motivation to the Civil Rights Movement. It was the racist murder of the African-American youth (seen in the photo with his mother) and the court trial that inspired Harper Lee to write To Kill a Mockingbird.

This connects to a powerful new documentary now playing in theaters such as Film Forum on West Houston Street in downtown New York City: filmforum.org.

Thomas Allen Harris has my respect, appreciation and deep gratitude for his moving and significant new documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.

Harris understands and communicates the power of a single image -- a single black and white image.

He gives us history.

He shows how the power that images taken by black people challenged demeaning images projected in mainstream white media. This ranges fromfamily photos to pictures in national magazines. Here's a trailer for Harris' Through a Lens Darkly.

I did not expect this documentary to make me cry, but it did. The segment about photographs taken during the funeral service for Emmett Till had tears rolling down my face. There have been documentaries made about Till. One aired on PBS. If you're unfamiliar with that crime and its court case, learn about it.

I think the negative, humiliating racial images projected in mainstream media influenced Hollywood. I feel they had an impact on the restricted film image career of Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel (1939's Gone With The Wind, Best Supporting Actress) and the complicated career of the actor known as Stephin Fetchit, an black actor very popular with white audiences for his