Notebook on Black History Month 2012 (Part 5): Black Power Mixtape (continued)

To read previous installments of this special series by Aberjhani please click this link: Notebook on Black History Month 2012. Part 5 of the series begins now:

Stokely Carmichael’s defense of “black militancy” allowed the media in America to cast him and others featured in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975––including Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Bobby Seale–– as homegrown terrorists intent on staging a blood-drenched revolution. Yet one of the more powerful scenes in the film is not the historically sensationalized image of fists raised to symbolize a demand for black power, but of Carmichael calmly interviewing his mother about the impact of racism on her family’s life since their move from Trinidad to the U.S. Such an image is more revelatory than revolutionary.

As The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 progresses from one year to the next, it depicts through a steady succession of images and voices the arc of the movement’s development as well as the context in which that development took place. Brief but pointed references to the Vietnam War, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the Attica Prison uprising, and the lethal influx of hard drugs into black communities reveal the turbulent background against which African Americans and others struggled to give meaning to the word democracy.

The Swedish journalists who shot the footage approached their subject with the same mostly objective manner that American journalists once did when reporting on the brutalities of apartheid in South Africa. Or even as they do now when documenting conflicts in Egypt, Syria, Greece, or elsewhere. The irony is that such objectivity or dedication to principle was generally abandoned when it came to covering advocates of basic human rights for black people.

The Sounds of Bombs Exploding

The value of the Swedes’ application of a broader global scope becomes powerfully clear when an imprisoned Angela Davis responds to reporter Bo Holmstrom’s question regarding violence as a preferable means to a political end. Her now frequently-quoted answer reveals that the movement was less an exercise in militant ideology or strategy than it was a very human response to a very inhumane state of affairs:

“You ask me whether I approve of violence. I mean that just doesn’t make any sense at all… I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Some very very good friends of mine were killed by bombs, bombs that were planted by racists. I remember, from the time I was very small I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking…

“When someone asks me about violence I just find it incredible. Because what it means is the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

While Davis’s and Carmichael’s voices are the most dominantly compelling in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, they are also, as previously stated, only two within the chorus of voices that give this film substance and definition. Davis’s voice is actually presented as part of the past and the present. Among others adding contextual commentary in the present, and whose lives and careers to a degree were shaped by the struggles of the 1960s and 970s, are the following: Erykah Badu, Harry Belafonte, John Forte, Kenny Gamble, Talib Kweli, Melvin Van Peebles, Sonia Sanchez, and Ahmir-Khalib “QuestLove” Thompson (who also contributed to the soundtrack).Re-imagining the Process of Democracy

Celebrated actor, producer, and director Danny Glover is not a prominent figure within the film itself but his role as a co-producer of it was crucial. It was to Glover that Olsson reportedly turned for support and direction after first discovering raw archived footage. Speaking on the Tavis Smiley Show, Glover offered his own insights into the nature of the Black Power era and the significance of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975:

“…When you think of it as a re-imagining of the process of democracy then you have it from a very different vantage point. What the Black Panther party was talking about , what Stokely would talk about [were] the issues around healthcare, free clinics, school, education, freedom summer—which was [also] about education. Free lunch programs. The whole idea of community control of police was about self-defense. Simply self-defense.”

Despite the fact that the film’s focus is on events that took place almost half a century ago, much of it bears direct relevance to contemporary global events:

“When I started this film,” said Olsson, my friends told me that ‘Demonstrations, revolution, you know that’s 60s, that doesn’t apply to contemporary society.’ And they’re [now] proved wrong because we’ve seen the Arab spring, we see demonstrations in Israel, 400 thousand people demonstrating, we have the riots here, we have Occupied Wall Street and so on, all kinds of movements, there are strikes at university in the UK. So the issue is still the same, and the issue is really freedom.”

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 likely deserves much greater attention than it has received thus far because of all the reasons indicated and more. Whether such attention comes via the mainstream or not, the film is destined to go down in history not only as a profoundly classic portrait of the 1960s Black Power Movement, but one as crucial to understanding it as the writings of Davis, Carmichael, Newton and the others honored so brilliantly by the film.

NEXT: Notebook on Black History Month 2012 Part 6 The Consecrated Soul of Whitney Houston

by Aberjhani, National African American Art Examiner
co-author of ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love
and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

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