civil rights

RUSTIN: greatness, overlooked

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Photo caption: Colman Domingo in RUSTIN. Courtesy of Netflix.

We all know of the March on Washington, culminating in Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people filling the National Mall. It’s one of the most iconic and important moments in American history. Rustin introduces many folks to the overlooked greatness of Bayard Rustin (Colan Domingo), the organizer of the event.

Bayard Rustin was an important civil rights leader who was relegated to the background of the movement, and sometimes even ostracized, because he was a gay man. In the 1950s and 1960s, being a former Communist didn’t help, either.

Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph (played in Rustin by Glynn Turman) is the other most overlooked male civil rights leader. Randolph’s two greatest accomplishments, the integration of the military and of the defense industries, occurred before television (and were filtered by the white mainstream print media). A personal note from The Movie Gourmet: my decades-long career has been in politics, and one of my very first political day jobs was funded by the A. Philip Randolph Institute. Here is more on Randolph and Rustin from the APRI website.

Rustin takes us behind the scenes, and we see the strategic disagreements, petty jealousies and jockeying for status between civil rights leaders. It’s important that the leaders came from generational strata. In 1963, Randolph was 74. Rustin was 52. NAACP head Roy Wilkins was 61, and Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was 55, both at the peaks of their careers. MLK was a rising superstar, but still only 34. John Lewis was still only 23.

In birthing the March on Washington, Rustin was fighting the overt attacks of J. Edgar Hoover and Strom Thurmond and the covert obstructionism of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Rustin also had the contend with the antagonism of Wilkins and Powell. But, Rustin had two cards to play – the respect demanded by Randolph and the rock star sizzle of MLK.

In a stellar, commanding performance, Colman Domingo is charismatic as Rustin. Domingo has been so good in everything I’ve seen him in: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, Selma and Lincoln. Glynn Turman brings gravitas and moral authority to Randolph. In ingenious, against-type casting, Chris Rock is excellent as the funny-as-a-heart-attack Roy Wilkins. Jeffrey Wright PERFECTLY captures Adam Clayton Powell.

Ami Ameen has the challenge of satisfying audience expectation in portraying MLK. He gets the speech patterns and mannerisms right, while inhabiting a still-young MLK growing into the leader he was just becoming.

If you want to learn more of Bayard Rustin, I recommend Matt Wolf’s award-winning, but hard to find, short doc Bayard & Me, which features Rustin’s longtime partner Walter Neagle’s recollection of his life with Rustin; it’s an important insight into both Civil Rights and LGBTQ history.

Rustin was directed by George C. Wolfe, whose previous feature, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was my #2 movie of 2021. We need to see more movies from this guy.

Rustin is now streaming on Netflix.

THE LEAGUE: untold stories

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Photo caption: THE LEAGUE, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The League is a comprehensive documentary on the history of Negro League baseball.  As one would expect from a Sam Pollard doc, it’s well-sourced and reveals some less well known history:

  • Rube Foster, remembered as a pitching great and inventor of the screwball, was the impresario and strategic mind behind the first Negro League.
  • Effa Manley, the canny co-owner of the Newark Eagles, was a pioneering female AND African-American businesswoman with the spunk, if not the resources, to stand up to MLB.
  • The Negro Leagues’ surprisingly brief lifespan and even briefer glory days.
  • Why the immensely talented, even Ruthian, Josh Gibson wasn’t put forward to integrate MLB (like Jackie Robinson was).  
  • How MLB execs like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck worked with the Negro Leagues (or not).
  • The painful trade-offs from the long-awaited integration of MLB.

The League is the work of filmmaker Sam Pollard, who directed the more compelling MLK/FBI.  The League will appeal to those with interests in baseball and/or civil rights.  The League is streaming on Amazon.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S BLACK & BLUES: what Armstrong was really thinking

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Photo caption: LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S BLACK & BLUES. Courtesy of AppleTV.

Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues affirms my observation that, ideally, a satisfying documentary requires a great subject and great source material. For decades, apparently focused on his historical legacy, Louis Armstrong audiotaped his conversations with visiting friends, preserving his candid thoughts and reflections on his life and times. His family has made those taped conversations available to the filmmakers and Armstrong’s own words are a revelation.

Armstrong’s public Satchmo persona, perpetually upbeat and non-threatening, made White Americans comfortable and seemed Uncle Tom-like to younger Black Americans. Armstrong’s own words in private (he preferred being called Pops) leave no doubt about his own complicated thoughts. Armstrong, who was raised in the South at the height of the lynching period, was clear-eyed and resolute about American racism. His perception of personal safety and commercial viability intentionally guided his self-invented image and, also, the roles in the Civil Rights movement that he adopted and that he declined.

Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues also lays out Armstrong’s pivotal influences on impact on vocal popular music, on jazz and on American music. We also see Armstrong’s private personality with his family and intimates.

Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, which closed this year’s Nashville Film Festival, is steaming on AppleTV.

OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING: a pioneer worth knowing about

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OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING. Courtesy of TCM.

If you don’t know who Oscar Micheaux is, you should – so watch the documentary Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking. As writer/director/producer, the African-American Michaeux created so-called “race films” – movies made for black audiences from a black perspective during the most shameful years of American racial segregation. Michaeux himself directed 42 feature films DURING Jim Crow.

There’s a lot in Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking:

  • Micheaux’s pivotal sojourn in a cabin in, of all places, the Dakotas.
  • His very personal and hands-on distribution methods.
  • His discovery of Paul Robeson’s on-screen charisma, a full eight years before Robeson’s first Hollywood film (The Emperor Jones).
  • Micheaux’s comfort in portraying that most incendiary topic – interracial relationships. 
  • How he slyly bent rules to avoid censorship.

I have seen some Oscar Micheaux films, and their stories, freed of the White Hollywood lens, are eyeopening. They allowed black audiences to see big screen characters that acted like real African-American – not the degrading stereotypes in Hollywood movies.

That being said, Michaeux did not make “Noble Negro” movies. His work is authentic, and criticized, for example, black preacher-hucksters who exploit religious devotion in the African-American community for their own venal and carnal appetites.

Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features a solid panel of expert talking heads to explain Micheaux’s place in cinema and in African-American history. The most compelling are screenwriter Kevin Wilmott and University of Chicago cinema professor/TCM host Jaqueline Stewart. 

Animation is used sparingly and effectively, including one inspired segment to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

I watched Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking on Turner Classic Movies, and it is streaming on HBO Max.

A SONG FOR CESAR: the arts embedded in activism

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Photo caption: A SONG FOR CESAR. Courtesy of Juno Films.

A Song for Cesar is a rich documentary on the role of music and the arts in the critical years of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker movement – so rich that it’s much more than that. There’s a time capsule of the turbulent 1960s, the story of emerging Chicano identity and a meditation on the role of arts in political activism – all embedded in a compelling history lesson.

A Song for Cesar shows us how music and the UFW uplifted each other. Anthems were used in mobilizing, and benefit concerts were a major pillar of UFW fundraising. In the other direction, Cesar Chavez and the movement inspired a generation of Chicano musical artists. We hear directly from a veritable Who’s Who of Chicano musicians from Malo, El Chicano, Tower of Power, War, Santana and Los Lobos through Ozomotli. The memories of UFW allies like Taj Mahal and Joan Baez are also central to A Song for Cesar.

It’s not just only about music, either – the importance of murals and theater are highlighted. We hear from Luis Valdez, founder of Teatro Campesino, about the beginnings of Teatro and its place in the movement.

A Song for Cesar captures the zeitgeist of the time. The UFW’s organizing campaign coincided with (as well as inspiring) new Chicano identity and pride. As Tower of Power’s Emilio Castillo says, “People were ready to protest for social change.They weren’t going for the old okey-doke no more.” 

A Song for Cesar reminds us of the mass casualty tragedies that galvanized the Farm Worker movement, along with the low pay, wage theft, horrid working conditions and exploitation. (A personal reflection: when I think of the cruelty, disrespect and social control embodied in the short handled hoe, I still get pissed off.) Exceptionally well-sourced, A Song for Cesar presents first-hand recollections of Chavez family members, UFW leader Dolores Huerta and other participants. The UFW history is deep enough to acknowledge the overlooked role of Filipinos in the UFW, with Larry Itliong as a co-founder of the union.

The Farm Workers had to face goon violence from the growers and infiltration by racist law enforcement. It becomes all the more relatable when Luis Valdez describes facing the violence with non-violence in very personal terms. A Song for Cesar is solid history and an important document of the times.

A Song for Cesar is filled with cool tidbits, like how Cesar Chavez was himself a big jazz fan, who would comb record store bins whenever he had the chance. Who knew?

A Song for Cesar opens this weekend, and will have March 18-24 runs at the Opera Plaza and the Smith San Rafael.

Coming up on TV – the hard to find GEORGE WALLACE

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Photo caption: Gary Sinise in WALLACE.

On January 12, Turner Classic Movies brings us George Wallace, with its brilliant performance by Gary Sinise. Sinise captures the character of the driven, morally flexible Alabama Governor, whose political opportunism took him to personify the defense of racial segregation in America. His wild personal journey included presidential campaigns, becoming paralyzed by an assassination attempt, and mellowing in a redemption-seeking epilogue.

Originally a 1997 TV miniseries, this three-hour work was based on the fine Marshall Frady biography and was directed by the legendary John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May).

Mare Winningham plays Wallace’s first wife Lurleen, who succeeded him as Alabama’s Governor, and Angelina Joie plays his second wife Cornelia. Sinise, Winningham and Frankenheimer all won Primetime Emmys.

George Wallace is not available to stream and is rarely broadcast, so set your DVR.

Angelina Joie and Gary Sinise in GEORGE WALLACE

PASSING: navigating a racist society and the value of one’s identity

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Photo caption: Negga and Tessa Thompson in PASSING. Courtesy of Netflix.

Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in Rebecca Hall’s thought-provoking drama Passing, about the value of one’s identity and navigating in a racist society. It’s 1920s New York City and two light-skinned black women, both prosperous wives and mothers, happen upon each other for the first time since childhood. Irene (Tessa Thompson) is married to a doctor and has become a figure in Harlem society. Irene is shocked to find Clare (Ruth Negga) with her hair died platinum blonde and passing as Caucasian – even married to a racist white man.

For Irene, the reunion is unsettling because, ever polite, she doesn’t want to express her own disapproval of “passing”. Things get nerve-wracking for Irene when Clare’s husband (Alexander Skarsgård) shows up; from his very first word (which is overtly racist), it’s clear that things will go badly for Clare if he discovers her actual race. Presumably, he knows that Clare is not a real blonde, but he is SO racist that he even assumes that Irene must be white.

Clare on other hand, is eager to rekindle their friendship, regardless of the risks that Irene calculates. Clare NEEDS to slip a toe back into African-American culture. She is oblivious to Irene’s disgust for “passing”, and, when they first encounter in an elegant hotel tea room, Clare even assumes at first that Irene is passing.

Despite Irene’s reluctance, Clare composes herself in Irene’s family and social circle. We watch Irene as she runs her staid household (with black servants). She puts on a swinging charity benefit, attended by her black upper crust peers and by hip white New Yorkers sampling Harlem culture. One of the latter is Irene’s friend Wentworth (Bill Camp), a literary figure of standing.

Despite her charity leadership (for the Negro Welfare League), she wants to “protect” her sons from the “race issue” by keeping them sheltered and ignorant.  Her husband Brian (André Holland) doesn’t agree – he has given up on improving race relations in America and wants to relocate the family in another country.

Is anyone here satisfied? Irene keeps saying she is satisfied, meaning personally, but she does her charity work for a reason. Brian is exhausted by his practice and wants to give up on the entire nation. Clare is comfortable having made a choice that she describes in the most materialistic terms, but is still yearning for what she misses in White society.

Referring to the 1929 novel, Mick LaSalle writes,

“…it’s a great advantage that the movie’s source is in the past. If this story were attempted today, it would be about a social issue. One woman would be presented as right, and the other would be wrong. There would be a crucial realization three-quarters in, and then a moral to the story spelled out before the closing credits.“

Passing is directed by British actress Rebecca Hall, whose own American mother is multiracial. As a director, Hall puts her actors in the forefront, framing them in static shots and with piano music just jazzy enough to suggest Harlem setting. Passing is photographed in black and white, with the backgrounds washed out to emphasize the characters in the foreground (and the colors of their skin).

The performances are excellent. Negga has the showier role as the charming, flamboyant and dangerously flighty Clare. Thompson’s Irene is really the more important character, and Thompson lets us see inside this woman who is so very proper that she should be boring; but Thompson’s Irene is ever thoughtful, introspective and contained – with all her turmoil roiling inside. 

Veteran character actor Camp is exceptional as Wentworth, the sardonic white novelist who enjoys his forays into Harlem and values his friendship with Irene. An actor who can make the smallest role memorable, Camp has recently played Mr. Shaibel, the chess-teaching school janitor in The Queen’s Gambit and The Beach Boys’ controlling father in Love & Mercy.

Passing is still in some theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.

more thoughts about THE NEUTRAL GROUND and the Lost Cause lie

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Dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia

C.J. Hunt, in his insightful and thought-provoking documentary The Neutral Ground, explores the lie of the Lost Cause, which is still embraced by many White Southerners and is the rationale for preserving Confederate monuments. That myth is that that the Civil War was about a principle of “States Rights” somehow divorced from slavery, and that the Southern cause in the Civil War was romantically heroic.

At one point, Hunt observes,

“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”

Not only is Hunt dead right, but you can read the actual declarations of the causes of secession yourselves. The truth is inescapable – the South fought the Civil War PRIMARILY to continue slavery.

The SECOND SENTENCE of Mississippi’s declaration is “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery”.

Texas identified this grievance against the Northern States:

“based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color– a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”

One of South Carolina’s grievances against the northern states was, without irony, “They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes.”

It is clear from reading the official actions of the Southern states AT THE TIME that the only relevance of “States Rights” was to continue and expand slavery. Baby Boomers recall that “States Rights” was code for “racial segregation” in the 1950s and 1960s. Same thing.

The Neutral Ground also documents that, after the subversion of Reconstruction in the last quarter of the 19th Century, Confederate statues were intentionally placed to impose terror and demonstrate White supremacist power. See the photo (above) of the dedication of the Charlottesville, Virginia, statue of Robert E. Lee during this period. The dedication is ringed by robed and hooded Ku Klux Klan members. Everybody AT THE TIME knew what was going on,

Unfortunately, Southern Whites have lived in a Lost Cause echo chamber for a century. It has become more offensive to tell them that the Civil War was about slavery than to suggest that Jesus was not the son of God.

The German people embraced a “stab in the back” lie to explain their defeat in WWI. That, of course, led to the Nazi regime, a second world war, mass genocide and the destruction of Germany itself. Today’s Germans know that they can be proud of their contributions to world culture, industry and science and still accept that following Hitler was a grievous mistake. Good luck finding a contemporary German who will say, “Hey, none of us actually believed all that stuff about a Master Race”.

MLK/FBI: about America then and about America today

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MLK/FBI. Photo courtesy of IFC Films.

In MLK/FBI, Sam Pollard, the master of the civil rights documentary (Eyes on the Prize), takes on the FBI’s quest to discredit and even destroy Martin Luther King, Jr. Over many years, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI targeted King with wiretaps, bugs, surveillance and informers. The FBI built a trove of audio tapes of King having extramarital sex; these tapes are now in the National Archives and will be released publicly in 2027. The tapes themselves are not included in MLK/FBI, but the film reveals the many secret FBI memos that discuss them.

Pollard bookends MLK/FBI with historians considering the questions of how we should process the behavior on the tapes and how we should face the actual tapes when they are released six years from now.

MLK/FBI documents the moment that Hoover and his top lieutenant William Sullivan became obsessed with King – and the moment they tried to force him into suicide. From their perspective, if King’s movement wanted to upend the racial inequities that included legal segregation, then of COURSE he must be an anti-American subversives. They started by red-baiting King for associating with communists, and then moved to focus on sexual behavior.

MLK/FBI reminds us who we were back in the 1960s. King had not yet been martyred and many in the mainstream shared Hoover’s discomfort with racial progress and his driving fear of communism. When MLK and Hoover had a public spat, the polling documented 50% of the American public siding with Hoover and under 20% with King.

While today, a male public figure would likely not be ruined by consensual heterosexual sex outside of marriage, that was not the case in the 1960s. Then it was still controversial about whether a divorced person – or even someone married to a previously divorced person – should be elected to high office.

And MLK/FBI says a lot about our society today. Although this salacious material was leaked to many journalists in the 1960s, none actually made it public. I find this particularly sobering, because today there is no way that the temptation to generate clicks, likes retweets and ratings would have been resisted – it would have gone viral, as we now say, probably with history-changing consequences.

MLK/FBI can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Remembering John Lewis

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John Lewis (on far right) in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

John Lewis, that most profoundly American of American heroes, has died at age 80. Released just nine days ago, the documentary John Lewis: Good Trouble traces the life of the civil rights icon.  I usually don’t buy reverential biodocs, but when the subject is a freaking saint, I guess you have to go with it.  The rest of the title comes from Lewis’ mantra – if you see injustice, make good trouble, necessary trouble. 

US Representative John Lewis, of course, was a real hero.  As a very young man in 1965, he had been leading efforts to register Blacks to vote in Selma, Alabama, including a peaceful march to the State Capitol in Montgomery.  On March 7, 1965, the march got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma when they were attached by local law enforcement and Ku Klux Klan members under the command of Sheriff Jim Clark.  Lewis was in the very first rank and was beaten, shedding his own blood on “Bloody Sunday”.  Two subsequent marches on the bridge and the LBJ speech that followed led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the most important civil rights legislation since 1867. 

In John Lewis: Good Trouble, we see footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  We see a young John Lewis being beaten in 1965, and we see an elderly Lewis in an anniversary march with President Barack Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

John Lewis: Good Trouble is well-sourced by director Dawn Porter, even though only a few of Lewis’ contemporaries survive.  When the first Black president was elected, Lewis says he wept for JFK, RFK, Dr. King and the others who hadn’t lived to see it.  Fortunately, Lewis had sisters still alive who participated in the documentary.

We get an inside glimpse at Lewis’ childhood.  We get to see Lewis watching footage of himself at a pivotal Nashville sit-in that he had “never seen”.  And, this intimate portrait shows us some dry Lewis humor and some impressive octogenarian dance moves.

How did Lewis get to Congress?  John Lewis: Good Trouble shows us the race against his longtime friend and fellow Civil Rights icon Julian Bond. My day job is in politics, and I understand that, to win, you have to do what you have to do to win; others may find this episode bracing and unsettling. 

 John Lewis: Good Trouble is an insightful view of a man and of a critical point in American history.  You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.