Meanwhile, a younger generation of black filmmakers emerged from academic settings: the film schools of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California, New York University (NYU), and later from historically black schools such as Howard University. Variously they embraced Van Peebles, Micheaux, and African filmmakers such as Ousmene Sembène of Senegal as their cultural models. For the first time women joined black filmmakers' ranks.

Asserting that black expression could be appreciated on its own terms, this new black cinema aimed to preserve black culture both within the Hollywood system and apart from it. New distributors, including the Black Filmmakers Foundation, California Newsreel, and Women Make Movies, Inc., aimed at select audiences and academic circles rather than mass markets. Yet there were crossovers such as Warrington Hudlin, who made Black at Yale (1977) and Street Corner Stories for the new distributors, but who also penetrated Hollywood, together with his brother Reginald. St. Clair Bourne's Let the Church Say Amen (1972) revealed both a filmmaker and a movement journalist. Women's films ranged from Madeleine Anderson's documentary pieces, Kathleen Collin's Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, and Ayoka Chinzira's satiric Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People (1985) to Julie Dash's commercially distributed, nostalgic Daughters of the Dust (1991). Others who crossed the line between the avant-garde and the commercial were Charles Burnett with his Killer of Sheep (1977) and Haile Gerima (of Howard University) with, most successfully, his fable of a clash between African and American sensibilities, Sankofa (1993).

The best known of the new black filmmakers during the 1980s and 1990s was probably Spike Lee, an NYU alumnus. He managed to win large audiences for almost everything he produced - film school exercises, credit-card-financed early efforts such as She's Gotta Have It (1986), television commercials, and promotional pieces. He also directed a string of Hollywood successes, including one of the most politically challenging and commercially successful films of the new black cinema, Do the Right Thing (1989).

As black filmmakers became more prolific, black actors in Hollywood - Danny Glover, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, and Jada Pinkett, among others - got steady, rather than sporadic work. By the late 1990s, the steadily expanding black presence in American film seemed to assure a solid future for the new black cinema.