As the Black Lives Matter movement is gaining more ground in the wake of countless police killings, the number of (mostly white) people interested in getting an education in Black history is growing. The streamers have responded and added many films and documentaries to their library. Some docs are recent, others are quite old. They all are being offered in connection with Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month in February.

Interested in the Civil Rights movement? There is no better series than the 14-hours of Eyes on the Prize that originally premiered in 1987 and spans all major events from 1954-1985 with many of its interviewees like Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), and George Wallace.

Many of the same figures plus Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver were interviewed by Swedish journalists for The Black Power Mixtape which tells the story of the Black Power Movement through European eyes. The footage was lost for decades, then found in the basement of a Swedish TV-station and resurrected by director Göran Olsson and co-producer Danny Glover, with the filmmakers cleverly editing the interviews and adding present-day comments from African-American artists Melvin Van Peebles, Erykah Badu and Harry Belafonte.

In 2013 The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross premiered and won an Emmy. The series, narrated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is a journey seen through the viewpoint of the Black Experience. Peppered with scenes of historic sites, it spans 500 years and both continents – America and Africa.

Freedom Riders is another not-to-be-missed film: in the summer of 1961 over 400 Blacks and Whites drove through the segregated South to protest segregation. They risked their lives while deliberately violating Jim Crow laws and demonstrating how racist the country really is. Says its director Stanley Nelson: “The lesson of the Freedom Rides is that great change can come from a few small steps taken by courageous people. And that sometimes to do any great thing, it’s important that we step out alone.”

That history is often not learned in school, as being proven by a number of documentaries that have come out in recent years. Filmmakers have poked considerable holes in the whitewashing of history with works like Slavery by Another Name, that explores the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation did not end forced labor and that thousands of Black Americans were brutally coerced into a system where, even without committing a crime, they worked without pay for their masters; that practice lasted well into the 20th century. Ava DuVernay went a step further with her Oscar-nominated documentary The Thirteenth about the 13th amendment that led to mass incarceration and the continued practice of slavery in prisons.

For those still not familiar with James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro is a must-see. It is based on an unfinished book that Baldwin had been working on before he passed away in 1987. The film shows the Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of Baldwin and through his encounters and experiences with other contemporaries including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. The narrative, using the words of Baldwin, is haunting and the author/activist really comes to life in this doc.

For more recent events dealing with racism, there is LA92 about circumstances that led to the Los Angeles Riots in 1992 after the acquittal by a court in Simi Valley of the cops who violently beat Rodney King. It juxtaposes archival footage of the incident with other injustices caught on tape, making the film eerily relevant for our times.

For this and much more, many of the streamers have created “Black History” sections on their homepages.