Another Black History Month has gone by, and again we were fed the same types of television programming that “celebrates” the “black experience”:
“Roots.” “The Color Purple.” “Amistad.” “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”
More Top Picks Best Garden Hose Reels
You can look at it one way: a collection of well-made television and film projects showing blacks overcoming mostly racism-fueled atrocities.
Or you can look at it another way: constant images of whippings, rapes, lynching and other evils against blacks.
What “celebration” is that?
This is how I’d commemorate Black History Month: us sticking it to The Man. Or, if that sounds harsh, then programs that empower the African-American experience.
Instead of “Driving Miss Daisy,” why not “Shaft,” the 1971 crime caper with Richard Roundtree, whose character helped kick the blaxploitation film movement into gear–while sticking it to The Man?
I’d add Pam Grier from 1974’s gritty “Foxy Brown” and 1997’s eloquent “Jackie Brown.”
I’d program Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” to show how powerful one black man was in this country.
I’d grab the cheesy “Get Christy Love!” a 1974-75 ABC series starring Teresa Graves as a no-nonsense cop who tried to capitalize on the blaxploitation movement . . . while she stuck it to The Man.
In addition to non-stop airings of “The Bernie Mac Show,” the first two seasons of “Good Times” would get some notice.
The reason I’d do only the 1974-75 and 1975-76 seasons is that John Amos left the series afterward, and his character, proud Chicago patriarch James Evans, energized the series as a black man keeping his dignity while guiding his family living in a housing project during the 1970s.
I’d do a tribute to actor Avery Brooks through his menacing gun-for-hire Hawk in ABC’s “Spenser: for Hire” (1985-88); the short-lived 1989 spinoff “A Man Called Hawk”; and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in which, during that show’s last few seasons, Brooks–with his shaved head and goatee–was basically Hawk in space.
At first, I was going to add “M.A.N.T.I.S.,” a 1994-95 Fox series with Carl Lumbly as TV’s first black superhero, until I remembered the pilot changed when it went to series and fixed it so a white scientist (Roger Rees) developed the superhero technology.
That’s “Mississippi Burning Syndrome,” where you see something that affected black people but through a white perspective, which is boring.
And I don’t want to see “Mississippi Burning” during Black History Month, either.
I do, however, want Comedy Central’s outrageous sketch series “Chappelle’s Show,” starring comic Dave Chappelle, the funniest black man on TV.
Just to show my mother raised me with some culture, I’d include an A&E “Biography” on influential writer James Baldwin; a WTTW-Ch. 11 documentary on 47th Street on Chicago’s South Side, a street in my old neighborhood that I grew up admiring; and the theatrical comedy concert “The Original Kings of Comedy” and its Showtime spinoff “The Queens of Comedy.”
Finally, people would see PBS documentaries “Two Towns of Jasper”–relating the 1998 murder in which three white men dragged an African-American man to death in Texas–and “The Murder of Emmett Till”–on the 1955 death of a Chicago teen in Mississippi.
Though African-Americans shouldn’t have such pitiful incidents relentlessly rubbed in their faces in February, we still should never forget.
———-
Send e-mail for Allan Johnson to [email protected].
More Top Picks Best Monitor Light Bars Under 100