Now showing

Free at Last (1965-11-09)

Public Broadcasting1965Creative Commons
Poster for Free at Last (1965-11-09)

About this film

In this program dramatic readings trace the history of the American Negro from emancipation to the end of World War II. The words are those of four major Negro figures - Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey. The cast features Ossie Davis, Frederick O'Neal, Hugh Hurd, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Leonard Jackson. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and leading abolitionist, saw the years immediately following the Civil War when Negroes and whites went to school together, rode on street cars together, when Negro senators and representatives sat in Congress. By 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Douglass as Marshal of the District of Columbia, Jim Crow had reared his head. Douglass reflected: "I am an outcast from the society of my childhood and an outlaw in the land of my birth." Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute and an advisor to presidents, called for conciliation, for patience and hard work on part of the Negro. Later William DuBois, Harvard educated and a founder of the NAACP, spoke for another course: ... "Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that…

Directors & creators

National Educational Television and Radio Center

Subjects

public broadcasting, AAPB, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Ossie Davis, Frederick O'Neal, Hugh Hurd, Roscoe Lee Browne, Leonard Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Rutherford B. Hayes, Robert Smalls, Blanche Kelso Bruce, Robert H. Wood, Carl Schurz, Tuskegee Institute, NAACP, Universal Negro Improvement Association, Emancipation Proclamation, Jim Crow laws, Reconstruction era, African American history, civil rights

View on archive.org ↗

More from this pool

Public Broadcasting

See all →