Streaming on Max, the 2023 documentary “Gumbo Coalition” follows Black and Latino civil rights leaders, including the mayor of New Orleans, who have worked for change over several tumultuous years that included the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath and the onset of a global pandemic, as well as political movements hostile to immigration, diversity and the defense and expansion of voters’ rights.
To some, the current civil rights struggle may be identified with the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the wake of deaths of innocent men and women at the hands of police. Others may see this movement as a reawakening of a civil rights struggle that erupted in the middle of the 20th century, after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation, the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till and the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks and led by civil rights activists including the Rev. Martin Luther King.
But there’s a documentary streaming now that reminds us that all history has a history of its own.
Airing on WNED PBS (Buffalo) and streaming on Buffalo Toronto Public Media’s YouTube Channel, beginning at 9 p.m., the 2023 documentary “The Niagara Movement: The Early Battle for Civil Rights” recalls a decisive moment in the history of civil rights and Black identity dating back to 1905 and the birth of the NAACP.
At the end of the 19th century, a debate emerged among Black leaders, writers and clergymen. In 1896, the Supreme Court had decided, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, that segregation was consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Some Black leaders, most notably Booker T. Washington, the founder of the prestigious Tuskegee Institute, believed that Black citizens, just a generation removed from slavery, should “go slow” and work within the system, training an uneducated and unskilled population in the industrial arts and agricultural science. Only after such uplift, Washington felt, could Black people receive their equal due.
Washington attracted the praise and financial support of benevolent white donors, but lived and worked in Alabama, where a color line was officially, and often violently, enforced.
Other leaders, including the author W.E.B. Dubois (“The Souls of Black Folk”), contended that the time for conciliation was over and that Black citizens should fight for equal rights and accommodations.
Curiously, this very moment and argument are featured as a subplot in the HBO series “The Gilded Age.” In its second season, the aspiring writer and journalist Peggy Scott (Denee Benton) and her colleague T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) travel to the Tuskegee Institute to see its work firsthand and write about it for their New York Black newspaper. Peggy sees the virtue in Washington’s approach, but Fortune does not want to dance to the white man’s tune.
It’s curious that both Washington and Dubois were around at the time of author Mark Twain, who once observed that “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”
— Shudder, the streaming service for horror movies, offers “I Am Not a Serial Killer, a shocker about a town besieged by a supernatural entity. Their only defense is a disturbed young man obsessed with visions of homicide.
Shudder also streams “Mastemah,” about a therapist whose friends and patients start dying after she takes on a mysterious patient.
TONIGHT’S OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
— The battle rounds conclude on “The Voice” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-PG).
— The New York Jets host the Los Angeles Chargers in Monday Night Football action (8 p.m., ABC).
— A delicate case sends Alec’s date night into overtime on “The Irrational” (10 p.m., NBC, TV-14).
— Best known for light comedy, Audrey Hepburn stars in the violent 1967 thriller “Wait Until Dark” (10:15 p.m., TCM, TV-PG) as a blind woman trapped in her Greenwich Village apartment by drug dealers (Alan Arkin and Richard Crenna).
CULT CHOICE
A woman (Mary Tyler Moore) discovers that her best friend (Christine Lahti) is pregnant with the child of her late husband (Ted Danson) in the 1986 melodrama “Just Between Friends” (8:45 p.m., TMCX), written and directed by Allan Burns, co-creator of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Sam Waterston co-stars.
SERIES NOTES
CBS unspools three consecutive episodes of the naval justice procedural “NCIS” (8 p.m., 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., CBS, r, TV-PG) … “Kitchen Nightmares” (8 p.m., Fox, TV-14) … … “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test” (9 p.m., Fox, TV-14).
LATE NIGHT
Jimmy Fallon welcomes Please Don’t Destroy and Jung Kook on “The Tonight Show” (11:35 p.m., NBC) … Jennifer Hudson and Matt Rogers visit “Late Night With Seth Meyers” (12:35 a.m., NBC).
