ABC will remove a series anthology about the struggle for the civil rights of African Americans, and the story will be told through the prism of the life of the women involved in it. According to Deadline, the project received the working title “Women of Movement”.

The series will be produced by a team of well-known American cultural figures, including rapper Jay-Z, actor and musician Will Smith, as well as Aaron Kaplan, the owner of Kapital Entertainment (the studio that will release the series).

The first eight episodes of the anthology are based on the book Emmett Till: The Murder That Shook the World and Caused the Civil Rights Movement by Devery Anderson, released in 2015 and dedicated to the mid-1950s. Then, after the murder of black teenager Emmett Till, a wave of protests swept in the United States, stimulating the African American civil rights movement.

Kapital Entertainment began developing the series based on the book back in 2014. Then the project was offered to HBO. The authors did not initially intend to talk about the struggle for racial equality from the point of view of women, however, when the project changed the broadcaster, the producers decided that the focus should be shifted specifically to the weaker sex. Marissa Joe Cerar (Fosters) acted as the screenwriter of the updated project.

Thus, the central figure of the first episodes of the anthology was Emmett Till's mother Mami, one of the women who launched the struggle for equality, Deadline notes. The struggle for justice in the name of her son has become a matter of her life. Till conducted a very successful campaign under the auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Population (NAACP) (then she traveled around the country talking about the fate of her son). This event is considered a turning point in the struggle for civil rights, the publication emphasizes.

According to the producers, the activist Rosa Parks will become the key character in the second part of the anthology. According to Deadline, there is an opinion that Mami Till and Rosa Parks once met - so this alleged meeting symbolized the transfer of the baton from one representative of the civil rights movement to another.

“I am not a Negro” and “Ghostbusters”


Recall that in the late 1950s, the US movement for the civil rights of the black population, against segregation and racial discrimination, intensified. African Americans staged protests, strikes and boycotts, including in schools and public transport).

One of the most famous leaders of the movement was the heroine of the future series - Rosa Parks. During the bus ride, Parks refused, at the request of the driver, to give way to a white passenger. This act of civil disobedience ultimately provoked massive public action - a black population led by a Baptist preacher Martin Luther King boycotted Montgomery's public transport lines. As a result, in 1956, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in the provision of transport services as unconstitutional.

  • Shot from the film "I am not a Negro to you"
  • © imdb.com

However, protests took on an ever-increasing scale throughout the country. US authorities made concessions to African Americans, and the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination.

The series, produced by Will Smith, Jay-Z, and Aaron Kaplan, is far from the first appeal of American writers and filmmakers to the history of the movement against racial discrimination. In addition, at present the situation is such that almost no American films can do without black characters.

So, the first black woman, Nobel Prize winner in literature, Tony Morrison, in her 1983 Recitative story, wrote about two girls, black and white. At the same time, throughout the whole story, the author intentionally did not mention which of the heroines was African American, erasing their racial identification for the reader. Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019.

In the early 1990s, Mark Kitchell’s movie, Berkeley in the 60s, was released. The picture, among other things, tells about the Black Panther Party, which called for armed resistance to spread racial inequality. In 2016, the documentary “I'm Not A Negro” was released by director Raul Peck, based on the unfinished memoirs about America of the early 1960s by journalist James Baldwin.