A retelling of a traditional African tale in which King Leopard invites all the animals to a spear-throwing contest whose winner will marry his daughter and succeed him as king.

Traces the course of a single day on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It's the hottest day of the year, a scorching 24-hour period that will change the lives of its residents forever.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage....

In 1829, a pregnant woman is condemned to die for a murderous act of rebellion. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a woman is accused of giving sanctuary to runaway slaves. Dessa Rose is the heartwarming story of an extraordinary friendship between two strong, remarkable women from very different backgrounds, both caught in the shadow of slavery in the 19th-century South. One is an escaped Black slave under sentence of death; the other is a white woman...

Biography of Jackie Robinson, the first black major league baseball player in the 20th century. Traces his career in the negro leagues and the major leagues.

Sean Connery stars as a retired Harvard law professor who strives to prove the innocence of a young black man sentenced to death in Florida in this hard-edged, complex legal thriller. A brutal murder is committed in the Florida Everglades. Eight years later, a principled Harvard law professor tries to save the convicted man on death row who swears he's innocent of that crime. For the small-town detective who investigated the killing, however, there's...

A Harvard Law School professor reopens a murder investigation on behalf of a Death Row inmate who claims he was forced by a sinister lawman to confess to a crime he didn't commit. On the surface, it seems to be a straight-ahead case of the prisoner's guilt or innocence. But nothing really lies on the surface of this mystery, set in the Florida swamplands.

Discusses the theme and characters in Gaines's novel and includes excerpts from the book and background information on the author.

Film of the award-winning play about a struggling black family living on Chicago's South Side and the impact of an unexpected insurance bequest. Each family member sees the bequest as the means of realizing dreams and of escape from grinding frustrations.