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From SeeingBlack.com Movies/TV From the inner-workings of hip-hop, to Los Angeles street gangs, to the intricate history of New Orleans,there is an especially rich offering of new Black History Month specials on television in 2007. Here are our reviews and highlights of four programs, “Bastards of the Party,” “The U.S.S. Constitution: Battling for Freedom,” “New Orleans,” and “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.” Also check our complete calendar of TV listings with links to our reviews of encore broadcasts.
Made in conjunction with Antoine Fuqua by a longtime member of the Bloods, Cle “Bone” Sloan, “Bastards of the Party” does not attempt to glamorize gang life or go too deep inside the world of gangs today. Rather, Sloan, who was 34 years old at the time the movie was made, wonders aloud at his longevity in such a death-ridden world and explores the history of how these two gangs have evolved to be what they are. To understand the gangs of today, Sloan starts with Black migration to Los Angeles in the early part of the last century. Well-known train routes that stopped in small towns in the Deep South picked up many Blacks traveling West to escape racist terror in Mississippi, Alabama and other states. But when they debarked in Los Angeles, the new arrivals found themselves in an environment that could be equally as inhibiting. Vintage footage, news accounts and interviews with longtime residents paint a picture of mid-century Los Angeles that was rife with discrimination, neighborhood segregation and racist violence against Blacks. In response to skirmishes from White street gangs who called themselves “spook hunters,” and from the Los Angeles Police Department (which made, at one time, a concerted effort to recruit Southern Whites as officers), some young Black men formed themselves into several street gangs, including the Slausons and Businessmen. “They fought the White boys — then there were no more White boys to fight,” says one longtime Black resident of the eventual White flight from communities such as Crenshaw, Inglewood and Compton. “Sooner or later, these Black gangs turned on each other.” Equally fascinating and well told is the story of how, during the 1960s, these original gangs morphed into Black political organizations — with many members of the Slausons joining the emergent Black Panther Party for Self Defense and other gangs feeding into the US organization headed by Ron Karenga, who would go on to found the Kwanzaa holiday. While there were tensions between the two groups, those differences were exploited by the F.B.I. in covert operations designed to destroy Black political organizations. The tensions came to a head in 1969 when two Black Panthers were killed in a shooting on the UCLA campus. Though many blamed US for the deaths, no retaliation was ordered from the Panthers. Both groups eventually declined in influence and active membership. The transition from political consciousness to the Bloods and Crips is less defined in this narrative but follows roughly the same social patterns that impacted many Black communities in the United States. As factories and plants, which had employed young Black men, closed down in Los Angeles beginning in the 1970s, unemployment and frustrations were on the rise. It was easy for the idle, unemployed to get work with the burgeoning drug trade, which by the 1980s, exploded with crack and its attendant violence. At the same time, a heightened drug dealer culture and materialism, depicted in popular movies such as “Superfly,” encouraged disrespect of the law and individual ruthlessness, according to residents and experts interviewed. As the lore suggests, sometimes gang fights would spring up over a seemingly insignificant incident, such as the theft of a leather jacket. Fights that were once fought with fists, bats and knives became the realm of drive-bys, guns and semi-automatic weapons. Sloan, a man with chiseled features who looks like an older, street version of basketball star Kobe Bryant, speaks directly into the camera in several segments. He is especially pensive when talking about those he knows who have been killed in gang warfare. While “Bastards of the Party” may provide some illuminating history, it also conveys the senselessness of gang violence and the utter waste of so many lost lives. The U.S.S. Constitution: Battling for Freedom” The History Channel Feb. 10, 8 p.m.
Though this is not sleek movie-making, it delivers a compelling narrative that keeps your attention. It is also a show that you can watch with young children or siblings without squirming about content that is too mature. In addition to the story of the ship itself, scholars such as James Oliver Horton add valuable information about relevant aspects of Black history. For example, they estimate that during the more than 250 years of the African slave trade, between 15 million and 20 million Africans were taken from their homeland. Of these, only 6 percent came to the United States, and the majority went to South America. One illegal slave ship or “slaver” discovered by the squadron was able to hold about 700 African men, women and children, estimated to be worth as much as $700,000, a staggering fortune at that time. Horton reminds us, as he did in “Slavery and the Making of America,” that the value of enslaved Blacks was greater than that of all of America’s banks, railroads, and manufacturing put together. Most effective are the stories about the ship and sailors, almost all White, who took this assignment not necessarily with any abolitionist drive but because it paid well, and paid even better if a rogue slave ship was captured. A journal maintained by one sailor details how many of the ship’s officers were sons of the Southern Confederacy and supporters of slavery, and how some Northern sailors were against the “peculiar institution.” The voyage re-created by this show begins in 1859. By its conclusion, the United States was already six months into the Civil War and many of these former shipmates would wind up on opposite sides of the battlefield. Oddly enough, some of the least effective portions of “The U.S.S. Constitution: Battling for Freedom” are re-creations of Africans who are captured in their village and eventually boarded on slave ships. Even for such a made-for-TV project, the effect is a bit too stagy and melodramatic, without the real horror of death during capture, the march to the coast, the imprisonment in dungeons or the actual Middle Passage. But this is my adult sensibility. A teen-ager who watched the program with me seemed positively mesmerized. There is an additional appeal here for those who love the history, structure and mechanics of ships. “The U.S.S. Constitution: Battling for Freedom” reminds us of the intertwining of maritime and Black history, without overlooking the gravity of millions of African lives lost during the Atlantic slave trade. New Orleans” PBS Feb. 12, 9 p.m.
Race, of course, looms large in any discussion of New Orleans, and this documentary does a decent job of explaining the intersection of Black History and city history. Most of us know about the birth of jazz and the world-fame of the city’s most favorite son, Louis “Satchmo” Armstong. But we may not know that, during slavery, New Orleans had the most prosperous community of “free people of color” in the United States, that the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared that states had the right to provide “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and Whites, started from a court case there, and the that the triumph of Ruby Bridges, the little Black girl who desegregated an elementary school [and was captured in a Norman Rockwell painting] also occurred there. One issue that narratives about the city, including this one, rarely address is how slavery was carried on differently in French-dominated Louisiana. Wynton Marsalis summarized the difference in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” by saying, simply, that the French married their slaves. Whether acknowledged or not, it is this atmosphere of race-mixing, within a larger context of available sex, that has always contributed to the city’s risqué ambiance. New Orleans has always had a large population of people referred to as mulattos, quadroons and octoroons, who formed their own society and sometimes, like Homer Plessy, could pass for White. It was in New Orleans where America’s “one drop” rule was a blur, if not a joke. One amusing anecdote that is offered by “New Orleans” on this subject mentions the difficulty street car operators had in enforcing segregated seating because it was often impossible to tell who was what. Without more on these roots of New Orleans, it feels like this documentary, though fine in many respects, is missing something. The city’s racism and largely Black poverty becomes difficult to reconcile with its supposed allure. Images of Black poor people suffering and dying after Hurricane Katrina only exacerbate this disconnection. There is definitely no basis offered to support the statement from artist John T. Scott that New Orleans “showed America how to do it” when it comes to race relations. This history is presented in a style that mixes a sort of modern Southern gothic with the moody and mysterious tones always associated with New Orleans. But the supposed “common culture” that all the city shares becomes a cruel and superficial joke in the face of so much misery, and the stark reality that important markers of life, health and well-being are not shared at all. Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes PBS Feb. 20, 10 p.m.
While Hurt does not make the Golden Age his focus, it is a reference point for his entry into hip hop and for zeroing in on his primary target — “representations of [Black] manhood” made by the music today. “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” functions as a visual essay that is, at once, personal and community-wide, private and public. Rather than being preachy or academic, Hurt is very much in-your-face. For example, what better way to hammer home the point about violence in lyrics than to have a series of aspiring MCs “spit” for the camera, offering their own variation on the same themes of gun play. One rapper bridges stereotypes about violence and misogyny: Life’s a bitch And I’m tryin’ to get my rape on…. These various emerging entertainers, all men, are not self-conscious about their content and obviously don’t know that their brief performance will be placed within this narrative that is critical and questioning of it. Based on what they see on music videos and hear on the radio, there is no reason why they should question what they are producing. The effect of some of this rapping is just slightly less jarring than early auditions on the reality TV show “American Idol.” But Hurt does question these aspiring artists and, in response, hears familiar complaints about how the music industry only wants to hear this same-old, same-old, and that the industry, controlled at the top by Whites, doesn’t want to hear lyrics or see any images considered “socially conscious.” The same theme is repeated in interviews with established artists such as Mos Def and veteran Chuck D. Scholars, including Michael Eric Dyson, William Jelani Cobb and Mark Anthony Neal, offer analyses that bridge current events and history. The overall impact, as Hurt takes his camera to New York City, to the BET Spring Fling in Orlando and other venues, is that he paints a picture of a music industry, including artists, record companies, executives and music video channels, which is continuing to glamorize American images of violence and, more pointedly, is perpetuating images of the predatory Black male. This documentary is as male-centered is the world of hip hop. Two sequences that involve women include one on the 2004 uproar at Spelman College about Nelly and his “Tip Drill” video, which includes one scene of him swiping a credit card between a Black woman’s buttocks. The other scene, at the BET Spring Fling,” is kind of scary: Several scantily-clad women are fondled or groped by strangers, who feel free to take liberties with the women. As Hurt says, they are acting out their own music video and crossing “the line in sexual assault.” Hurt has produced a provocative movie that challenges much popular culture as business-as-usual. Like many of hip hop’s critics, he raises an apprehensive brow with some reservation because he also loves the music. “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” is a profound analysis and self-criticism by a member of the Hip-Hop Generation. Black History Month Encore Broadcasts PBS will also present several favorite encore broadcasts, including “African American Lives, America Beyond the Color Line,” “Eyes on the Prize,” “Fannie Lou Hamer: Courage and Faith,” “Chisholm ’72 — Unbought & Unbossed” and “Slavery and the Making of America.” Check your local listings. HBO will also re-air Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” and “Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning).” Check your listings. Iverem's Black History Month Package also appeared on www.BET.com. Her forthcoming book is We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007). © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
