Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story about Racial Injustice

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.

Starr Carter lives in a poor Black neighborhood and goes to a rich, mostly white prep school, and keeps those two lives apart until the night she watches a police officer shoot her friend Khalil. The film follows what happens when she is the only witness and has to decide whether to speak. Adapted from Angie Thomas's novel.

Why it’s here: The film puts a teenager in the position of choosing to testify against power, at real cost, and doesn't pretend it's easy. What's pedagogical is how clearly it shows the gap between the two worlds Starr lives in. It trims the book's interior voice, so read the book first when you can. Direct companion to the novel already in the catalog.