The Black Power Mixtape 1967 - 1975

Kathleen Cleaver

Martin Luther King Jr. (left) and activist Harry Belafonte

Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael interviewing his mother Mabel Carmichael at her home in the Bronx, 1967

Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale

Angela Davis prison interview

Angela Davis giving a speech, 1974

Angela Davis on the cover of Time magazine, 1971

Angela Davis (left) with Jane Fonda (right)in 1971 during a demonstration against the war in Vietnam in Los Angeles, California

Swedish director Göran Olsson

THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967 – 1975                  B+      

Sweden  USA  (100 mi)  2011  d: Göran Olsson

We wanted to understand and portray America – through sound and image – as it really is.  However, there are about as many opinions on that as there are Americans.

A subject rarely examined in film, including an independent film about a wayward former Black Panther in Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us (2010) or mainstream documentary overviews in Shola Lynch’s FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS (2012) or Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015), yet this offers a completely different perspective that feels as relevant as ever, offering the rare opportunity to examine America’s racial crisis in the 60’s from an outsider’s perspective, something more along the lines of Agnès Varda’s documentary short film Black Panthers (1968), yet extended over time.  With 16mm found footage from the 60’s and 70’s discovered in the cellar of the Swedish National Broadcasting Company where it had been sitting for 30 years, compiled by a group of 14 Swedish documentarists for Swedish television who received surprising access, edited and reinvisioned by documentary filmmaker Göran Olsson, adding updated commentary of unseen modern voices, mostly black musicians, who add their own personal perspective as well as a contemporary musical soundtrack.  The results are somewhat erratic, with no real analysis, no acknowledgement of sexism within the movement, yet still mandatory viewing, stunningly powerful, with some material standing out more than others, including the Swedish commentary subtitled into English, never delving deeply enough into any one particular subject, where any number of historical figures are barely mentioned at all or receive short shrift.  Yet some of what’s discovered is emotionally raw and uniquely impactive, becoming a mixed bag, exactly as the title suggests, with various scenes strung together, offering an overall glimpse of an extremely controversial subject, yet so much press has been spent undermining the significance of the movement, fueled by the racist paranoia of then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who used “any means necessary” (to coin a Black Panther phrase) to infiltrate, spread falsehoods and destroy the movement.  This film, much like the history books, barely touches on this issue, as the FBI files were so secretive, yet their intent is clear through the FBI COINTELPRO program, a covert counterintelligence operation that initially discredited communist activities in the 50’s, but expanded in the 60’s to include nearly every major black figure, including Malcolm X and Rev. Martin Luther King, both of whom were assassinated under mysterious circumstances, yet both are viewed as trailblazers of the times, with Hoover describing Dr. King as “the most dangerous man in America.”  With the FBI scrutinizing Dr. King’s tax returns, monitoring his sexual and financial affairs, even trying to establish that he had a secret foreign bank account, they “leaked” unfavorable material to the press while the FBI planted listening devices in their home and various hotel rooms, tapped their phones, wrote fake letters and initiated false allegations, anything to sabotage his reputation.  The irony is that Dr. King was a religious figure, a minister, a man of peace, hardly a radicalized threat, yet his reputation was continually undermined and besmirched by a perpetual stream of lies, while the Black Power movement was a more radical offshoot from the pacifist Civil Rights movement, refusing to turn the other cheek and suffer the abuses of King’s followers.  The term “Black Power” is attributed to Stokely Carmichael, also known as Kwame Ture after 1969, who participated in the Freedom Rides in the early 60’s before becoming a full-time organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually becoming the Chairperson when John Lewis was elected to Congress, working side-by-side with Dr. King, finally persuading King to use the term at the end of a long two-week march to Selma, Alabama.  The term actually originates in Richard Wright’s 1954 book Black Power, used by New York politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. on May 29, 1966 during an address at Howard University: “To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power.”  Yet it was Carmichael who popularized the phrase just weeks later in a June 16, 1966 speech in Greenwood, Mississippi after the sniper shooting of James Meredith during the Mississippi Delta March Against Fear:

This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more!  The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over.  What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!

The term quickly caught on, used widely in the black community, where Civil Rights laws transformed the way racial discrimination could be handled in the courts, but “Black Power” spoke to one’s identity, turning what was previously viewed as a negative into a positive, as the term exudes a sense of confidence and strength, culminating in a newfound pride in being black, never more publicly posturized than the James Brown megahit in the summer of 1968, Say it Loud- I'm Black and Proud James Brown - YouTube (3:01).  While there is footage of the Attica Prison riot, attorney William Kunstler argued negotiations were progressing for a peaceful settlement, yet Governor Nelson Rockefeller instead ordered a bloody assault using shotguns that killed 29 inmates and all 10 guards held as hostages, winning President Nixon’s hearty approval, quickly shifting the emphasis to a “black” uprising, overlooking the openly racist pummelings of black prisoners by white prison guards, using their batons, which they preferred to call “nigger sticks,” which only increased afterwards in even greater numbers.  Some of the earliest footage shows the original Oakland, California headquarters of the Black Panther Party, a completely unpretentious dwelling where people gathered to initiate their programs, including the Free Breakfast Program For Children, a radical idea that is now practiced in schools all across the nation, providing needed nourishment to those children most in need, for some the only nutritious meal of the day, yet the FBI’s ludicrous response was to label the program “The most dangerous threat to the USA.”  While there is some footage of Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale making speeches overseas in Europe, there is scant footage of Black Panther speeches or rallies, no reference whatsoever to The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), killed in a police raid in Chicago, or Bobby Hutton who was shot while surrendering in Oakland, while many more are still in prison (Mumia Abu-Jamal) or exile (Assata Shakur), though we do see Huey Newton’s release from prison after charges against him for murdering a white police officer were dropped after spending nearly three years incarcerated.  Much happened during the interim, as the Black Panther Party exhausted all of their money in defense of arrested members, which became an ongoing ordeal when nearly every male member was either arrested or killed by police in a consolidated police effort to wipe them out completely, with Eldridge Cleaver and his wife Kathleen seeking refuge in Algeria, Huey Newton exiled to Cuba, leaving it to the women to hold down the fort until the money simply ran out.  The film offers a sad commentary on what happened in the 70’s as first heroin and then crack cocaine flooded black communities, creating a regular stream of overdoses and fatalities, where there is a train of thought that the government was behind this, which isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem, as they had access to large quantities of drugs, the money and power to distribute, and a longstanding motive to decimate the black community, as drugs ravaged those communities in the 70’s, effectively eliminating whatever liberating solidarity may have existed.  Even Stokely Carmichael eventually sought refuge in Guinea, rejecting the Black Panther Party for collaborating with whites and not being separatist enough, becoming an aide to their president, a student of their exiled former president Kwame Nkrumah, an advocate of pan-Africanism.  Yet Carmichael is seen with his mother in her Bronx home patiently interviewing her about his father, repeatedly asking why they were so poor and why he was continually out of work, where initially she politely resists, finally getting her to acknowledge that it was due to his race, so he was always the first one let go.  That is the essence of racial discrimination.  While there is a surreal busride of Swedish tourists riding through Harlem with positively bizarre commentary, one of the more exemplary interviews offers little hype or fanfare, exposing the interior world of a teenage prostitute who speaks about her life in a matter-of-fact manner, offering heartbreaking and devastating commentary about income inequality, giving voice to the voiceless, expressing how the other half lives in a country that proudly calls itself the richest nation on earth.  This is not a one-time only film, as Olsson also made a poetic, thought-provoking visual essay entitled CONCERNING VIOLENCE (2014), also premiering at Sundance, another documentary set to Lauryn Hill’s reading the text of Franz Fanon’s landmark work The Wretched of the Earth, an astute analysis of the psychological effects of the dehumanization of colonialism, both films told in 9 chapters, examining earlier footage of violent encounters during third world liberation struggles in Africa during the 60’s and 70’s.    

The Black Power movement is rooted in outrageous acts of unmitigated white violence and vile race hatred continually directed towards blacks now for centuries, leaving a traumatic path of destruction and emotional devastation in its wake, where at some point enough is enough, with Black Power leaders identifying and pointing out the most scurrilous violators of human atrocities, literally calling them out and demanding change.  With racism so entrenched in the fabric of American society, poisoning the waters of normal discourse, what appalls black communities barely registers in white neighborhoods, out of sight, out of mind, as there has been no accountability from the continual assault to black life, literally a tale of two Americas, where black and white are two entirely different and separate realities.  The Black Lives Matter protest movement of today has picked up on the theme that throughout American history, black lives haven’t mattered, and change won’t come until they do, receiving the same protective community policing as whites, basically the demilitarization of police, equal justice for the same crimes as whites, and access to the same resources and opportunities.  The real message here is that until the violence of racism subsides, no one is really safe.  Today, police routinely treat blacks differently than whites, targeted, killed and brutally mistreated more frequently, constantly viewed as a threat, where the Fraternal Order of Police has labeled Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization, just as the Black Panthers were perceived half a century ago by the same white law enforcement establishment.  It seems so little has been learned in the passage of time from the 60’s until now, as history is simply repeating itself.  Easily the most incendiary footage is a 1972 prison interview that takes place between an unnamed Swedish reporter and lifelong socialist and black activist Angela Davis, one of the most educated black women in America, who had been fired by Governor Ronald Reagan (still fighting the 50’s fight of McCarthyism) from her job teaching philosophy at UCLA because of her affiliation with the Communist Party, now awaiting trial on what is perceived as trumped-up murder charges, as guns that she legally purchased were involved in a Wild West courtroom shootout (Marin County Civic Center attacks) leaving the perpetrator and the presiding judge killed along with two others, while another (who provided testimony at the trial) was left paralyzed.  Davis fled the scene and became a fugitive, placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, eventually tracked down in New York, with President Nixon congratulating them on their “capture of the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.”  However, all charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, as Angela Davis is no terrorist, as she’s a professor and liberating free-thinker.  But during this interview, she is asked why so much violence is associated with the Black Power Movement?  Her answer is startling in its personal sincerity, offering a testimonial on what it means to be black in America, growing up in Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama where his radio comments sparked KKK vigilante violence against black communities, where she was neighbors with one of the girls killed by a Ku Klux Klan dynamite blast in a church depicted in Spike Lee’s 4 LITTLE GIRLS (1997), “I remember our house shaking,” where her father and others armed themselves and patrolled the streets to keep their families safe.  Each carefully chosen word is spoken with a suppressed inner rage, yet she speaks calmly and eloquently with a raw power that reverberates long afterwards, Angela Davis – YouTube (8:44).  “And you ask me about violence?!”  This moving sequence is the heart and soul of the film, the picture of inner resolve and strength.  The other remarkable aspect is the astute personal commentary of American historian Robin Kelly, filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, the poet Sonia Sanchez, and the musicians Om’Mas Keith, Erykah Badu, John Forté, Talib Kweli and Questlove.  What’s remarkable about these choices is how the political landscape has shifted from the radical hard core community activists to rappers and performers in the music industry who today inspire cultural change.  It was a remarkable decision to choose these contemporary figures without ever showing their faces, who so easily identify with these transforming historical moments, becoming a conversation linking the past and the present.  This film premiered at Sundance in 2011, inspiring immediate acclaim for its wealth of historical footage, where foreigners were allowed astonishing access that Americans might not otherwise obtain, providing a universality about the material, as racism doesn’t only exist in Oakland or America, but in all corners of the globe.  This film offers insight into how to develop empathy and fully understand someone else’s plight, which in itself is a major lesson in how to apply history, as it’s not always as the history books suggest.  Often oral histories contain much more observational truth, as these experiences are personalized, having been lived through and evaluated, offering a subjective truth that has an objective reality about it.  For all practical purposes, that’s the essence of poetry. 

He Got Game

HE GOT GAME          B+  
USA  (136 mi)  1998  d:  Spike Lee

It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that - for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four of the neighborhood's most promising players. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication. But working against them are woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the slick, often brutal world of college athletic recruitment. Incisively and compassionately written, The Last Shot introduces us to unforgettable characters and takes us into their world with an intimacy seldom seen in contemporary journalism. The result is a startling and poignant expose of inner-city life and the big business of college basketball. 

—Darcy Frey, book jacket from the uncredited The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, 1994

Spike Lee’s take on HOOP DREAMS (1994), an often amusing yet also dead serious message about how basketball is the new drug in the urban black community, as it can take you places you never dreamed or imagined.  The amount of attention young black basketball players receive often begins in middle school, becoming an all-out war in high school of competing college interests, each one absurdly creating what they think is the right fantasy to feed into a young man’s imagination, including fast cars, women, and money, where legal and illegal incentives all weigh into the picture.  A mix of gritty realism with fantasia and flashback, what truly sets it apart is the chosen use of music by Aaron Copland, which just feels like the heartland of America, traces of which could be heard in the orchestral music written by his father Bill Lee’s original soundtrack from Do the Right Thing (1989).  In an extended opening credit sequence, Copland is heard over the opening montage that starts off as a reference to Hoosiers (1986), with white kids shooting baskets out in the middle of cornfields, but it slowly gravitates towards the more upscale suburbs and inner city playgrounds, where both Brooklyn and Chicago are duly noted, including the Brooklyn Bridge and the Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center, extending to the outer reaches of the country as well before a masterful crane shot takes us from the Atlantic Ocean to the housing projects in Coney Island to the concrete outdoor yards of the Attica Correctional Facilities that houses inmate Denzel Washington (sporting an Afro) as Jake Shuttlesworth.  The music seems to have turned off many viewers, who prefer their basketball movies fast and freewheeling, more compatible with black music, but Aaron Copland, who happens to be white, Jewish, and gay, was born in Brooklyn where Spike Lee grew up, whose classical sound is expansive, grand, and eloquent, and may be the most American orchestral music ever written, incorporating jazz and folk into his music, literally liberating it from European influence, while also writing music for the film version of Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN (1940), a fictionalized portrait of small-town America.  These references are not lost on Lee, who makes proudly American movies, suggesting basketball is as quintessentially American as cowboys or Abraham Lincoln.

Sports culture, if one follows the money, is a dominantly male discussion in America, both at the collegiate and professional levels, where a sports movie is also a reflection of masculinity.  As Spike Lee shows his flamboyant support for the New York Knicks through his courtside tickets for games in Madison Square Garden, often engaging in trash talking with many of the opposing players during the game (where Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller in legendary playoff games come to mind when they literally torched the Knicks), he also has many pro basketball friends and acquaintances, and most prominently made a series of black and white Nike commercials in the 90’s with Michael Jordan 1991 - Nike - Michael Jordan, Spike Lee - Is it the shoes? 1 - YouTube (30 seconds).  Suffice it to say, with this basketball pedigree, he would be subject to humiliating ridicule by current NBA players if he made a bad basketball movie, so he avoids dunkfests or the underdog sports cliché, like ROCKY (1976) or Hoosiers (1986), and puts himself at the center of the controversy.  In Lee’s film, Academy Award winning Denzel Washington is not the basketball star, as he’s serving 15 years in prison, but the Governor is a big basketball fan and has taken a particular interest in his son Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by NBA guard Ray Allen at age 22, at the time a member of the Milwaukee Bucks), who is ranked the #1 high school player of the nation, courted by every school in the country, all offering scholarships and other assorted goodies.  The warden has a plan to release Jake for a week, on an electronic monitoring device, guaranteeing a quicker release from prison if he can get his son to commit to Big State University, the Governor’s alma mater. 

Oddly enough, the plot bears a resemblance to John Carpenter’s electrifying thriller Escape from New York (1981), where Kurt Russell as prison convict Snake Plissken is released from prison to perform a morally questionable, near suicidal mission in exchange for the dubious government promise of his release should he succeed, where the suspense is enhanced throughout by a diminishing time limit that could produce fatal effects.  Here Jake is the convict, and his mission is to go into the projects of Coney Island and get his son to sign a letter of intent to enroll in Big State University, where the kid is under siege from every college in the country.  Since so many of the other offers are morally questionable, why not from the Governor?  Lee proceeds to use recruitment offers like Busby Berkeley dance spectacles in 1930’s musicals, each one more outrageous than the last, using quarter of a million dollar automobiles, free access 24-hours a day to willing and available white girls in college dorms, who in addition to sexual favors will also cook and clean for him, or a cool $10,000 in cash as suggestive inducements.  This plays out like utter fantasy, an exaggerated invention of an artificialized paradise, where what’s most distressing is just how real these offers actually are.  College athletics is a huge business, where money is flowing at all levels, where sports agents routinely sign their players to multi-million dollar deals, exactly the opposite world than the often desolate, gang-infested, economically deprived urban ghettoes where these inner city kids come from, as the recruitment process for the best high school players in the country is open season for the highest bidder and amounts to little more than camouflaged bribery. 

The idea of pairing up Denzel Washington with a real NBA basketball player parallels a theme of social reality, which works brilliantly in the film, especially Allen whose shooting skills and talent on the court are indisputable, where Lee capitalizes on his natural grace and timing, turning it into cinematic poetry in motion.  Real life coaches John Thompson (Georgetown), Dean Smith (North Carolina), John Chaney (Temple), Roy Williams (Kansas), Nolan Richardson (Arkansas) and Lute Olson (Arizona) appear on video to remind Jesus, “This will be the most important decision in your life,” which he hears a zillion times.  While Lee is the credited screenwriter, his first since JUNGLE FEVER (1991), using actress Lonette McKee in both, he’s lifted more than a few pages from Darcy Frey’s book The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams, as both are set in and around Brooklyn’s Lincoln High School, each grounded in the game’s meaning and potential monetary significance to those living in the Coney Island projects, where basketball is both a trap to those who get injured or fail, and a ticket out to those few who succeed.  The book follows three seniors and freshman Stephon Marbury, an eventual NBA all-star, where the others aren’t so lucky, as Darryl Flicking couldn’t pass the 700 SAT score needed to be NCAA eligible, becoming homeless afterwards where in five years he was eventually hit and killed by an Amtrak train.  One of the other players currently works manual labor, where both the film and book expose the demeaning recruitment process, where teenage kids are tempted by the million dollar lifestyle of NBA stars (see a pulled from the headlines 2013 story where hotel, meals, and travel expenses, along with $20,000 were issued to former coach to lure a college freshman player to an NBA sports agent:  Kansas reviews McLemore coach allegations), where friends and family already have their futures lined up, completely dependent upon this kid’s potential future earnings, convinced he will make it, usually at the expense of his education. 

Much of the movie’s tender and often heartwarming storyline is the friction that exists between father and son, the root of which is not initially known and slowly unravels through the use of flashbacks, but also the pressure that exists from being the best in the country, where so much is expected from you.  Even if you keep your head and avoid the lure of temptation, those around you are more susceptible, where recruiters end up going after aunts and uncles or high school coaches, even girl friends, played here by a young Rosario Dawson.  Everybody wants a piece of the gravy train, and no one wants to be left out, so they get their hands in early.  But clearly, the film’s definitive mano a mano struggle is between Jake and Jesus (interestingly not named after the Biblical figure), both struggling with their own masculinity, where Jake’s dreams to succeed may have pushed Jesus too far in what amounts to bullying tactics, literally forcing him to succeed for the supposed benefit of the family, while Jesus completely rejects anything from his still incarcerated father, thinking of him as a stranger that no longer exists.  Both are connected to a wounded past from which they haven’t recovered and both need to redefine themselves for the future if they ever expect to heal from past mistakes.  Easier said than done, as this film suggests there are no easy answers, that the line between multi-millionaire and prison for a black man is a thin one, where a few split seconds in one’s life may make all the difference—but what a difference.