Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
The Last Blockbuster is a 2020 documentary film about Blockbuster LLC's last store, located in Bend, Oregon. It was released on December 15, 2020, by 1091 Pictures.
ClayFighter is a fighting/beat 'em up series of video games. The series has character sprites rendered from clay-animated figures, and parodies other fighting games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. ClayFighter: Tournament Edition and ClayFighter: Sculptor's Cut were only released as rental games from Blockbuster LLC in the United States.
Blockbuster or Blockbuster Video is an American multimedia brand which was founded by David Cook in 1985 as a single home video rental shop, but later became a public store chain featuring video game rentals, DVD-by-mail, streaming, video on demand, and cinema theater. The company expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster employed 84,300 people worldwide and operated 9,094 stores. Poor leadership and the impact of the Great Recession were major factors leading to Blockbuster's decline, as was the growing competition from Netflix's mail-order service, video on demand (including the Netflix streaming service), and Redbox automated kiosks. Significant loss of revenue occurred during the late 2000s, and the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010. The next year, its remaining 1,700 stores were bought by satellite television provider Dish Network; by 2014, the last 300 company-owned stores were closed. Although corporate support for the brand ended, Dish retained a small number of franchise agreements, enabling some privately owned franchises to remain open. Following a series of further closures in 2019, only one franchised store remains open, located in Bend, Oregon. As of 2025, the corporation that owned Blockbuster before Dish remains in existence as a shell company under the name BB Liquidating, Inc., which gained notoriety in the GameStop short squeeze in 2021.
Nintendo of America, Inc. v. Blockbuster Entertainment Corp. is a 1989 legal case related to the copyright of video games, where Blockbuster agreed to stop photocopying game instruction manuals owned by Nintendo. Blockbuster publicly accused Nintendo of starting the lawsuit after being excluded from the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act, which prohibited the rental of computer software but allowed the rental of Nintendo's game cartridges. Nintendo responded that they were enforcing their copyright as an essential foundation of the video game industry. The dispute began in the late 1980s, when video rental shops began to rent computer software to capitalize on the growing software industry. This practice was legal, thanks to the first-sale doctrine which allows anyone to distribute an instance of a copyrighted work that they have legally purchased. To stop the rental of software, the United States Congress was lobbied by the Software Publishers Association, as well as Microsoft, the WordPerfect Corporation, and Nintendo. The Video Software Dealers Association offered a compromise to the Software Publishers Association, promising to support a prohibition on software rentals if they still allowed the lucrative game cartridge rentals. A draft of the new rental protection bill passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, prohibiting software rentals for computers while allowing stores to rent Nintendo game cartridges. With no legal remedy to stop the rental of their games, Nintendo sued Blockbuster for reproducing their copyrighted game manuals. Blockbuster quickly ended the practice, and decided to hire third parties to create replacements for any lost or damaged manuals. They settled the lawsuit with Nintendo a year later. Soon after the settlement, the United States Congress passed the Computer Software Rentals Amendment Act prohibiting software rentals, excluding Nintendo cartridges from similar protections. Although Nintendo criticized the game rental business, they came to accept it, even working with Blockbuster to offer exclusive rental versions of their games. The first-sale doctrine was eventually subverted by end-user license agreements, which describe that the consumer is purchasing a singular, non-transferable license to the software, thus limiting the sale of used software.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.