10 Inspirational Black Leaders Who Deserve Films About Their Lives

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Like Solomon Northup, the protagonist in 12 Years a Slave, Robert Smalls’ name is not a household one. But his story has all the makings of a fantastic film. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls used his position as a ship’s captain to overtake the CSS Planter on May 13, 1862 and steer himself—along with his crew and their families—to freedom. But Smalls’ activism didn’t end there: following the Civil War, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and the South Carolina State legislature, where he helped to establish the first school for African-American children and founded the Republican Party of South Carolina.

A pioneer of the civil rights movement, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a journalist and social observer who used the media as a platform to share the injustices that were being done to both African Americans and women in America in the 19th century. Though she helped to establish several women’s organizations and even sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company in 1884, after being forcibly removed from a train when she refused to give up her seat to a white man, Wells-Barnett is best known as an anti-lynching crusader. She used Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper she co-owned, to encourage fellow Memphis residents to relocate after three of her close friends were lynched, writing that, “The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.” She continued her crusade even after taking her own advice and relocating to Chicago, when she created the pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record, 1892–1894.

Before there was Thurgood Marshall, there was the man who trained him: Charles Hamilton Houston, a well-respected lawyer and the NAACP’s litigation director whose prominence in helping to abolish racial segregation in America earned him the moniker of “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.” Houston’s unexpected passing—from a heart attack on April 22, 1950, at the age of 54—meant that he unfortunately didn’t get to witness much of what he had started, including the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. But his protégé, Marshall, carried on his work. And in 1982, author Genna Rae McNeil helped to further identity his long list of contributions to the civil rights movement in her ripe-for-adaptation book, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree, this icon of equality (quite appropriately) re-christened herself as “Sojourner Truth” in 1843—nearly two decades after escaping to freedom with her infant daughter and 15 years after she became the first black woman to successfully sue a white man in order to recover her son. And win! In 1851, Truth made history once again when she ad-libbed a groundbreaking speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, the transcript of which was later published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle.

Though he’ll play a major part in the upcoming Paul Robeson biopic, author, historian, and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois’ life is equally deserving of its own two-hour runtime. After becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, Du Bois went on to fight for equal rights of America’s black citizens around the country. In 1905 he co-founded the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization named for the “mighty current” of change they hoped to see happen. Four years later, he helped to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Naturally curious and imbued with a strong sense of egalitarianism, Du Bois authored some of the most important works in African-American literature of the 20th century, including 1935’s Black Reconstruction in America. In truly dramatic Hollywood fashion, it wasn’t until a year after his passing that the Civil Rights Act was passed, enacting many of the changes Du Bois had fought for throughout his life.

Though he’s been represented, referenced and adapted in a number of films and stage plays, how the leader of the Harlem Renaissance has managed to escape a big-screen biopic treatment is baffling. A classmate of Thurgood Marshall, Hughes differed in his approach to social activism; whereas Marshall and Du Bois took a hard political line, Hughes preferred to express his politics via poetry. Rather than focus solely on the hardships of being black in America, Hughes aimed to depict the beauty of his culture. And in doing so, brought a bit of the black experience to all those whom his words touched.

The granddaughter of slaves, Fannie Lou Hamer is perhaps best known for “being sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A fiercely powerful orator, for years she served as one of the country’s leading voting rights activists, educating her fellow black citizens of their constitutional right to vote—and encouraging them to take advantage of it. Even if it meant being turned away, arrested, beaten, or shot at (all of which Hamer endured). Yet Hamer persevered, co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 and subsequently running for congress against a 13-term (white male) incumbent. It was during her run that Hamer stood before the Credentials Committee—in a televised proceeding that was seen by millions of Americans—to inform them of her desire to be treated as a first-class citizen, ending her speech with a poignant—and telling—question: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Frederick Douglass has appeared as a supporting character in films (Glory), novels (Riversmeet), and video games (Civilization Revolution), and been referenced by The Fugees and in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. But a biopic of the famed social reformer has never made it to the big screen. Which is particularly baffling given the built-in three-act structure of Douglass’ life: born into slavery, Douglass’ supreme intellect and oratory skills served as proof against the idea of slaves as intellectually inferior human beings. In 1838, he used those smarts to escape to freedom—utilizing four modes of transportation to travel from New York to Maryland, all under the guise of a free man. His 1845 autobiography (the first of three), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was a key piece of literature in the fight for abolition. Yet even after securing his freedom, Douglass remained a vigilant soldier in the fight for equal rights for all. In 1872 he became the first black candidate for the office of the Vice President of the United States. Not bad for a man who had forcibly taken his freedom back just three decades earlier.

Race wasn’t the only social injustice that concerned novelist James Baldwin; he spoke often of themes related to sexual and class discrimination as well. A friend to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers, Baldwin’s connection to the civil rights movement was a deeply personal one. And his writing pulled no punches. In novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain and essay collections such as Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin was striving to make sense of the world he lived in, never sugar-coating his experiences as an openly gay black man in 20th-century America. Now seems like the perfect time to tell the story of one of the world’s most famously complex creative talents.

He may be less than two decades into his political career, but don’t count POTUS out as a fascinating feature film subject. (Oliver Stone’s film W. came out while George W. Bush still had eight months left of his presidency, after all.) Sure, he’s only 52 years old, but America’s first black president has got a lifetime of perfectly dramatic big-screen fodder: an Ivy League graduate from a mixed race background who spent his formative political years trying to clean up Chicago’s South Side and the past five contending with old-school ideals while attempting to solve problems that were inherited from a previous administration. We smell an Oscar…