The Ultimate Black History Month Documentary Watch List

Black History Month is upon us, along with an abundance of well-told stories grounded in history: a bounty of feature documentaries, many directed by ascendant Black filmmakers, centered on entertainers, political figures and activists. Here are 14 works worth diving into that tell gripping stories and illuminate their historical context.

Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues (2022)

In addition to writing a winning memoir about growing up in New Orleans, trumpeter Louis Armstrong was a copious keeper of his thoughts. The shelves in the Queens, New York, home he shared with his wife of nearly 30 years, Lucille, were lined with audiotapes he made of those ruminations and conversations. With those tapes, along with a treasure trove of archival images, director Sacha Jenkins, 54, creates a fabulous portrait of an artist in his own voice, on his own terms.

Watch it: Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues

Descendant (2022)

Margaret Brown’s intricately woven film follows the story of the salvaging of the last known slave ship to carry African captives into American waters, the Clotilda, paying special heed to the descendants of that ship: the people of Africatown, Alabama, a small community north of Mobile. Like many stories involving the enslaved, Descendant engages the past and follows a river of ongoing outrages and lies to the present. But the film also holds exquisite space for the progeny of the captives — including Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis — to seek and speak their truths. Literary trailblazer Zora Neale Hurston interviewed and later wrote about the Clotilda’s last living captive (Lewis died in 1935) in her posthumously published work, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.”

Watch it: Descendant

I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

It’s not entirely clear when the James Baldwin renaissance began, though Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 book Between the World and Me certainly nudged it. Director Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary grapples with the unfinished book Baldwin hoped to write about three of his friends assassinated for their activism and vision: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In addition to using excerpts from the manuscript, Peck weaves his own thoughts about cinema’s history of representation of Black people to elegiac and damning effect.

Watch it: I Am Not Your Negro

Great Migrations: A People on the Move (2025)

Harvard professor and cultural griot Henry Louis Gates Jr., 74, delivers a four-hour PBS series not about movements but about movement and how it transformed America. The four-part PBS opus comprises Exodus, about the 1910-1940 first-wave migration of over a million Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South for the North; Streets Paved in Gold, about the 1940-1970 second-wave migration; One Way Ticket Back, about the reverse migration back to the South; and Coming to America, about African and Caribbean immigrants to the U.S.

Watch it: Great Migrations: A People on the Move