016
A visual album weaving poetry, music, and film that centers Black womanhood, draws on Yoruba spiritual traditions, and addresses police violence, infidelity, and ancestral memory.
Learn moreLes Fétiches
Loïs Mailou Jones · 1938
Jones combined modernist experimentation with African visual references. Les Fétiches offers a powerful way to examine how Black artists engaged African art and Pan-African ideas while participating in international modernism.
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Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp)
Augusta Savage · 1939
Savage created this monumental harp-shaped sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, inspired by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing. The original plaster sculpture was destroyed after the fair; this public-domain photograph preserves its appearance.
Learn moreNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass · 1845
Douglass's memoir is one of the most powerful abolitionist texts ever written, documenting his enslavement, escape, and journey to becoming the most influential Black orator of the 19th century.
Learn moreReconstruction: America After the Civil War
Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 2019
A four-hour PBS documentary exploring the transformative years following the Civil War — the remarkable achievements of Black Americans and the violent backlash that dismantled their progress.
Learn moreRoots
Alex Haley / David Wolper · 1977
The groundbreaking miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley's novel traces an African family from The Gambia through enslavement and emancipation in America, inspiring millions to research their ancestry.
Learn moreRoy DeCarava: Civil Rights and Everyday Life
Roy DeCarava · 1963
DeCarava's photographs of Black life in New York and the Civil Rights era emphasize intimacy, dignity, light, and everyday experience. His work helps students understand photography as an art form as well as a historical record.
Learn moreSelma
Ava DuVernay · 2014
Chronicles the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr., centering the organizing power of ordinary Black citizens.
Learn moreSharecropper
Elizabeth Catlett · 1946
Catlett's Sharecropper centers the dignity and endurance of Black agricultural workers. Her career in the United States and Mexico also makes her a natural bridge between African American history and the wider African diaspora in the Americas.
Learn moreSlavery by Another Name
Douglas Blackmon / TPT · 2012
Based on Douglas Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning book, this PBS documentary exposes the system of convict leasing that re-enslaved thousands of Black Americans for decades after emancipation.
Learn moreStrange Fruit
Billie Holiday · 1939
Holiday's haunting protest song about the lynching of Black men in the American South became one of the earliest anthems of the civil rights movement and a defining moment in American music.
Learn moreSuddenly It's Spring
Alma Thomas · 1970
Thomas's abstract paintings connect nature, color, beauty, and intellectual independence. Her career as a Howard University graduate, longtime Washington educator, and pioneering abstract artist broadens the story of Black excellence beyond representational protest art.
Learn moreThe 1619 Project Podcast
Nikole Hannah-Jones / The New York Times · 2019
The audio companion to the landmark journalism project that reframes American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative.
Learn moreThe African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 2013
A sweeping six-part PBS series exploring the full arc of African American history from the origins of slavery in Africa to the election of Barack Obama.
Learn moreThe Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X & Alex Haley · 1965
One of the most influential autobiographies in American history, documenting Malcolm X's transformation from street hustler to Nation of Islam minister to advocate for global Pan-African solidarity.
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The Banjo Lesson
Henry Ossawa Tanner · 1893
Tanner portrays an older Black man teaching a boy to play the banjo, emphasizing family, learning, music, and intimate everyday life. The painting offers a powerful counterpoint to the racial caricatures common in nineteenth-century American visual culture.
Learn moreThe Block
Romare Bearden · 1971
Bearden's collage The Block presents Black urban life as a layered community of homes, businesses, relationships, and memory. It offers students a visual language for thinking about Harlem, migration, neighborhood identity, and collective memory.
Learn moreThe Fire Next Time
James Baldwin · 1963
Two searing essays — one a letter to Baldwin's nephew, one on race and religion in America — that remain among the most powerful indictments of American racial injustice ever written.
Learn moreThe Migration Series
Jacob Lawrence · 1940
Lawrence’s sixty-panel Migration Series transforms the Great Migration into a visual historical narrative, following African Americans moving from the rural South to cities in the North. Use the museum source for the licensed artwork rather than assuming the digital image is freely reusable.
Learn moreThe Migration Series, Panel 1
Jacob Lawrence · 1940
Panel 1 of Lawrence's Migration Series announces the Great Migration as a mass movement shaped by economic opportunity, information, family decisions, and collective action. The series treats ordinary migrants as historical actors.
Learn moreThe New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander · 2010
Alexander's landmark work argues that mass incarceration functions as a racially discriminatory system of social control, drawing direct parallels to the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction era.
Learn moreThe Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois · 1903
Du Bois' foundational collection of essays introduced the concept of 'double consciousness' and remains essential reading for understanding Black identity and the struggle for civil rights.
Learn moreTo Pimp a Butterfly
Kendrick Lamar · 2015
A jazz- and funk-infused hip-hop album exploring Black identity, systemic racism, survivor's guilt, and Pan-African consciousness — widely considered one of the greatest albums of the 21st century.
Learn moreA Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry · 1959
The first play by a Black woman on Broadway, it follows the Younger family's dreams and struggles in 1950s Chicago, confronting housing discrimination and Black aspiration.
Learn moreAfrican American Life at the 1900 Paris Exposition
W. E. B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway / 1900 Paris Exposition photographs · 1900
The photographs assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition documented Black education, institutions, occupations, family life, and achievement for an international audience. They are unusually valuable for studying how Black communities represented themselves beyond the United States.
Learn moreAugust Wilson's Century Cycle
August Wilson · 1982
Ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, chronicling the African American experience in Pittsburgh — the most sustained dramatic portrait of Black life in American theater.
Learn moreBecoming
Michelle Obama · 2018
The former First Lady's memoir traces her journey from Chicago's South Side through Princeton and Harvard Law to the White House, addressing race, identity, and what it means to belong in America.
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Black Business in Chicago, 1899
African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition · 1899
A photograph documenting a Black-owned business in Chicago that was included in the visual record assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It provides evidence of Black entrepreneurship, urban life, and economic development at the turn of the century.
Learn moreBlack Chicago and the Great Migration
Unknown photographer · 1910
Photographs of Chicago's Black neighborhoods, businesses, churches, and public life help students trace how migration transformed northern cities. They can be paired with Jacob Lawrence and Archibald Motley to compare documentary photography with artistic interpretation.
Learn moreBlack Education and Institution-Building, 1900
W. E. B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway / 1900 Paris Exposition photographs · 1900
The educational photographs created for the 1900 Paris Exposition show schools, students, teachers, and training programs. They provide visual evidence of institution-building and educational ambition during the post-emancipation era.
Learn moreBlack Girl's Window
Betye Saar · 1969
Saar's assemblage practice draws on memory, family, African diasporic symbolism, and found objects. Black Girl's Window is a strong entry point into the Black Arts era and the growing importance of personal and ancestral memory in contemporary Black art.
Learn moreBlue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River
Robert S. Duncanson · 1851
Duncanson became one of the most accomplished landscape painters of the nineteenth-century United States. His career offers a way to study Black artistic achievement, freedom, and professional independence during the era of Reconstruction and its aftermath.
Learn moreDo the Right Thing
Spike Lee · 1989
A day in the life of a Brooklyn neighborhood explodes into racial violence, offering a searing portrait of systemic racism, neighborhood displacement, and the limits of nonviolent protest.
Learn moreFinding Your Roots
Henry Louis Gates Jr. · 2012
The PBS genealogy series uses DNA analysis and historical records to trace celebrity family trees, regularly uncovering stories of enslavement, resilience, and diaspora migration.
Learn moreGet Out
Jordan Peele · 2017
Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning horror film uses the genre to explore the commodification of Blackness, liberal racism, and the enduring psychological terror of racial subjugation in contemporary America.
Learn moreGlory
Edward Zwick · 1989
Tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of the first official African American units in the Civil War, confronting discrimination within the Union Army itself.
Learn moreGordon Parks: Civil Rights and Black Power
Gordon Parks · 1967
Parks documented the Civil Rights and Black Power eras while continuing to portray family, community, and individual identity. His photographs connect political history to the lived experiences of the people who shaped it.
Learn moreHarlem Gang Leader Series
Gordon Parks · 1942
Parks's early documentary work examined Black life in Washington, D.C., including housing, work, family, and segregation. His photographs demonstrate how documentary photography could function as both historical record and social commentary.
Learn moreHarlem Renaissance: Community and Everyday Life
Unknown photographers / Harlem Renaissance archive · 1930
Studio and street photographs from Harlem document the emergence of a major Black cultural center. Use photographs of residents, performers, businesses, and community institutions to examine how the Great Migration reshaped American cities.
Learn moreHarvest Talk
Charles White · 1953
White's monumental drawings and paintings centered Black dignity, labor, history, and community. Harvest Talk demonstrates how figurative art could convey both everyday life and a larger historical consciousness.
Learn moreHomecoming: A Film by Beyoncé
Beyoncé Knowles-Carter · 2019
Documents Beyoncé's historic 2018 Coachella performance, the first Black woman to headline, explicitly designed as an homage to HBCU homecoming culture and Black college traditions.
Learn moreI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou · 1969
Angelou's autobiographical coming-of-age story explores racism, identity, and resilience in the American South, becoming a landmark of African American literature.
Learn moreInsecure
Issa Rae · 2016
Issa Rae's groundbreaking HBO comedy-drama offers a nuanced, modern portrayal of Black professional life in Los Angeles, centering Black women's interiority in ways rarely seen on mainstream television.
Learn moreInvisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952
Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel depicts the psychological impact of racial invisibility on a nameless Black narrator navigating America from the Jim Crow South to Harlem.
Learn moreJust Mercy
Destin Daniel Cretton · 2019
Based on Bryan Stevenson's memoir, the film follows his efforts to exonerate Walter McMillian from Alabama's death row, exposing the racial injustice embedded in the American legal system.
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Kindergarten at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute
African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition · 1899
A photograph of a kindergarten at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia, one of the educational images assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It documents Black educational institution-building at the turn of the twentieth century.
Learn moreKindred
Octavia Butler · 1979
Butler's genre-defining novel follows a modern Black woman repeatedly transported back to the antebellum South, forcing intimate engagement with the psychological and physical reality of slavery.
Learn moreLift Every Voice and Sing
James Weldon Johnson · 1900
Known as the 'Black National Anthem,' this hymn of faith and resilience has been sung at civil rights gatherings and HBCU ceremonies for over a century.
Learn moreLincoln
Steven Spielberg · 2012
Dramatizes the political struggle to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, centering the legislative battle in the final months of the Civil War.
Learn moreLovecraft Country
Misha Green / Matt Ruff · 2020
This HBO series blends horror and fantasy with 1950s Jim Crow history, following a young Black man traveling through segregated America, exposing the real-life monsters of white supremacy.
Learn moreMalcolm X
Spike Lee · 1992
Spike Lee's epic biographical film starring Denzel Washington captures the transformation of Malcolm X from street criminal to global symbol of Black liberation and Pan-African consciousness.
Learn moreMigrating Birds
Norman Lewis · 1954
Lewis used abstraction to explore movement, rhythm, migration, and atmosphere. Migrating Birds is useful for showing that Black modernism included abstraction and formal experimentation alongside explicitly figurative political art.
Learn moreMississippi Burning
Alan Parker · 1988
Dramatizes the FBI investigation into the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
Learn moreNative Son
Richard Wright · 1940
Wright's explosive novel follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in 1930s Chicago, confronting the dehumanizing conditions created by institutional racism and systemic poverty.
Learn moreSay It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud
James Brown · 1968
Released months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., James Brown's electrifying anthem became the defining soundtrack of Black Power and a cultural turning point in American music.
Learn moreSeeing White
Scene on Radio / John Biewen · 2017
A 14-part podcast series examining the construction and history of whiteness in America, tracing how racial categories were invented and enforced to maintain power.
Learn moreStrange Days in America
Code Switch / NPR · 2016
NPR's Code Switch podcast covers race, culture, and identity at the intersection of politics and media, offering rigorous journalism on the lived experience of being a person of color in America.
Learn moreThe Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982
Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of Celie, a young Black woman in the early 20th-century South, weaving together themes of racism, sexism, spirituality, and resilience.
Learn moreThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Andy Borowitz / Susan Borowitz · 1990
Will Smith's iconic sitcom explored the class divisions within Black American society and the tension between assimilation and cultural authenticity, reaching global audiences and shaping 90s Black popular culture.
Learn moreThe Hate U Give
Angie Thomas · 2017
A YA novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, following 16-year-old Starr Carter as she witnesses her childhood friend's fatal shooting by a police officer and becomes an activist.
Learn moreThe Janitor Who Paints
Palmer Hayden · 1930
Hayden's painting presents a Black artist balancing wage work and artistic ambition. It opens discussion of class, labor, artistic identity, and the economic realities of Black creative life during the Harlem Renaissance era.
Learn moreThe Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill · 1998
This Grammy-sweeping album blended hip-hop, soul, and reggae with sharp critiques of systemic racism and spiritual renewal, becoming a landmark of contemporary Black cultural expression.
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The Trees, Early Afternoon, France
William A. Harper · 1905
A landscape by Black American artist William A. Harper, painted after his study in Paris. The work connects African American artistic achievement to the international currents of French landscape painting and Black expatriate life.
Learn moreThe Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · 2016
Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal train network, following an enslaved woman's escape and confronting American racism in each new state she enters.
Learn moreThe Wiz
Charlie Smalls / William F. Brown · 1975
The all-Black reimagining of The Wizard of Oz that became a landmark of African American theater, celebrating Black culture, vernacular, and artistic expression on Broadway.
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The Young Sabot Maker
Henry Ossawa Tanner · 1895
Tanner's scenes of work and everyday life connect African American artistic achievement to his international career in France. His paintings provide an entry point into Black expatriate life and the freedom to pursue artistic identity across borders.
Learn moreTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
A cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston's novel follows Janie Crawford's journey toward self-discovery, celebrating Black Southern vernacular and women's independence.
Learn moreThis Little Light of Mine
Fannie Lou Hamer / Spiritual Tradition · 1963
A gospel standard transformed by Fannie Lou Hamer and the civil rights movement into a defiant anthem of resilience, sung at marches, jails, and mass meetings throughout the South.
Learn moreTo Be Young, Gifted and Black
Nina Simone · 1969
A celebratory anthem of Black identity and pride written after the death of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, it became a defining song of the Black Power movement.
Learn moreWe Shall Overcome
Pete Seeger / Civil Rights Movement · 1963
The anthem of the civil rights movement, sung at marches and sit-ins, became a global symbol of nonviolent resistance and solidarity in the face of oppression.
Learn moreWhat's Going On
Marvin Gaye · 1971
Marvin Gaye's socially conscious masterpiece addressed war, poverty, and racism in post-civil rights America, revolutionizing what popular music could say about the Black experience.
Learn moreWhen They See Us
Ava DuVernay · 2019
Dramatizes the true story of the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of a brutal assault in 1989 — exposing systemic racism in the criminal justice system.
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Women Sorting Tobacco in Richmond, Virginia
African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition · 1899
A photograph of African American women working at a Richmond, Virginia tobacco company, assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. It can be used to explore Black labor, women's work, economic life, and how Black communities represented their achievements to an international audience.
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Woodworking Workshop at Claflin University
African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition · 1899
A photograph of Black students engaged in industrial education at Claflin University. Collected for the 1900 Paris Exposition, it presents education, skilled work, and institutional development as evidence of Black achievement after emancipation.
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