I make documentaries about Black and American history out of period photographs, film, and sound recordings. Every film starts with something in the record that doesn't add up: a birth year, a caption, a sealed transcript. There are 14 here, and all of them are free to watch on this page.
Jump to: Writers and artists · Chicago and the Great Migration · The Jim Crow South · The war years · The American record
In 1939, Zora Neale Hurston told a government recording machine she was 35 and born in Eatonville, Florida. She was 48 and born in Alabama. The film follows the birth year she chose, told in her own recorded voice.
Watch on YouTube ↗In a closed 1953 Senate hearing, Roy Cohn read Langston Hughes his own poems and demanded yes or no answers. The transcript stayed sealed for 50 years.
Watch on YouTube ↗In 1942, Gordon Parks photographed Ella Watson, who cleaned a federal office building in Washington. One frame became famous. About 90 pictures from the series are in the federal file, showing her work, her family, and her church.
Watch on YouTube ↗In 1930, readers of The Forum wrote in to say Nella Larsen's short story "Sanctuary" closely matched one by a British writer. The editors accepted her explanation, but it was the last fiction she ever published. The film sets her case beside plagiarism accusations made decades later and asks who gets to make them.
Watch on YouTube ↗Chicago's Black population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to about 277,000 in 1940. In April 1941, Russell Lee photographed the South Side on a Saturday night: the Savoy Ballroom, the roller skaters, the taverns.
Watch on YouTube ↗On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1941, two federal photographers made dozens of pictures on Chicago's South Side. Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices credits only one of its pictures as Easter.
Watch on YouTube ↗By its dedication in October 1940, nearly 16,000 families had applied to live in Chicago's Ida B. Wells Homes. There were 1,662 homes. In March 1942, Jack Delano photographed families who got in.
Watch on YouTube ↗In the fall of 1939, Marion Post Wolcott followed cotton money through the Mississippi Delta, from the field to a juke joint outside Clarksdale on Saturday night.
Watch on YouTube ↗Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was a Black town founded in 1887. The 1949 Green Book gave it four listings, three tourist homes and a garage, with no street and no number.
Watch on YouTube ↗In January 1939, more than 1,500 evicted sharecroppers, most of them Black, set their belongings down along two Missouri highways and stayed. Arthur Rothstein photographed it.
Watch on YouTube ↗A 1925 Army War College study called the Black officer a failure in combat and said none should be placed over white troops. Twenty years later, Toni Frissell photographed the pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group at a briefing in Ramitelli, Italy.
Watch on YouTube ↗In 1942, the federal government opened 200 homes in Detroit for Black war workers. A white crowd turned the first families back in February. They moved in under armed guard in April.
Watch on YouTube ↗In the 1930s, over-plowing and drought turned much of the southern Great Plains to dust. The film tells it through Farm Security Administration photographs, including negatives Roy Stryker's office marked as killed.
Watch on YouTube ↗Police had photographed prisoners since the 1840s. In Paris in the 1880s, Alphonse Bertillon, who started as a police records clerk, standardized the mugshot: one shot facing front, one in profile. The plain, face-forward ID photo follows the pattern he set.
Watch on YouTube ↗The research behind the wider work is in the research hub. Every link in one place: adamlmcmath.com/links