Documenting the Black Experience is motivated by two primary concerns:

Versions of history taught at the elementary, middle, high school, and at times college levels often exclude significant events from African American history, such as the murder of Emmett Till or the Ku Klux Klan's murder of four black girls when it bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Such events are integral aspects of history that continue to inform America's racial politics. Their exclusion from traditional accounts of history is a problem that this project addresses by bringing more visibility to documentaries focusing on such stories, and thus the events themselves.
Notable cinema books chronicling the history of documentary films and filmmaking follow a similar pattern, omitting the efforts of documentarians who have chronicled and continue to recount black-oriented stories. Therefore, this book also works to make documentary discourse more complete.


Hence, Documenting the Black Experience works to bring attention to non-narrative films chronicling the African American experience in four areas - Civil Rights, Sports, Electronic Media, and And Beyond: The Contemporary Black Struggle - demonstrating how the issues that the films address continue to inform America's racial politics.