Rikers

Nov 12, 2016

1h 10m

★ 6.0

AN AMERICAN JAIL

Overview

This film from Bill Moyers is the first documentary to focus exclusively on people formerly detained in New York City’s notorious Rikers Island Jail. They tell their compelling stories direct to the camera, revealing the violent arc of the Rikers experience – from the trauma of entry to extortion and control by inmates, to oppressive corrections officers, violence and solitary confinement.

Genres

Documentary

Rikers Trailers

Cast

Host

Bill Moyers

Self

Tariq Barnes

Barry Campbell

Hector Custodio

Candie Hailey-Means

Robert Hinton

Kathy Morse

Five Mualimm-Ak

Ismael Nazario

Marcell Neal

Ralph Nuñez

Damian Stapleton

In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the course of American history. Based on Richard Gergel’s book Unexampled Courage, the film details how the crime led to the racial awakening of President Harry Truman, who desegregated federal offices and the military two years later. The event also ultimately set the stage for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which finally outlawed segregation in public schools and jumpstarted the modern civil rights movement.

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