Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference choose Selma, Alabama, as the place to push for voting rights. The film follows the strategy meetings, the fear, the brutal police attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the march to Montgomery. It is a film about organizing as a craft: picking the target, planning the confrontation and putting bodies on the line.

Why it’s here: The film shows a movement as a strategy argument as much as a moral one. What's punk is its focus on the organizers and local people, not only on one man. What's pedagogical is the planning: viewers see why a town was chosen and what a campaign has to do. Note: historians dispute the film's portrayal of President Johnson, and that dispute is a good discussion. Ava DuVernay's Origin is already in the catalog.

A documentary built from James Baldwin's own words, drawn from letters, interviews and the thirty pages of an unfinished manuscript about his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin's text over archival footage, old Hollywood films and newsreels, and contemporary images of the same fights still being fought.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the structure: Peck refuses the usual documentary apparatus of talking-head experts and lets one voice, a writer who was long ignored and long right, carry the whole film, cutting it against the images that prove his point. The pedagogy is in how it teaches a way of seeing. Baldwin takes apart the stories America tells about itself and shows how film and popular culture manufacture them, which makes this as much a lesson in media literacy as in history. It is dense and unsparing, so it suits older teens and adults who are ready to sit with it.