The Black American Struggle Portrayed in Film

For my first blog post, I wanted to share movies that I thought delivered powerful messages, specifically in terms of black empowerment and black stories. The three movies I chose are in Media Services’ collection and will make you think critically and analytically about race and the history of racism that still persists today.

Get Out (2017)

Get Out. Screenrant.com. [10 April 2025], https://go.iu.edu/8t3s

The film Get Out stars Daniel Kaluuya as the film’s principal character, Chris Washington. Chris agrees to spend the weekend with his girlfriend Rose to meet her parents. At first, Chris assumes her parents might be uncomfortable with their daughter being in an interracial relationship. However, he soon discovers that the Armitages abduct and hypnotize black people—and that Chris is their next target. The mind control they use is effective in the sense that their victims feel trapped in their own body and their own mind while acting on the feelings, desires, and motivations of their torturers. While the film is clearly fictional, the message behind it is very real and relevant: White supremacy and power have consistently been mechanisms of oppression, especially for the black race. Peele demonstrates the racial injustices that permeate our society in an extreme way, however, the manipulation tactics that are used to subdue black people in the movie have parallels to tactics used in real life. Hypnosis is the main strategy in the film for silencing the black voice, which isn’t far off from the current narrative in our country. Black voices today are being silenced systematically, whether that be through police violence, incarceration, wage gaps, or discrimination in housing and employment. Perhaps Peele is commenting on those several forms of injustices by creating a film where the black mind is susceptible to white influence, control, and domination. Peele may be asking his audience to reflect on the (not so) hidden racial injustices that are embedded in every aspect of American life.

Antebellum (2020)

Antebellum. NYTimes.com. [10 April 2025], https://go.iu.edu/8t3t

Antebellum, directed by Christopher Renz and Gerard Bush, stars Janelle Monáe as Eden/Veronica Henley. The horror/mystery begins with Eden, a slave in the antebellum South—antebellum referring to something that occurs before a particular war, in this case the American Civil War. Antebellum is mostly connotated as an aesthetic that glorifies the period before the war of slavery and plantations. A principal message the film delivers to its audience is the notion that the present cannot continue on without the past being resolved. This is reinforced when Monáe’s character Veronica gets kidnapped and the two plot lines converge to reveal that “Eden” was a character assigned to Veronica by pre-Civil War glorifiers who use a Civil War reenactment camp to create the simulation of the antebellum South. The other black people in the reenactment camp are other victims of kidnapping in the white man’s antebellum roleplay. When Veronica finds the phone of one of the “Confederates,” she calls for help and, after much fighting and struggle, finally escapes the camp. The movie’s comparison of the past and the present serves to firstly demonstrate the progress of the Black Liberation Movement and secondly to prompt the audience to consider that progress cannot occur without fully addressing the past. At the beginning of the movie, we see Eden: a black woman who is subject to the will and wishes of a white man. She has no power. Following up, we then see the contrasting black, working woman Veronica who is in control of her own schedule, career, and ambitions. This comparison illuminates the plethora of opportunities that were opened up to black people far after the results of the American Civil War. The movie juxtaposes the perceived progress for the black race with the group of Confederate sympathizers who used the reenactment camp to recreate the experience from the antebellum South. While the scenes in the reenactment park still take place in the film’s modern times, the present-day Confederates do a remarkable job at transforming the camp and its black prisoners into a realistic, pre-Civil War setting. The fear, hatred, and desperation experienced by Veronica—and the others—are very real, though, and show that without confronting the past, any progress made in the present is meaningless and reversible. The film allows its audience to reflect on injustices from America’s past with the hope that through acknowledging its dark, racist foundations, we can take appropriate steps in rectifying the inequalities that have persisted for the black community for hundreds of years.

A Time to Kill (1996)

A Time to Kill. Amazon.com. [10 April 2025], https://go.iu.edu/8t3C

A Time to Kill was directed by Joel Schumacher and set in 1984 in a small, fictional town in Mississippi. It stars Samuel L. Jackson as the protective father Carl Lee Hailey, who kills the two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter who did not face legal consequences for the rape. The story then follows lawyer Jake Tyler Brigance (Matthew McConaughey’s character) and Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock’s character) as they take up Hailey’s case. Freddie Lee Cobb, the brother of one of the white men Hailey shot, wishes to avenge his brother’s death and does so by finding and joining the long-forgotten Mississippi branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The reemergence of the KKK in the film is a shock to the town, since it had long been thought that the KKK was disbanded. The Klan wreaks havoc on the black community in town, attacking black people and sending messages through burning crosses in Jake Brigance’s front yard. The movie was an adaptation of the book A Time to Kill by John Grisham, with some basis in reality but the majority of the story is fictional. However, the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the movie is a parallel to the group’s consistent reemergence in real life. While it was thought that the KKK was abolished after the Civil War in the early 1870s, the Revival of the Klan was seen in 1915¹. One recent sign the Klan was in 2019, here in our very own Bloomington, Indiana². In 2019, KKK posters and threats were displayed around the community. These facts go along with the movie’s message that racism is—and has always been—prevalent, even if it is not visible. The film is important for recognizing black struggle because it demonstrates that collective hatred, fear, and discomfort bring people together in sometimes violent and aggressive ways to target the subject of their fear and hate. The collectivity of anti-black hate was the reason that the KKK was formed and it’s the reason why it has been historically revived over and over. The elements of the film leave questions for reflection: what are the structures and systems in place that allow for such strong hate to accumulate in destructive, homicidal organizations? Is there anything we as a society can do to prevent these kinds of groups? While many believe that the KKK and other black hate groups have lost their relevance because we no longer live in a world where the black man is not often explicitly inferior to the white man, this is far from the truth. Racism in our society has been transformed from overt methods such as slavery, lynching, etc. to more discreet, institutional forms of injustice and inequality.

References

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/ku-klux-klan-in-the-twentieth-century/¹

https://indianapublicradio.org/news/2019/08/bloomington-police-investigating-possible-kkk-flyers²

Valerie Terew is a freshman studying Social Work (major) with a focus on Political Science (minor). This is her first year working at Media Services and she feels as though she has gained a lot of insight through powerful, meaningful movies.