Tonight I went over to the Armer Theater at CSUN to watch a film called "Night Catches Us" (2010), directed by Tanya Hamilton. The current series at the Cinematheque focuses on the works of various female filmmakers. "Night.." tells the story of a group of former Black Panthers. The year is 1976. Most of the group still live in the same Philadelphia neighborhood they resided in when the Panthers were in their heyday in the mid-to-late 1960s, but none of them are members anymore. The Black Panthers have been extingushed in the neighborhood since the day their local leader was killed by police in a hail of bullets in his own living room. This was revenge for his murder of a cop (Google the real life story of Panther Fred Hampton for more info).
His widow (Kerry Washington) has gone straight. She still lives in the same house in which her husband was shot, but she seems to be a lawyer or a legal aide (never specified). She is raising her 10 year old daughter to follow the path of school and success - i.e the American Model - and her boyfriend is a paunchy, 45ish African-American lawyer who is fully committed to the System, as corporate as any white man.
Into the old neighborhood walks Anthony Mackie, an excellent actor and a rising star. In the movie, he has just been paroled from prison and is looking for a place to stay. His brother has converted to Islam and won't have him, so he seeks out Washington, his former partner in the Panthers a decade earlier. At first she wants nothing to do with him. They have a secret between them concerning the death of her husband. The little daughter wants to know what happened to her Dad, too. Washington won't let Mackie stay until she is convinced he is going straight, which he makes clear by running a young troublemaker out of the house.
The plot is focusing on the theme that the 1960s are over, and gone with that decade is the raw idealism that inspired the youth to push so many boundaries, both culturally and politically. In the mid-1970s, where they are now, their ideals have long since run up against the wall of reality. The Black Panthers were a political movement begun with high goals, but they were also a militant organisation, meaning they took the policies of Malcolm X to heart. "By any means necessary" was his motto. The Panthers swore they did not want violence but would defend their neighborhoods, with force, against police brutality if they had to. They posed for photos wearing military berets and carrying rifles. They did suffer police harassment as a result. Panther leaders like Huey Newton were jailed and Fred Hampton was murdered. But their initial high ideals were corrupted as well, by agitators within their ranks. The Panthers were not non-violent, and some bad apples got into the mix. This is shown in the movie by some former Panthers from the local group who have not gone straight but have gone into the criminal underworld. One former Panther leader now runs a bar and strongarms the neighborhood while running numbers and selling guns and drugs. Anthony Mackie, having done a stint in prison, wants no part of any aspect of the old neighborhood. His story drives the movie, and a very good film it is.
In going back to that era (mid-70s militancy), we see why Martin Luther King insisted a decade earlier on non-violence as a policy. He knew it was the only way to rise above the bigotry that was entrenched in some segments of America and which remains even now. MLK knew that dignity must be maintained, for any violence on the part of the black people would be met with police violence in return, and a "told-you-so" response on the part of citizen bigots and those in the news media. The Panthers chose the late Malcolm X as their prophet instead. I won't get into my opinion of the politics of this decision, because I was just an eight year old white kid from Northridge when a lot of this action was going down. But I did live next door to a University (CSUN, known then as San Fernando Valley State College) that was a hotbed of Black Student activity. Just for the record, it was okay to refer to the students as Black. The terminology went from Negroes, in the early 1960s, to "Colored People" in the mid-60s, to Black People in the late-60s. That seemed to have stuck until the term of African-American took hold......when? Was it in the 1980s? Early 1990s?
Well anyway, how about just thinking of everyone as People? That's the way I was raised, but from a cultural standpoint, at CSUN when the black students demonstrated in 1968, they wanted their new student union to be known as The Black House.
I say all of this because The Black House still stands, and I live directly across the street from it. When I start my walk at night, it is the first building I pass. And when I was a kid and attending Prairie Street School, which was located on the CSUN campus, we were often bussed home because of the hard-core protests and demonstrations that were taking place on University grounds. SFVSC was a hotbed of student political activity in the late 1960s.
I witnessed all of this, and the point of the movie is that, while some very positive changes came out of these political movements, it was not possible for the youth to maintain an idealistic philosophy because Big Business America was way too powerful to overthrow, and way too entrenched.
So the most enlightened of the radicals decided to join the system and try to change it more slowly, from the inside, by going down the center of the road.
That is where I have found myself, after flirting very briefly with communism in my youth. And again, I have never been very political, because I am against the whole idea of Big Ideas.
Big Ideas, of trying to force your way, or your organization's way onto the world, don't work. Those ways might have been successful in the 18th century, when the Europeans took over the North American continent through the use of superior technology, but they won't work anymore.
I don't believe in Big Ideas to try and change other people, only myself.
And that's all I know for tonight. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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