Gullah—the African-influenced dialect of Georgia’s Sea Islands—has undergone few changes since the first slave ships landed 300 years ago, and provides a clear window into the shaping of African-American English. This classic PBS program traces that story from the west coast of Africa through the American South, then to large northern cities in the 1920s. Studying the origins of West African pidgin English and creole speech—along with the tendency of 19th-century white Southerners to pick up speech habits from their black nursemaids—the program highlights the impact of WWI-era industrialization and the migration of jazz musicians to New York and Chicago.
posted by cthuljew on Nov 15, 2011 - 12 comments

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on Nov 13, 2007 - 30 comments

Currie Ballard, a historian in Oklahoma, has just made what he calls “the find of a lifetime”—33 cans of motion picture film dating from the 1920s that reveal the daily lives of some remarkably successful black communities.

A Find of a Lifetime
Twelve different short excerpts of the film are linked
posted by y2karl on Sep 16, 2006 - 20 comments

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, a movie pitched and marketed as blaxploitation, was a low budget political science fiction thriller about black revolution in urban black America based upon the novel written by Sam Greenlee. It was withdrawn two weeks after its release in 1973, ostensibly at the behest of the FBI. Some remember it fondly, while others revile it in recollection. Thirty-one years later, it has been released on DVD. Sam Greenlee's an interesting man--another book of his, Baghdad Blues, is evidently an autobiographical novel based upon his first hand experience of the 1958 Baath coup in Iraq. Side notes: Researching this post led me to the intriguing Chicken Bones. And here is Elvis Mitchell's take on The Marginalization of Black Action Films.
posted by y2karl on Jan 20, 2004 - 6 comments

Berry, Denzel Make Oscars History Denzel Washington is only the second African American male to win an Best Actor Oscar since Sidney Poitier's win for Lilies of the Field in 1963. Halle Berry is the first African American female to win Best Actress ever. Berry's speech was quite good (albeit long) but it leaves me wondering how all those "women who stand behind her[sic], Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox and it's for every nameless faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened" feel about being named inferior. And why didn't the camera flash onto Jada Pinkett-Smith when Berry said that? Now, that would have been a true Oscar moment.
posted by gloege on Mar 25, 2002 - 60 comments

I can't wait for the new version of Shaft to come out. It should be pretty cool. Richard Roundtree played a pretty good badass in the original, but other than that it was pretty comical. Rent it and listen to the lame dialouge the writers came up with.
posted by mathowie on Sep 21, 1999 - 0 comments