The ‘Hays Code’ explicitly forbade the depiction of sexual relationships between ‘the white and black races’. ibid.
‘My name is Earl Cameron and I’ve been an actor from the age of … it’s a long time ago.’ ibid.
Carmen Jones: Budget: $750,000; Box Office $9.8 million; Equivalent Today: $87.5 million. ibid.
Five decades ago, at the height of the civil rights movement, America’s most beloved actor was a black man. His name is Sidney Poitier … To Sir with Love (1967). ibid.
Spike Lee: nothing has ever been the same since. ibid.
Black Panther [2010] has shown that a film can be both all-black and all-successful. Black Hollywood: They’ve Got to Have Us II: Black Film is Not a Genre
Do the Right Thing (1989): hip-hop score was is itself revolution but the movie was much more than a soundtrack. ibid.
Stereotypical Casting: ‘I was auditioning, auditioning, auditioning, and now suddenly it’s like Thug #1.’ ibid. Laurence Fishburne
Pam Grier: Foxy Brown (1974) … ‘And I got my black belt in bar stool.’ ibid.
Even white directors came up against age-old obstacles attempting to tell the black story. ibid.
Ray: Budget $40 million; Box Office $124.7 million. ibid.
Most black actors found themselves as the only non-white person on set playing a very minor roll. ibid.
The game changer: True star power is found in Denzel Washington. ibid.
Black Panther (2018): The biggest entertainment franchise of recent times. ibid.
The next generation of black British actors bagged leading roles in a succession of Hollywood blockbusters. Black Hollywood: They’ve Got to Have Us III: Have Us
The exodus of black British talent to the US began in the 90s. ibid.
It wouldn’t be until 1989 that a black women would direct a Hollywood movie. ibid.
Get Out raked in over $250 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest selling horror movies of all time. ibid.
We were making history. And there wasn’t nice and clean. There wasn’t easy. It was complex. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Erica Huggins, Netflix 2015
The police jump on you, beat you up, put the gun at your head, this is what we’re going through on a daily basis. ibid. Warne Pharr
We want freedom, we want decent housing, we want education for our people, we want an immediate end to police brutality … ibid. Black Panthers
The Black Panther Party demands that Huey P Newton be set free. ibid. Eldridge Cleaver
Free Breakfast For Children Served Here Every School Morning. ibid. sign
The reality is that the majority of the rank and file by the end of the 60s are women. ibid. Claybourne Carson, historian
In other cities the Panthers were under physical attack from the police departments. But New York City was going to handle its Panther problem differently: they created a conspiracy case that allowed them to arrest the entire leadership of the New York City Black Panther Party. ibid. Jamal Joseph
He [Bobby Seale] kept insisting on his right to represent himself, and the judge’s response to that was to order the bailiffs to put gaffer tape over his mouth and tie him to his chair. ibid. Mike Gray, filmmaker
It was like a slaughterhouse. And there was blood all over the place. ibid. Mike Gray, assassination of Fred Hampton
It was a death squad that did this raid. It was a police death squad. And the whole thing was set up by the FBI. ibid. historian
It was a split in the party. And within days we began to feel just how bad it was. ibid. William Calhoun
There are over 20 Panthers that remain in prison. ibid. captions
For non-violence to work, your opponents must have a conscience. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Stokely Carmichael, 2011
When a black man strikes back he is an extremist. ibid. Malcolm X
We weren’t the ones who inflicted pain and harm on people. We weren’t the ones who kidnapped a whole culture. ibid. Erykah Badu 2010
This is the Harlem office where the 21 panthers who are now on trial worked. But despite the arrests, political education is still being carried out here today – regular classes in revolution. ibid. commentary
The Black Panther party started in Oakland, California and so you know the party is known mostly for its confrontational stances – and that’s a good thing to be confrontational against evil and violence. ibid. Professor Kathleen Cleaver 2010
Bobby Seale says that the Black Panthers are an American revolutionary party working to fulfil the basic needs of the black population: work, food, housing and education. ibid. commentary
J Edgar Hoover states that the Free Breakfast Program is the most dangerous internal threat to the US. The FBI unleashes the COINTELPRO covert operation to neutralize the black power movement. ibid. caption
Political trials are getting more and more common in the USA … A number of trials against radicals are being carried out across the country. ibid. commentary
23 February 1972: Angela Davis is tried, acquitted and released after 18 months of incarceration. ibid. caption
We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society. Angela Davis
Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially, victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression, bear the brunt of this repression. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women, the overwhelming majority of them poor, fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more, including the most presumably respectable groups and individuals, are subject to police, FBI and military intelligence surveillance. The Nixon administration most recently responded to the massive protests against the war in Indochina by arresting more than 13,000 people and placing them in stadiums converted into detention centers. Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning, 1971
Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society. ibid.
We believe that the most pressing political necessity is the consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the revolutionary, radical and democratic movements. Only a united front – led in the first place by the national liberation movements and the working people – can decisively counter, theoretically, ideologically and practically, the increasingly fascistic and genocidal posture of the present ruling clique. ibid.
In the heat of our pursuit for fundamental human rights, Black people have been continually cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings. But having been taught by bitter experience, we know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate matrix of the laws and the system which govern them – certainly not Black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their lives. ibid.
Needless to say, the history of the United States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression of Black people. Particularized reflections of existing social inequities, these laws have repeatedly borne witness to the exploitative and racist core of the society itself. For Blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed people, the problem of opposing unjust laws and the social conditions which nourish their growth, has always had immediate practical implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance. In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even when containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus. ibid.
Racist oppression invades the lives of Black people on an infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the economy begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always the most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we continue to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is generally twice as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as a whole and even higher among Black women and youth. The unemployment rate among Black youth has presently skyrocketed to 30 per cent. If one-third of America’s white youth were without a means of livelihood, we would either be in the thick of revolution or else under the iron rule of fascism. Substandard schools, medical care hardly fit for animals, overpriced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system based on a policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and divide (and even this may soon be cancelled) – this is only the beginning of the list of props in the overall scenery of oppression which, for the mass of Blacks, is the universe. ibid.
We’ve got to rise up. We’ve got to organise. We’ve got to mobilise. And we’ve got to work to solve these problems. All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party & Beyond, Martin Luther King, 1996
The Black Panther Party’s ten-point programme of platform was basically a statement of principles. And it was around these principles that we organised in the black community. ibid. Dhoruba bin Wahad
These racist Gestapo pigs have to stop brutalizing our community or we’re gonna take up guns and drive them out. ibid. Black Panther
FBI director J Edgar Hoover today asserted that of the black extremist groups the Black Panthers represent the greatest internal threat to the nation. ibid. television news report
Fred Hampton et al: They shot that place up in ways you couldn’t believe. His wife pregnant shot up in the bed there, she survived as did the foetus but Fred’s body was riddled; the walls of the room riddled; you can count scores of bullet holes there. He never got out of the bed; he was murdered right there: 2.30 in the morning, and they claimed they’re serving a search warrant? ibid. attorney
What we see is a war against black America. ibid. dude
This is a film that started with a funeral. The funeral of Pauline Celestine Martin whose favourite colour was red. She’d come from Jamaica in 1962 and died here in south London leaving her grandchildren and children behind. Her eldest son Steve, also known as Blacker, was someone I’d featured in a student documentary when we were both 19. Being Blacker, BBC 2019
The cortège travelled past significant places in the family’s life including the iconic record shop Blacker he’d had in Brixton for 21 years. ibid.