Agents of Change. Directed by Frank Dawson and Abby Ginzberg. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2016. 66 minutes.

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez. Directed by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2015. 91 minutes.

These films represent useful strategies to teach about the 1960s Black Freedom Struggle. They capture the zeitgeist of the times, and both focus on core activists who helped give birth to significant societal changes. While Agents of Change chronicles the origins and development of the Black studies movement, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez takes a deep dive into the biography of one of America’s greatest poets and most effective and enduring freedom fighters, since Sanchez continues to organize and train students to effect change. The films are equally effective at offering analyses that allow viewers to understand the larger movement narratives they chronicle.

Utilizing newspaper articles and other archival documents alongside interviews with student activists, elected officials, and university administrators, Agents of Change adeptly shows how young people pushed institutions like San Francisco State University and Cornell University to establish Black studies units. Focusing primarily on the California school, the film shows that while Black students and their White allies had been boisterous in their insistence that the histories of people of color be taught as part of a university’s curriculum, they were nonviolent in their initial demonstrations in fall 1968. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan took a hard line against their calls for equity and inclusion and counseled San Francisco State’s president, Robert Smith, not to negotiate or accede to their demands. Smith followed Reagan’s advice and asked the police to quell the student protests. Police officers subsequently beat and arrested the students, radicalizing many and ensuring the protests ultimately devolved into physical confrontations. The university’s refusal to consider the students’ demands precipitated a student strike that lasted four months. After more than six hundred arrests and significant support from the faculty, the university agreed to establish the nation’s first Black studies program and its first ethnic studies department. Because Asian, Chicano, and other students of color had supported and participated in the strike, this latter victory can serve as an excellent teaching tool about one of higher education’s crowning achievements. Detailing how similar upheavals occurred at Cornell University and other campuses across the nation, the film is an excellent way to spark discussions about systemic racism and healthy ways to address this ill. This film pairs perfectly with Martha Biondi’s Black Revolution on Campus (2014) and would work well with the film Off the Pig (1968), a fifteen-minute documentary that captures the early history of the Black Panther Party, a militant political organization that had been of central importance during the strike.  

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, which covers a similar period, is an homage to the life and legacy of one of America’s greatest scholar activists. It explores her development from a talented young person who admired Malcolm X, to a slightly older adult who, along with great poets like Amiri Baraka, were among the first contingent of Black studies instructors at San Francisco State. The film does a good job of showing not only how Sanchez’s poetry, written, according to her, by “a woman with razor blades between her teeth” (0:40), set the standard for the now wildly popular spoken word genre but also how her work provided the foundation for the later flourishing of hip hop and rap music. This legacy is made clear as the filmmakers use her writing and her life experiences to demonstrate that individuals who resist the status quo can influence the course of human history. Appearances by artists like Talib Kweli and Questlove, both known for their contributions to rap and hip hop, add spice to the documentary and help demonstrate the importance of change over time in social movements.

During a moment when equity, inclusion, and the teaching of Black history is under constant attack, the two films can serve as an introduction to an important historical period when young people utilized progressive approaches to tackle seemingly intractable social problems.1 Students not only will see examples of what it means to be totally dedicated to a principled cause, but they can also analyze the consequences of such dedication, as well as the sacrifices required to live a life intentionally arranged around the principles of freedom and justice for all. Because BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez highlights women’s agency during a period some history books infer had been led primarily by men, students might be well-served to view as a companion piece The Intolerable Burden (2003). This documentary depicts the life and times of Mae Bertha Carter, a lone Black woman who mounted a successful challenge to 1960s-era school segregation policies in the state of Mississippi. Ultimately, both BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez and Agents of Change shed light on the beauty, power, and intellect of unsung women activists who worked tirelessly to ensure future generations did not have to contend with a status quo established during the previous century.

To be clear, women played a pivotal role in creating Black studies on college campuses by serving as organizers, theorists, and activists who expanded the scope of the field intersectionally, moving it beyond race to integrate gender and other identities. Often marginalized within broader Black liberation movements, they foregrounded issues like sexism and the lived experiences of Black women, ensuring that the discipline addressed systemic oppressions holistically. Their contributions established Black studies as a challenge to academic norms and a transformative framework for understanding power, identity, and resistance.

1 In advance of classroom discussions, teachers will benefit from consulting a wide array of curriculum materials related to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements at the site Teaching for Change and the resources within Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching.

Curtis Austin teaches African American history and the histories of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements at Arizona State University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning book Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. His current writing projects include “Dare to Struggle: A History of the Black Power Movement” and “Dare to Win: A History of the San Francisco 8,” which is about a group of former Black Panther Party members falsely arrested in 2007 on charges of murdering a San Francisco police officer in 1971. Four years later in 2011, after sixties-era activists united with younger, present-day activists to raise awareness about the case, a California court dismissed the charges.