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When Hollywood focuses on civil rights

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It's been 50 years since Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. For Screen Time this week, Stephanie and Kerri talk about Hollywood's portrayals of the civil rights movement.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS ON THE SILVER SCREEN:

• The New York Times Magazine article that inspired Spike Lee to make "4 Little Girls," his documentary about the bombing of an Alabama church in 1963.

• Clip from "Lee Daniels' The Butler"

• Clip from "The Help"

• Review of "Mississippi Burning"
"Mississippi Burning" surveys the geography of racism, sheds light on the dark night of the soul. Director Alan Parker stokes the inferno with cruelty, hatred and charring crosses, then sifts the cold ashes for clues. The mystery, ostensibly about the murder of three young civil rights workers, is the inhumanity of man. Parker, a director of breadth, not depth, never supplies the big answers, but he does powerfully depict the climate of the Confederacy in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964. "Mississippi Burning" offers an appalling litany of white supremacist atrocities in the guise of a buddy detective thriller. Gene Hackman gives a towering performance as Anderson, a former sheriff wise to sleepy Southern streets, and Willem Dafoe is understated as Ward, the principled straight arrow in charge of the FBI's search for three missing civil rights workers. (Washington Post)