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Reviews
From the Bottom (2008)
A powerful yet gentle account of a young black man's rise from the post-slavery cotton fields to the aircraft industry and the state legislature of Kansas
In this gentle documentary an amazing, articulate man shares his fascinating story of finding his own power despite being orphaned and living in crushing poverty. From the cotton fields of Jim Crow Tennessee he got an education, including college, realized his dream of being a pilot, established his own pilot training and plane sales business in Wichita, Kansas. Ulysses Lee Gooch was named by the white landowner for whom his family sharecropped. He dreamed of flying and became first a pilot--though denied the right to fly for the U.S. military in WWII--and then a businessman, a distributor of planes. He provided plane charter service, trained pilots, and sold MOONEY planes in the aircraft capital, Wichita, Kansas. When Mooney went under, owing him $100,000 that it never paid him, he was devastated financially, but paid off his creditors. He went on to be was elected to the city council in Wichita, Kansas, and elected and re-elected to the Kansas State Senate. Senator "Rip", whose nickname came from Ripley, Tennessee, his birthplace, is a Kansas icon. His story is told in this documentary and in his autobiography, Black Horizons: One Aviator's Experience in the Post-Tuskegee Era. Gooch's narration of his life is understated, powerful, and never self-congratulatory. His story illustrates 20th Century U.S. history from 1923 through the present and the extraordinary challenges that had to be overcome by African American youth seeking to follow their dreams.
The House I Live In (2012)
an outstanding look at how our prison system has changed under the War on Drugs
This outstanding documentary is being shown across the nation in prisons, watched by guards and inmates. Including inmates, prison officials, and scholars of corrections, this documentary is riveting. It exposes what mandatory sentencing for drug use and sale, victimless crimes, has done to fill our prisons and promote expansion and privatization. It is an excellent companion piece to Michelle Alexander's outstanding book, The New Jim Crow. Its findings show the personal impact of the US having one of the largest prison populations in the world and paying $24,000 per inmate to incarcerate rather than funding programs, including job training, and policies including a higher minimum wage and changing sentencing so that victimless crimes do not net a felony conviction, that would help offenders function in the outside world. It is a must see!