Four Little Girls

In honor of the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cythia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, who were murdered in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, here is Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls.”

Sun Ra and George Clinton, Brothers From Another Planet

Don Letts‘, the well-known British music documentarian and DJ, 2005 BBC documentary on the “out-of-this-world” jazz musician, composer, and bandleader, Sun Ra. Born Herman Blount, in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra later claimed to be from Saturn and his music definitely sounded like it came from there. Using interviews from members of his “Arkestra” and […]

Black Power Mixtape Vol. 2

Last Friday, I went to see the Black Power Mixtape and I must say it is a very powerful film. It gives a fresh perspective on the Black Power movement from 1967 to 1975, especially because it is through the eyes of Swedish journalists, who are somewhat removed from the events happening in the United States […]

Black Power Mixtape

Starting tomorrow, Lincoln Plaza Cinema and IFC Center in New York City will be premiering “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.” The film combines footage from a Swedish journalist (it was lying undiscovered in a basement of Swedish Television for 30 years) of activists, like Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, with contemporary interviews from African-American artists, […]

Black Gold

“Not One Drop” Written by A. Sayeeda Clarke, this episode, called “White,” on the online show, Futurestates, is an appropriate and frightening story for our times with discussions on climate change, global warming and our dependency on oil and coal. Will melanin become the new “black gold” in the future? Will brown people be exploited […]

Robots of Brixton

In wake of the recent London riots, just 30 years after the 1981 Brixton riots, Kibwe Tavares released his animated afrofuturistic, sci-fi short film about the future of Brixton in which robots are disenfranchised and tensions between robots and police escalate into violence. The end quotation from Karl Marx reads: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, […]

Enough Monkeying Around

“The Rise of Planet of the Apes” came out in theaters this month. Entertainment is never just entertainment; it is always feeding into the zeitgeist of the time. So, I started to think about the use of monkeys and apes in media, especially film, and their social and even racial symbolism. Is it a coincidence […]

What Ever Happened to Hip Hop?

“It began with the beat of the drum. With the beat, came a voice for those without one. From this voice, came a movement. Overcoming the odds, the originators of hip hop took their music from block parties of New York City streets to world wide radio waves. During the early years, the music and […]

What Are We Doing Now?

Space Thank you to Andrew Rebatta, who you will find out more about in a later post, for this video! In the future, when we are looking back, what will we be able to say about the things we did today to make our future better? What plans, actions, organization and training are we […]

In Flight….

We have come full circle. At the beginning of this blog, I wrote how I was inspired to create this blog because of a clip from the documentary, “The Last Angel of History.” Fortunately, one of my followers, Mr. Thumble Waddle, gave me a link to the documentary and I was finally able to see […]