Product Details

• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: January 11, 2005
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0006L0LHA
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #39,625 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

FREE AT LAST:CIVIL RIGHTS HEROES - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you have any interest in the Civil Rights struggle, buy this, February 19, 2008

By 

David Nox (Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes (DVD)

This is a great DVD that documents the life and death of several civil rights heroes. It's shows how some were tried for their murders and how many escaped for these crimes.
It shows interviews with the people who were there. Also the surviving family members. I found the story of Viola Liuzzo quite moving. A white house wife and mother who saw what was going on in Alabama and went down
to help drive the activists. She was shot dead. Leaving her husband and children. There were many heroes of the struggle many are rarely discussed.
Here are a few who paid the ultimate price.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hats Off To Lesser Known Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, September 5, 2010

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes (DVD)

Every major (and most minor) progressive social struggle in America from the struggle for independence from Great Britain through to the struggle for slavery abolition up to the struggle for women's rights and gender equality today has had more than its share of heroes and martyrs. The purpose of the documentary under review, Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes, rightly, highlights some of those lesser known heroes and martyrs from the struggle for black civil rights that came to national prominence in the1950s and 1960s (although arguably that conscious struggle goes back to the 1930s and before).

Although, in the end the question of black equality had to be addressed (and still has to be addressed) nationally the thrust of the black civil rights movement that is featured in this film is the struggle for something like a democratic revolution by blacks and their supporters in the police state-like American South. That barbaric de jure and de facto Jim Crow system officially, as a matter state and social policy, held blacks in second class citizenship (or lower). The struggle to overcome that ingrained (and profitable, profitable for whites of almost all social strata) was almost, of necessity, going to create more than it share of heroes and martyrs.

The case of fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till and his horrible murder at the hands of white marauders in Mississippi in 1955, the first of the three separate segments that make up the film graphically highlights the problem. For the mere allegation of "whistling at a white woman while black" (if that allegation had any substance) young Emmett was brutally mangled and thrown into the local river. When his mother, righteously, made a cause out of this bestial murder all hell broke loose, at least on the surface. And the case galvanized blacks and whites nationally, alerting many for the first time to the hard fact that something was desperately wrong down in Mississippi (and not just there). But justice, Mississippi justice, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, is justice deferred. As detailed in almost all the cases highlighted in the film those directly responsible for the actions against the civil rights workers were either never brought to justice or only after something like a long drawn out legal civil war. No one should forget that aspect of the struggle either.

The other cases highlighted from the assassinated Medgar Evers to the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church when it was bombed to the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi that drew nation-wide attention to slain white civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb, murdered for "being white while working for black civil rights" exhibit those same kinds of sickening results. Let me put it this way after viewing the film footage here, especially Bull Connor's attack dogs being let loose on civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama that was one of the first visual images that drove me into the civil rights struggle, I still wanted to throw something at the screen. And you wonder why fifty or so years later I still say Mississippi (or fill in your preferred state) goddam. Kudos here.