The Film Group was a Chicago-based production company founded in 1965. In the late 1960s, while anti-war and racial justice movements grew to prominence in Chicago, Mike Gray, a founder of the Film Group, was shooting a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Seeing the police violence on the streets, Gray and his crew decided to turn their cameras on the protests. Over the next few years, the group produced the award-winning documentary features American Revolution 2 (1969) and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).
Using footage shot for the earlier film and additional material of the Chicago Black Panthers, a 1966 civil rights march and the protests and police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Film Group produced the seven-part series of documentary shorts, “The Urban Crisis and the New Militants,” released in 1969. The Film Group intended the series to “teach by raising questions rather than by attempting to answer them.”
On September 4, 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality’s Robert Lucas led a civil rights march through Cicero, Illinois, protesting restrictions in housing laws. Cicero March is a vérité documentation of the march and hostile counter-protests that serves as a microcosm for the entire civil rights movement sweeping through Illinois and beyond.
As a sign of truly collaborative filmmaking, the Film Group’s cinematographer Mike Shea, sound recordist Gray and editor Jau Litvin are credited as “Film Makers,” thereby making the film not just a document of the history of the Civil Rights Movement but also of the country’s rich but under-documented history of radical film collectives and collaborative filmmaking. The film was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2013.
