I remember attending America’s bicentennial festivities in 1976 as a 10-year-old Black girl with only an inkling about the truth of our nation’s history, who had yet experienced racism in the public parks, at school, or on TV.
The groundbreaking limited series “Roots” would not premiere until January 1977; the seminal civil rights-era documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize,” was a decade away; and the digital technology that allowed Darnella Frazier to capture and share the murder of George Floyd with the world wasn’t developed yet.
In the past 50 years, academics, filmmakers, and educators have broadened our understanding of the Black American experience. As we mark this point in America’s history, our nation has an opportunity to reflect honestly on the people, struggles, and ideas that shaped this experiment called America. Anniversaries invite celebration, but they also demand truth-telling. No meaningful commemoration can ignore the labor, sacrifice, creativity, and resilience of African Americans and other historically marginalized communities who helped build this nation.
Black Public Media was born in 1979 from a recognition that authentic stories about the Black experience were largely absent from America’s screens and public record. The stories that did make it to television and film were too often filtered through the perspectives of others, reduced to stereotypes, or dismissed as niche narratives. Independent filmmakers who wanted to tell authentic stories about Black communities found few opportunities for funding, mentorship, or distribution — public media gatekeepers frequently questioned whether these stories had broad appeal.
Yet Black stories have always been American stories.
Films such as “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords” illuminated the indispensable role of Black newspapers in documenting history, fighting injustice and giving voice to communities excluded from mainstream media. “I Am Not Your Negro” invited audiences to wrestle with James Baldwin’s piercing examination of race and identity in America and confront uncomfortable truths about the nation’s unfinished project of equality.
Perhaps most importantly, they have rescued stories from obscurity.
For decades, many Americans knew little or nothing about the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The violent eradication of one of the nation’s most prosperous Black communities remained largely absent from textbooks and public conversation. Stories like this did not disappear because they lacked significance. They disappeared because historical memory is often shaped by power that decides whose stories are preserved, whose experiences are deemed important, and whose pain is considered valid. When we can make and support Black stories, documentaries like “Goin’ Back to T-Town” (1993) about the Tulsa race massacre, are made and seen.
This has always been the power of Black storytelling.
When we learn about segregated schools, discriminatory housing policies, environmental racism, or voter suppression, we gain insights into the systems and structures that shape American life. These stories foster empathy, deepen understanding, and help us build a more just society. Unlike what some would have you believe, our stories do not divide us. They educate us, and they remind us of our shared humanity, which is precisely why some are afraid of the truth.
Although today’s streaming services offer an increasing number of films and series about Black history and culture, access often comes with barriers: Subscription fees, shifting business priorities, and changing licensing agreements can place important stories behind paywalls or remove them from public view entirely.
The public service mission is particularly important at a moment when efforts to restrict discussions of race and history have gained traction across the country. The painful irony of celebrating America’s 250th anniversary while simultaneously attempting to sanitize the stories that can be told about America should not be lost on any of us.
The audacity of celebrating freedom and democracy while minimizing the contributions and suffering of Black Americans, indigenous peoples, other communities of color, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and those living in poverty is deeply troubling. It suggests that the nation’s history can somehow be separated from the people who built it, whose activism expanded its freedoms, and whose sacrifices made its ideals more attainable.
Black Americans fought and died for rights they themselves were often denied. They served in every American war. They built businesses, created art forms that transformed global culture, advanced scientific innovation, strengthened democratic institutions, and repeatedly challenged the nation to live up to its founding principles. To act as though these contributions are peripheral to the American story (or even didn’t occur )is not simply historically inaccurate — it is a disservice to the country itself.
Attempting to destroy the mechanisms through which the truth is uncovered and shared is precisely what happened last August when Congress rescinded funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, our largest funder, clawing back $1.8 million from our budget.
As America approaches its semiquincentennial, Black Public Media stands as both witness and participant in the ongoing project of documenting the American experience in all of its complexity. The organization understands that public memory is not accidental. It is built intentionally — story by story, film by film, generation by generation.
The question is not whether Black stories have shaped the nation’s narrative. They always have. The real question is whether we will have the courage to tell the American story honestly and completely.
Leslie Fields-Cruz is executive director of the Harlem-based nonprofit Black Public Media and executive producer of the award-winning series “AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange.” She is a past president of the board of directors for New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and a board member of New Era Creative Space (NECS), a youth arts center in Peekskill, NY.
