This documentary was produced by Musindo Mwinyipembe and David Koff for the Public Broadcasting (PBS) affiliate in Boston, Massachusetts. PBS refused to air the film as the creators intended, and instead broadcast a heavily censored version in August 1978. PBS then filed a lawsuit against the director, Koff, to prevent him from distributing the film. The deputy director of the British Information Service in the U.S. called Blacks' Britannica "dangerous," and the film was banned in the U.K. It was eventually broadcast in its unedited form in 1989, by a small, independent cable program called "Alternative News" in Austin, Texas.