The Civil Rights Act was signed 50 years ago in the White House in Washington DC on July 2nd, 1964. Two Afro-Germans, Jeannine and John Kantara, husband and wife living in Germany, were asked to write about the state of  civil rights in Germany for the Morgan State University‘s Winter 2014: Morgan Global Journalism Review on civil rights.  Their contribution is the featured article in the Review and is a must read for anyone interested in the historic as well as the present-day experiences of people of color in Germany.

Mischlingskinder – What Civil Rights Means to Mixed-Race Germans – Civil Rights in Postwar Germany to Present. To read please click HERE or on the cover image:

MGJR-Aufsager from Kantara Films & Documentaries on Vimeo.

Jeannine Kantara is an activist and co-founder of the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland – ISD-Bund eV (the Initiative Black People in Germany) and the black German magazine afro-look. She has written for the Die Zeit, a national weekly newspaper, as well as the daily newspaper Tageszeitung. She is also a contributing author to Black Berlin – The German metropolis and her African diaspora in the past and present. 

John Amoateng Kantara is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Berlin, specializing in science and technology. He has been recognized by the German Academy for Technological Sciences, won the prestigious George-von-Holtzbrink Prize for Science Journalism and the German Journalism Prize for Space and Aeronautics. In 2013, the Otto-Brenner Foundation awarded Kantara with the prize in critical journalism for his documentary Killing Via Joystick – the Drone War and its Consequences.

From the archives of Kantara Films  & Documentaries: 1971 Film About Black Germans