Showing results for "witness" in Cultural & Regional

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so embedded in the culture as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served eight presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Forest Whitaker narrates the story of this remarkable man who, while serving tea and supervising buffets, was also a witness to history.

This is the true story of Dr. Charles Johnson, an African American preacher who entered Mississippi in 1961 during the summer of the Freedom Rides. Fresh out of Bible School Johnson hesitantly followed his Call to pastor in Mississippi, a hotbed for race relations during the early 1960s. Unwittingly thrust into the heart of a national tragedy, the murder of three Civil Rights activists, he overcame fear and adversity to become a leader in the Civil Rights movement.