From the moment the young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is stolen from his life and ancestral home in 18th-century Africa and brought under inhumane conditions to be auctioned as a slave in America, a line is begun that leads from this most shameful chapter in U.S. history to the 20th-century author Alex Haley, a Kinte descendant. The late Haley's acclaimed book Roots was adapted into this ...

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: LeVar Burton, Tina Andrews, Grand L. Bush, Henry Butts, Brooks Clift
Directed By: David Greene, Gilbert Moses, John Erman, Marvin J. Chomsky

Manufacturer: Live / Artisan
Starring: Claudia McNeil, Janet MacLachlan, Robert Christian, Larry B. Scott, Roy Poole
Directed By: Jack Smight

The only one of August Wilson's plays to be filmed (and for television, at that), this 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winner is an amazing piece of work. Adapted by Wilson and directed by Lloyd Richards, who staged it on Broadway, the play deals not just with racism and its effects but with the ongoing legacy and curse of slavery on modern blacks. Set in 1920s Pittsburgh, the story deals with the arrival of ...

Manufacturer: Hallmark
Starring: Charles S. Dutton, Alfre Woodard, Carl Gordon, Tommy Hollis, Lou Myers
Directed By: Lloyd Richards

Made for HBO, this film biography of boxing promoter Don King is solid entertainment, thanks to a startlingly real performance at its core by Ving Rhames (who won a Golden Globe award for the role, then gave it away to Jack Lemmon on the TV broadcast). Rhames has the shuck-and-jive, but also the canny intelligence, as the film follows King from small-time numbers runner and concert promoter to ...

Manufacturer: Hbo Home Video
Starring: Ving Rhames, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Jeremy Piven, Darius McCrary, Keith David
Directed By: John Herzfeld

Manufacturer: Hallmark
Starring: Cicely Tyson, Erika Alexander, Blair Underwood, Queen Latifah, Mario Van Peebles
Directed By: Peter Werner

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Patty Duke, Al Freeman Jr., Ford Rainey, William Hardy, Chris Wilson
Directed By: Lamont Johnson

This 1973 television movie about 110 years of American history as seen through the eyes of a black woman from Louisiana (Cicely Tyson) is a terrific achievement, a window onto racism from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. Tyson gives a career performance as the title character, whose personal life is inextricably woven into the fabric of the African American struggle for equality. A ...

Manufacturer: United American Video
Starring: Cicely Tyson, Eric Brown, Arnold Wilkerson, Richard Dysart, Joel Fluellen
Directed By: John Korty

This true story of the black flyers who broke the color barrier in the U.S. Air Force during World War II is a well-intentioned film highlighted by an excellent cast. Proud, solemn, Iowa-born Laurence Fishburne and city-kid hipster Cuba Gooding Jr. are among the hopefuls who meet en route to Tuskegee Air Force Base, where they are among the recruits for an "experimental" program to "prove" the ...

Manufacturer: Hbo Home Video
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Allen Payne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Courtney B. Vance, Andre Braugher
Directed By: Robert Markowitz

Laurence Fishburne helped shepherd this Emmy Award-winning exposé from American medical history books to the small screen. Anchored in the 1973 Senate inquiry into the infamous Tuskegee Study, the film uses a flashback structure to take us back 40 years as Nurse Eunice Evers (played with honest conviction by Alfre Woodard, who also earned an acting Emmy for her powerful performance) describes how ...

Manufacturer: Hbo Home Video
Starring: Alfre Woodard, Laurence Fishburne, Craig Sheffer, Joe Morton, Obba Babatundé
Directed By: Joseph Sargent

On a bright sunny day in 1948, Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer) sets off down the road to go catch some fish; by the end of the movie's opening sequence, he is the one who's been caught, and wrongly accused of the murder of a white shopkeeper. Racial inequality, at the time, is so pervasive in Louisiana that the white defense lawyer's argument at Jefferson's trial is that his client is not worthy of ...

Manufacturer: Hbo Home Video
Starring: Don Cheadle, Cicely Tyson, Mekhi Phifer, Irma P. Hall, Brent Jennings
Directed By: Joseph Sargent