In light of research on diversity learning and teaching, this article describes how an introductory course on cinematic depictions of African Americans taught at a predominately white, rural university campus leads students to see the impact of history and Hollywood on their own local and statewide communities. Like others who teach courses on multicultural and ethnic literature and film, the author's objectives include examining the cultural, social, political, and economic significance of these texts. In the film class, his objectives also include attempting to determine the importance of these films to American cinematic history. In order to engage his students in the course and help them understand the importance of the messages encoded in these film texts, he drew from an experiment conducted by Margaret A. McLaughlin, who used African American literature in her developmental reading and writing courses to help her students discover connections to their own personal experiences. (Contains 3 notes.)