Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (Mon., Jan. 20, 10 p.m., WHYY-TV) Born in West Chester in 1912, Bayard Rustin was raised a Quaker, and he held fast to the ideals of nonviolence and peace throughout a long career in political activism. Early on in Nancy Kates' and Bennett Singer's documentary, Eleanor Holmes Norton calls Rustin "an organizer unequaled in his time," and Brother Outsider collects plenty of evidence to buttress that accolade. Perhaps Rustin's greatest achievement was conceiving and organizing the March on Washington in 1963, a watershed event in the civil rights movement, and the greatest organized protest in American history at the time. He protested the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector before they were legally recognized as such and campaigned for refugee rights in Southeast Asia and Africa for much of his life.

Despite his achievements, though, Rustin remained in the shadows; during the footage of the March on Washington, he's a constant presence on the dais, peering over Mahalia Jackson's shoulder or crossing behind Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. However great Rustin's talents, his commitment or his fervor, his homosexuality was a thorn in the movement's side, leaving organizations he belonged to vulnerable to attack, and alienating him from supposedly broad-minded colleagues. Adam Clayton Powell muscled him out of organizing protests of the conventions in 1960, and A.J. Muste is quoted as urging Rustin to renounce homosexuality altogether. When it came time to denounce nonviolence and establish the Black Power movement, Amiri Baraka attacked Rustin as "a slave ship profiteer, a paid pervert for the racist unions," using Rustin's sexuality to slur his convictions. Even after his death, the prejudice he fought against still dogs Rustin, with school board members in West Chester objecting to the proposed naming of a high school after him, based mainly on his sexuality, or as board member June Cardosi was quoted in the Inquirer, "character flaws." (The board voted 6-3 in favor of naming the school after Rustin in December; Bayard Rustin High School for the Humanities sits on 18th Street in Manhattan.)

Even over the course of a feature-length documentary, Rustin remains elusive, the connection between the public figure and the private man barely probed. (Two of Rustin's lovers get about three minutes of screen time total.) The extent to which his homosexuality likely motivated his activism far more than it hindered it remains unexplored. Though it's a laudable work that gives credit where it is sorely due, Brother Outsider still leaves us on the outside.

The program, incidentally, kicks off an MLK-inspired week of programming about race in America, which includes the wrenching Two Towns of Jasper (Wed., Jan. 22, 9 p.m.), and America in Black and White: Jasper, Texas (Thu., Jan. 23, 10 p.m.), where the earlier documentary's producers return to Jasper with Ted Koppel in tow for a live "town meeting" examining the tragedy's lingering effects.

Strange Fruit (Mon., Jan. 20, 7:30 p.m., $7, Gershman Y, 401 S. Broad St., 215-446-3033) Joel Katz's documentary, shown at last year's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, uses the title song, penned by a Jewish schoolteacher and made famous by Billie Holiday, as a metaphor for the history of the civil rights movement. A bloody cousin to "We Shall Overcome," the song's portrait of a late-night lynching is by turns harrowing and horribly beautiful, as it lends the victims of mob brutality dignity even in death. Katz will attend the screening.

Singin’ in the Rain (Fri., Jan. 17-Sat., Jan. 18, Mon., Jan. 20-Wed., Jan 22, 7:30 p.m.; Sat, Jan. 18 at 3 p.m.; Sun., Jan. 19 at 3 and 6 p.m., $8.50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) I take back every nice thing I said about the Singin' in the Rain DVD a few months back. Go see it on the big screen, now. A new print, the same old classic: Whaddya need, a road map?

War Is…: Round Three (Thu., Jan. 16Sun., Jan. 19, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) I-House's war film series starts cooking with gas this weekend, with eight films and three guest speakers spread over four nights. The 1972 Winter Soldier (Thu., 8 p.m.) records the 1971 hearings on American atrocities in Vietnam, organized in Detroit by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, including then-leader John Kerry. Directed by a collective that included Barbara Kopple, the film is jaggedly edited and unevenly structured, the cutting away from testimony to stock footage occurring almost at random. But the film's power is almost enhanced by the crudeness that gives it the ring of truth. Hearing one G.I. recall the trip to Vietnam as "like a hunting trip," hearing soldiers repeat again words to the effect that "any dead Vietnamese is V.C., [and] living ones are suspected V.C.," or the soldier recalling how two buddies from Philadelphia would compete to see how far they could throw Vietnamese prisoners out of a plane, the extent to which a war with no clear objective spawns a moral vacuum is patently clear. Winter Soldier is shown with Stan Brakhage's 23rd Psalm Branch, recording his own reaction to the war.

Vietnam is also the subject of Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (Sun., 7 p.m.), whose greater sophistication only enhances its tinge of snideness. De Antonio (Point of Order) was an unreconstructed radical who saw Ho Chi Minh as Vietnam's answer to George Washington, and had nothing but contempt for the U.S.'s attempts to stifle Vietnamese self-determination. The Scranton-born de Antonio conducted interviews himself, mainly from kindred spirits, but much of his raw material is stock footage purchased from American news agencies, and in one case procured from the East German government in exchange for his participation in their propaganda programs. In the Year of the Pig, then, is mainly a work of montage, damning by accumulation. Hearing George S. Patton III laud his men as "a bloody good bunch of killers" in close proximity to Air Force General Curtis LeMay's assertion that "Orientals" value life more "cheaply" than we do ought to erase any lingering doubts about the racist underpinnings of the conflict. But while de Antonio, a veteran of WWII, doesn't minimize the loss of American life, the film creeps into sarcasm, particularly on the soundtrack, as with its use of versions of "La Marseillaise" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" played on native instruments. Perhaps it was necessary to underline the farcical nature of the conflict in 1969, but now it just seems like overkill. Shown with John Ford's The Battle of Midway (1942), Newsreel Collective's No Game (1968) and introduced by Craig Eisendrath, Senior Fellow at D.C.'s Center for International Policy.

Sam Fuller (see feature, p. 23) was a WWII veteran as well, but he made his anti-war statements by depicting the hell he'd experienced firsthand. From 1951, The Steel Helmet was the first American movie set during the Korean war, but it's drawn more directly from Fuller's experience in the trenches. At times, it's an awkward cross between a genre war picture and a full-on Fuller yarn, but it has moments of sublime power, as when one soldier strikes up "Auld Lang Syne" on a portable organ, only to find out it's the same tune as the Korean national anthem. Plus, you finally get to find out where Steven Spielberg got the name "Short Round" from.