Black History DVD Collection

Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters DVD

This feature-length special features stories about slave catchers and slave resistance, from the colonial era through the Civil War and its aftermath. Slavery was built on a brutal system of slave policing--enforced by armed community patrols, paid slave catchers, and federal law. And most of us think that slave catchers were always successful. But the bounty hunters' bloodhounds occasionally lost against the intelligence and courage of the enslaved. In the North, slave catchers were sometimes defeated by an organized--and armed--free black community. Using recreations, archival material, and scholar interviews, we hear stories of actual slave catchers and fleeing slaves that have never before been portrayed on film. Through the hunter/prey lens of time, these stories demonstrate that within the darkness, there was also light. For even when freedom seemed no more than an illusive dream, the enslaved and their supporters struggled for the day when America could be America...for all its people.

The Underground Railroad DVD

This important set explores the world of America's first civil rights movement through three powerful programs.

• Alfre Woodard (Down in the Delta) narrates.
• DVD Features: Emancipation Proclamation; Background Information: Dredd Scott Case; Harriet Tubman Biography; Timeline of Key Historical Events; Interactive Menus; Scene Selection.
• Three programs illuminate every aspect of the legendary network that brought fugitive slaves to freedom.

They trusted their lives to "conductors" who they had never met and would never see again. They hid from bounty hunters and bloodhounds in the secret chambers of safe houses. One by one, for more than a century, thousands of slaves made the dangerous journey to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

The three programs in this important collection explore the world of America's first civil rights movement:

• The Underground Railroad--Alfre Woodard (The Core) hosts an in-depth examination of the secret network that helped runaway slaves escape bondage.
• Ships of Slaves: The Middle Passage--Rare diaries, oral histories and testimony from scholars illuminate the 400-year trade that brought millions of kidnapped Africans to the New World.
• BIOGRAPHY®: Frederick Douglass--The landmark series profiles the "recent graduate of slavery with his diploma on his back" who became the pre-eminent voice of the abolitionist movement.