Originally appeared in the artsfuse.org
10/17/11
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.
Directed Göran Olsson.
When a friend of mine joined the Occupy Boston protest in
Dewey Sq. recently, he introduced himself to a young woman camped out there by
saying, you know, I went to lots of protests in the '60s. She replied — with
fine anti-boomer scorn — yeah, and what good did you do?
It's true his protests — and mine— did not usher in a
world free from the need for further protest —we're as far from utopia now as
then — but I would say to her in his defense — and mine — that we
did, over quite a strenuous ten
year period, help stop a war, a major war, one that involved tens of thousands
of Americans dying and an order of magnitude more Vietnamese, and, excuse me —
hey, nice bandana you got there, cool tent — but what exactly have you accomplished to date in Dewey Sq.?
I mention this not merely to come to the defense of a fellow boomer — boomer though I am, I sympathize with, encourage, anti-boomer sentiment among oncoming, impatient generations — but because the War in Vietnam we helped stop is the context for The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.
The documentary footage for this film was moldering in the
basement of Swedish journalists who visited the United States in 1967 to see
what this country was really about.
Their first stop, for some reason, was Florida — not a high class
resort, but a small town whose beach was in the process of being bulldozed. After
a brief chat with a luncheonette owner in that community who works a seven day
week but thinks the United States is the greatest country on earth — "Hey, you can tell the President
to shove it if you want" — the Swedes push on to an inner, darker,
ghetto Florida, which is where they attach to the Black Power movement.
Their portrayal of that movement has some lovely moments. I
don't remember Stokely Carmichael being so soft-spoken, so calm, logical and
sweet. I remember ruinous rage or, more precisely, its effects — more ruinous,
in the end, to inner city blacks who set fire to their own communities than to
any whites in any "white power structure", as the expression went.
But when the Swedes film Stokely saying "Burn Baby Burn" it's in a
living room. His friends laugh softly as Stokely chants a proto-rap song he had
composed, in which he gently, quite reverently, puts Dr. Martin Luther King
behind him while setting fire to bits of paper in an ashtray. Burn baby burn.
Neither in that scene nor any other does Stokely seem
predisposed to violence. Neither is he in the least willing to point away from
the traumatic effects of racism on the country or on his own family. (The most noted
scene in the film is the one in which Stokely takes the microphone from Swedish
interlocutors and lovingly prods his mother to explain why they were more poor
than they had to be, why his father was always first to be laid off). At one
point, again, very gently, he says, he, and many blacks of his generation, were
simply not as merciful or patient as Dr. Martin Luther King in opposing racism.
Superimposed on this footage are commentaries by African
Americans — some too young to have known
it first hand — on the Black Power movement. One such commentary is by a
contemporary rap artist who says that though his songs sell precisely because
they dwell on drug culture and thug violence, when police snatched him off a
plane in 2010 it had nothing to do with those lyrics: it was because their
digital snooping indicated he had been listening to a pivotal Black Power
speech by Stokely in 1967.
Can it be? Do the '60s, the Black Power '60s, haunt United
States homeland security operations to that twisted degree? If only the
filmmakers pursued the question further. But The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 does not pursue things further.
It is inconclusive, scattered, even skewed, but rarely less than engaging.
There is much of Angela Davis in this film, some Bobby
Seale, snippets of Huey Newton and Malcolm X. You see the Black Panthers at
their best — responding to hunger and lack of education in the black community
by feeding and teaching children — but when it comes to the Panther's gun
toting bravado, their provocative readiness to "Off the Pig!", you
get the feeling the Swedes opted to edit that footage out.
You hear Louis Farrakhan putting forth the Nation of Islam's
view that white people are the botched results of an experiment by the
superior, original black race. He, too, is compelled to say something profound
about pigs, chortling weirdly as he maintains that human beings must at all
cost avoid consuming the filthy flesh of the swine.
One pivotal bit for me was an interchange between the Swedes
and the editor of "TV Guide". This editor, after a trip to Europe,
dedicated an issue of TV Guide to refuting the negative conclusion that, it
seemed to him, European, and worst of all, Swedish television, had arrived at about the United States. All
they showed, he complains, is America at its worst — Jim Crow, riots, the
storming of Attica, B52s carpet-bombing Vietnam. He admits America has
problems, but what about its good side?
The Swedish journalists don't ever speak up about their
motives, but I suspect he was right about why they had come: they were fixated
on the wrong side of America — Jim Crow, the terrible string of assassinations
(JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm), B52s —
as were, it should be said, many Americans, and not only black
Americans. The wrong side of America could suck you down.
The Swedes, to be sure, came for first-hand footage about
the Black Power movement. How they managed to forget about that footage for
decades is a story only they can tell. But you feel, in frame after frame, that
Black Power was superimposed over what really made America problematic for them
and much of the world: Vietnam. The film closes on black GIs returning from
Vietnam addicted to heroin. It maintains, further, that agencies of the
American government flooded the black community with heroin, then cocaine.
Addiction would snuff out politics. Drugs would trump Black Power.
Did American authorities actually green light drug flow into Harlem? The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 doesn't work to establish that
charge. But it doesn't have to do much to establish that violence gushed in from
Vietnam. Violence flowed freely, contaminating, distorting, everything, not
least of all the anti-war movement — violence of repression, violence of response. Violence was in, and Vietnam
an inexhaustible source. Violence was the drug that most helped to destroy and foment
the self-destruction of Black Power.
So, to return to Dewey Sq., it must be admitted that the
protestors of my generation left much of the wrong side of America intact. We
have often been accused of insufficient staying power, of quitting too early.
Perhaps so. But we did, quite a lot of us, put in at least a solid decade of
our lives, and played some role in ending the War in Vietnam. I permit myself
to wonder if the tent dwellers of Dewey Sq. will put in anything like that
amount of time to clarifying, sticking with, and winning any of their demands.
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