Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 1067

Young People in Tottenham Were Angry in 1985 and They Are Still Angry

Young People in Tottenham Were Angry in 1985 and They Are Still Angry by Elizabeth Pears | Huffington Post
Watching Tottenham burning down made me feel like a parent forced to watch their troubled child slip further out of reach. A community that had so little on Saturday evening, has even less this morning.
Tottenham's reputation is already tarnished by the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots, but as someone who started my journalism career on its streets, I know hundreds of people and organisations who have dedicated their lives to improving the community for no reward other than to see it uplifted. I know the police, too, have worked to rebuild up a relationship with young people through initiatives like the Haringey Police Community Consultative Group. All of this has been undone in an instant.
I mourn with the people who are proud of Tottenham and the rich parts of its history. I empathise with those who choose to live and send their children to schools there while others would prefer to criticise; condemning Tottenham on its reputation, not its reality. It is those people who are the victims of the events of Saturday night. Some are now standing in the ashes of their lives after their homes have burned down. Businesses and services that provide for families are gone. If the High Street was lacking before, it is a ghost town now.
Opportunistic looters, driven by mob mentality, opportunism and shameless greed, stole food, drinks, mobile phones and carpets. Finding slim pickings in Tottenham, they turned their attentions to Wood Green. These were not the people who, hours earlier, had attended a peaceful protest following the shooting of father-of-four Mark Duggan.
There is an anger that has built up over seasons of discontent that Tottenham and its people deserved so much more than it has been getting.
As the saying goes, those who cannot remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. No matter how many steps the police believe they have taken to rebuild the relationship with the community, police cars still got booed when they drive through Farm, as Broadwater Farm is known. A dislike of the police is embedded in some Tottenham sub-cultures.
Of all the footage I've seen, one image sticks out: the youths attacking a parked police car with a venom that transcended the television screen and spent chills down my spine. Using stones, parking cones, bricks and whatever they could get their hands on, they battered the vehicle for everything it represented; for every time they are stopped-and-searched; for friends and family that have been killed in police custody.
Young people in Tottenham were angry in 1985 and they are still angry now. This is what needs to be addressed. It is young people with whom the powers that be need to reconnect with. Instead, they have lost youth centres; their youth workers, their EMA and can't find jobs. Until then, Tottenham will remain stuck in a cycle of poverty where history of the worst kind will continue to repeat.
We can't use words and phrases like 'disenfranchised' and 'most deprived ward in the country' without reflecting on what it means. People may ask: why would anyone burn their own community down? It is tantamount to self-harm. The bottom line the youths do not feel a part of the community. There is still very much an 'us' and 'them' mentality.
In the background on the BBC, a heckler shouted at the MP David Lammy, "don't just be on their side, be on our side".
Friends and family attended Tottenham police station demanding answers over Mark Duggan's death. They don't condone the rioting that happened last night, but they are unsympathetic. As someone told me, you can rebuild a building, but you can't bring back someone back to life or give children back a father.
This year, peaceful marches have been happening in Birmingham and London over the deaths of reggae icon Smiley Culture, a father-of-two Kinglsey Burrell and 21-year-old Demetre Fraser who all died following police contact.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) are already investigating these deaths, and now add Mark Duggan's name to that list.
Unless these investigations are down independently, transparently and swiftly, the rage will continue to burn in hearts, minds, and, worse, on streets.
***
Elizabeth Pears writes for the The Voice - Britain's biggest-selling black newspaper. She spent three years as a local reporter in Tottenham. She has contributed to the BBC, The Guardian among other organisations. Follow Elizabeth Pears on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bizpears

The Return of Solidarity: Young Americans Band Together To Organize for Justice

The Return of Solidarity:  Young Americans Band Together To Organize for Justice by Mark Naison | special NewBlackMan
During the Great Depression of the 1930's, many Americans, though brought up on "rags to riches" stories of individual mobility, began to cautiously embrace the concept of "Solidarity"—the idea that working people could only survive, and ultimately prosper, if they helped one another when they were in need and organized together to demand that government and business provide them with economic security. Such an ideal fueled the growth of the industrial labor movement, which called on workers to sacrifice for once another, rather than compete for the favors of employers. But it was also visible in the emergence of an ethic of mutual aid that honored those who helped people in trouble, whether it was feeding a hungry person who came to the door asking for food, or taking in a family who just lost their farm or got evicted from their apartment.
The music of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck, especially the Grapes of Wrath captured the moral grandeur of solidarity both as a personal credo and a political ideal, but it was also institutionalized, through an alliance of the New Deal and the emerging labor movement, in unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and the legal protection of collective bargaining rights in basic industry.
For the last three years, I have been looking for signs that young college educated Americans, along with their working class counterparts, are beginning to rediscover the concept of Solidarity. Young people have been hammered especially hard in the current economic crisis. As of the Spring of 2011, youth unemployment in the US had topped 20 percent, with sections of that labor force (minority youth, high school graduates) having rates double that total. Even graduates of elite universities were having trouble finding work they were trained for, as many returned home to live with parents rather than striking out on their own.
For a while, I saw little evidence that young Americans were reading the handwriting on the wall and concluding that acquisitive individualism and consumerism just weren't going to work all that well for their generation. I watched in astonishment as young Americans failed to mobilize for the 2010 Congressional elections as they had in 2008, paving the way for Republican—and Tea Party-dominance of the House of Representatives.
But in the last six months, I have seen numerous signs that Solidarity is making a comeback among young people who are starting to realize that this economic crisis is not going away and that they had better reach out to one another and fight for economic justice, lest their dignity, as well as their power to make a living, be permanently compromised.
The first sign of this was in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of high school students and college students mobilized in support of union workers whose collective bargaining rights were being taken away through the actions of a Republican Governor and State Legislature. At the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, I had the privilege of introducing Kas Schwerdtfeger, a Students for a Democratic Society organizer from Milwaukee who led walkouts of thousands of high school and college students in support of the occupation of the state legislature by union workers, as well ass semester long occupation of the student center at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Such actions equaled, and in many ways, exceeded those launched by the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, the last major student movement in the US to mobilize around the concept of "Solidarity." But Wisconsin was not an isolated incident.
In New York City, the concept of "Solidarity" has been embraced by many young teachers enraged by the testing and assessment protocols imposed by the Bloomberg Dictatorship in the NYC Department of Education as well as the huge propaganda campaign launched by wealthy philanthropists in behalf of charter schools and privatization of public education. In the last six months, a multifaceted resistance movement, jointly led by young teachers and veteran education activists, has resulted in the organization of "Fight Back Fridays," citywide protests by protests by teachers, students and parents and parents against excessive testing; the production of "The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting For Superman," a devastating critique of dominant Education Reform ideology, and the organization of an amazing group called "The New Teacher Underground" which brings together teachers in alternative certification programs like Teach for America with long time graduates of teacher education programs to fight for democracy and a fair distribution of resources in the city's schools and the communities they are located in.
As someone who has been directly or indirectly involved with these initiatives—I have marched on a picket line with young teacher activists at Lehman High School, written an article on charters schools with the help of the creators of "The Inconvenient Truth about Waiting For Superman," and spoken at a meeting of the "New Teacher Underground"—I have seen, first hand, a level of energy and commitment on the part of young teacher activists in New York that reminds me of my own experience in justice movements in the Sixties and early Seventies
And this is only the beginning.
As the government of the United States has set upon a course of action, affirmed by both major parties, that will intensify the hardship of America's poor and drive millions of middle class people into the edge of poverty, the young people of this nation, I now am confident, will organize, will resist, and ultimately, over time, will change the course of American history so that sacrifice and hardship is no longer concentrated on our society's most vulnerable people.
***
Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the 

Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930's to the 1960's.

The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl--Episode # 7

Episode 7: "The Date"

J embarks on her first "White Date" with Jay.

(http://awkwardblackgirl.com) Created by Issa Rae (http://issarae.com)

Shabazz Palaces (Butterfly) | "Belhaven Meridian"

An allegorical short film/music video for Shabazz Palaces (Butterfly of Digable Planets) shot in Watts, Los Angeles, directed by Kahlil Joseph, Photographed by Matt Lloyd. Featuring a cameo of Dante (Ernest Wadell) from "The Wire" in homage to Charles Burnett's 1977 classic film Killer of Sheep.

Trying to Make It Real…: Remembering Eugene McDaniels

Eugene McDaniels' legacy is most pronounced as one of the figures in American pop music history who paid a direct price for his willingness to challenge both the recording industry and the political status quo. That McDaniels lived to tell, speaks volumes about the artist's ingenuity, perseverance, and convictions.
Trying to Make It Real…: Remembering Eugene McDaniels by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackman
There is likely not a day when Eugene McDaniels' music is not recalled on some Robo soft-Rock station, during a non-stop mix lodged between Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me," and The Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose's "Treat Her  Like a Lady."  Such is the fate of "Feel Like Making Love," the chart topping pop confection from 1974, that cemented Roberta Flack's position as one of the most important pop stars of the 1970s, and is perhaps, McDaniels' most well known composition. 
As a songwriter and producer, McDaniels, who passed away recently at the age of 76, could hang his hat on the longevity of the song—it has been recorded by artists as diverse as Jazz vocalist Marlena Shaw, George Benson (during his programmed pop period in the 1980s) and D'Angelo—and the Grammy Award nomination that it earned for Flack.  With songwriting and productions credits on recordings, spanning four decades, from the  likes of Melba Moore, Phyllis Hyman (the gorgeous "Meet Me On the Moon"), John Legend, Della Reese, Donny Hathaway, jazz artists Les McCann, Eddie Harris and Bobby Hutcherson, Meshell Ndgeocello, Nancy Wilson and most famously Flack, McDaniels surely had a career that was as notable as it was enviable—no matter how obscure McDaniels might have been rendered throughout the years.  
Yet McDaniels' legacy is perhaps most pronounced, well beyond the archives of ASCAP and BMI, as one of the figures in American pop music history who paid a direct price for his willingness to challenge both the recording industry and the political status quo. That McDaniels lived to tell—thriving on his publishing royalties and later influencing a generation of Hip-Hop era producers and artists—speaks volumes about the artist's ingenuity, perseverance, and convictions.Born in Kansas City in February of 1935 and later raised in Omaha, Nebraska, McDaniels sang in his father's church; his father was a Bishop in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC).  After studying at the Omaha Conservatory of Music, McDaniels, then known as Gene McDaniels, moved to Los Angeles at age 19.  While in Los Angeles, McDaniels connected with pianist Les McCann, who would figure prominently in McDaniels' career for the next two decades. Though McDaniels was perhaps most at home in the Jazz idiom, with a four octave voice—mellifluous is the term often invoked to describe his instrument—McDaniels could literally sing anything he wanted. 
By the beginning of the 1960s, McDaniels was ensconced on the pop charts with songs like "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," and "Tower of Strength."  Part of the success of McDaniels' early recordings is that his voice betrayed any hint of his racial identity—he could have easily been mistaken for singers like Bobby Vinton or Andy Williams.  In an 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel McDaniels admitted that Liberty Records, his label at the time, "didn't make a deliberate decision to  hide his race from audiences," but that they also were also  "in no rush to get publicity photos" of him out to the press.

Despite his relative mainstream success, far removed from the revolutions in pop sounds that were occurring in Detroit and Memphis, McDaniels career at Liberty Records came to an abrupt end in 1963, when he sued the label for back royalties, noting the still continuous practice of labels charging artists for traveling expenses and production costs against their royalties.  This would not be the last time McDaniels would spar with a recording label.  As McDaniels told Kansas City's Pitch Magazine in 2001, "We are in the slavery business…the major record companies are slave owners. Artists have next to no rights to their own material."
Without a recording contract, McDaniels retreated back into the world of the Los Angeles Jazz scene  honing his songwriting skills and, like many Black men of his generation, being profoundly affected by the Civil Rights and Black Power struggles. Early evidence of McDaniels' political transformation is heard on vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson's 1969 album Now, for which McDaniels provided original lyrics and vocals on tracks like "Slow Change," "Black Heroes,"  and the title track—all with nods to the Jazz vocal ensemble recordings of trumpeter Donald Byrd and the Free Jazz movement. 

In this period in the late 1960s McDaniels wrote the song "Compared to What?" The song was initially recorded and released by Roberta Flack on her debut album First Take (1969), the first of many of McDaniels' compositions that she would record, as she came to function as his muse for the mainstream pop career he couldn't sustain in the early 1960s.  But it was with a second version of the song, recorded later in 1969 by pianist Les McCann and saxophonist Eddie Harris for their recording Swiss Movement, (live at the Montreux Jazz Festival) that the song took flight becoming one of the most important protest songs of the 20th Century; even actress Della Resse felt compelled to record the song as she did on her 1970 album Black is Beautiful.

At a time when Black folk, American youth, and anti-war protesters were literally taking to the streets, "Compared to What" offered a scathing critique of social realities in the United States, taking aim at religious zealots  ("poor dumb rednecks"), "tired old ladies" and the Vietnam War.  Per the song's lyrics, McDaniels' understood  the risk of raising questions about the war in Vietnam; it was thought by some as an act of treason, a notion that gained increased relevancy in the post 9-11 era, when many raised the similar questions regarding the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
The success of the McCann and Harris recording of "Compared to What?," began a new phase in McDaniels' career as he signed with Atlantic Records (label home of Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway and Flack), now recording as Eugene McDaniels.  McDaniels recorded two discs for the label, Outlaw (1970) and The Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse (1971).
For those expecting the McDaniels of "A Hundred Pounds of Clay," they might have been surprised by the opening and title track on Outlaw, when he sings "she's a nigger in jeans…" leading the Washington Post to suggest, after catching a few of McDaniels' sets at Washington DC's legendary Mr. Henry's in June of 1970, that his "songs are filled with words and imagery that some may find difficult to take, but they  concern some of the most important issues of our time."  McDaniels had no illusions about the shift in focus of his musical career: "I'm not out here to make any money.  I'm out here to have some fun and tell the truth."
If Outlaw was provocative with its lyrics, McDaniels' follow-up,  Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse was both more musically and lyrically provocative. Forty years after its release, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse remains one of the most blatantly political musical tomes ever released commercially by a major label.  The album contained critiques of blue-eyed soul ("Jagger the Dagger"), examined the phenomenon of  "shopping while black" ("Supermarket Blues")—years before "racial profiling" entered into the national lexicon—and the futility of race hatred ("Headless Heroes").

"The Parasite" was McDaniels' most stinging critique though, as he gets at the root of American Imperialism and its relationship to the genocide of America's native populations.  On the track McDaniels describes some of the early settlers as "ex-hoodlums" and "jailbirds" who used "forked tongues" in their drive to pollute the water and defile the air.  Referencing America's ideology of "Manifest Destiny" McDaniels sarcastically sang that as "agents of God, they did damned well what they pleased."  To capture the annihilation brought upon the Native populations, McDaniels plucks a stringed instrument in a way that replicates Native resistance by way of bow and arrow. 
Shortly after the release of Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, McDaniels was unceremoniously "dropped" from Atlantic.  McDaniels apparently caught the attention of the White House with a not so thinly veiled shot at the Nixon administration and their "Law and Order" domestic policy ("rewriting the standards of what's good and fair/promote law and order/let justice go to hell").  As the story goes then Vice-President Spiro Agnew reached  out to Atlantic founders Armet and Neshui Ertegun and McDaniels was released from his contract.  McDaniels recalled thirty years later, just as Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse was being issued on CD for the first time on former Atlantic staffer Joel Dorn's Label M, "It was a black man in open, conscious resistance of the power that was trying to keep him enslaved—that was me…At last I had a chance to say what I believed in my deepest heart about politics, slavery, and about the genocide of Indians." (Pitch Magazine, 2001)
Even with the setback, other artists began to record McDaniels' songs; his "Sunday and Sister Jones" appears on Flack's 1972 album Quiet Fire (he also sings backup with McCann on "To Love Somebody") and also contributed "River" on Flack's career defining album Killing Me Softly (1973).  "River" was also a track that McDaniels recorded with the group Universal Jones for their eponymously titled album from 1972.  The album captured the vocal ensemble style that McDaniels featured on his album with Bobby Hutcherson, with a musical style that was much more accessible than his solo work with Atlantic. 
With his political points made, McDaniels seemed to be trying to find a way to function with the recording industry on his own terms.  When Universal Jones failed to make a mark, he got serious about the business of song writing, though he did make one last recording in the period with the provocatively titled Natural Juices (1975), which featured equally provocatively cover art of a scantily clad McDaniels.  The album opens with McDaniels own take on  "Feel Like Makin' Love," and also includes "River," which by 1975, had been transformed in a way that was not unlike the increasingly dynamic versions of "Ol Man River" that Paul Robeson performed throughout his career.

Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse might have remained an obscurity if not for the crate diggers of the late 1980s and early 1990s who liberated it  from the metaphoric dust bin. Out of print for more than 20 years, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse found its way into the music of A Tribe Called Quest, Organized Konfusion, The Beasties and Pete Rock and CL Smooth as samples.  The original recording quickly became a collectable (s/o out to John Roberts) and bootlegged CD pressings of the album also appeared.  In his 2001 profile of McDaniels in Pitch Magazine, writer Shawn Edwards notes the irony that Atlantic continues to collect royalties for the album's sampled use.
When Coke decided to launch an ad campaign in 2003 featuring "Compared to What?"  McDaniels' profile increased. The intent of the song seemed lost on a generation of caffeinated fizz drinkers, even as the campaign, which featured Common, Amel Larrieux, Angie Stone and Musiq, was released as it was increasingly clear that the United States was going to invade Iraq.  Even as it was being reclaimed, the song, and to some extent, McDaniels' legacy was being gutted of its political impulses.

Thankfully, Eugene McDaniels, lived long enough to hear Meshell Ndegeocello's brilliant reading of "Compared to What," on the soundtrack of Talk to Me,  the biopic of one of McDaniels' political contemporaries, Petey Green. Just this past year, McDaniels also witnessed  the release of the John Legend/The Roots collaboration Wake Up!, which featured a version of "Compared to What?."  In the weeks after the recording's release McDaniels even took to Twitter to voice his pleasure with a generation of musicians who had discovered the value of his music.
The reality is that Eugene McDaniels never stopped making music, even if we were no longer paying attention. Through social media, in his later years McDaniels began to circulate his music and ideas via Youtube and his website GeneMcDaniels.com, including his most recent full length recording Screams and Whispers (2005).
Over the span of nearly sixty-year career, Eugene McDaniels lived by the mantra of his most important recording; he simply tried to make it real.

Michael Eric Dyson and James Braxton Peterson on Bloomberg's Jobs Plan

MSNBC Guest Host Michael Eric Dyson Talks with Lehigh University Professor James Braxton Peterson about New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Proposed Job Plan for Black and Latino Youth.

Michael Eric Dyson and Kamala Harris on MSNBC

Michael Eric Dyson Guest Host MSNBC's The Ed Show w/ guest Kamala Harris, California State Attorney General.

New Book: Making the University Matter

Making the University Matteredited by Barbie ZelizerRoutledge – 252 pages
Making the University Matter investigates how academics situate themselves simultaneously in the university and the world and how doing so affects the viability of the university setting.
The university stands at the intersection of two sets of interests, needing to be at one with the world while aspiring to stand apart from it. In an era that promises intensified political instability, growing administrative pressures, dwindling economic returns and questions about economic viability, lower enrollments and shrinking programs, can the university continue to matter into the future? And if so, in which way? What will help it survive as an honest broker? What are the mechanisms for ensuring its independent voice?
Barbie Zelizer brings together some of the leading names in the field of media and communication studies from around the globe to consider a multiplicity of answers from across the curriculum on making the university matter, including critical scholarship, interdisciplinarity, curricular blends of the humanities and social sciences, practical training and policy work.
The collection is introduced with an essay by the editor and each section has a brief introduction to contextualise the essays and highlight the issues they raise.
Introduction: Pondering the University's Future | Barbie Zelizer
Part I On Teaching and Learning Introduction: Models of Teaching and Learning | Brittany Griebling and Adrienne Shaw
1. The Life of the University | Paddy Scannell 2. The Problem of General Education in the Research University | Michael Schudson 3. The University (or College) Keeps Us Honest | Robin Wagner-Pacifici 4. Rethinking Doctoral Education and Careers | Larry Gross
Part II Models of Intellectual Engagement Introduction: Against McCollege | Michael Serazio
5. University in the Age of a Transnational Public Sphere | Slavko Splichal 6. Surviving Through Engagement: The Faculty Responsibility to Defend Liberal Education | S. Elizabeth Bird 7. Monks, Managers and Celebrities: Refiguring the European University | Isabel Capeloa Gil 8. Universities and Globalization: Models and Countermodels | Marwan M. Kraidy
Part III Making Intellectual Work Public Introduction: Closing the Gap Between the Philosophical and the Practical | Susan Mello and Rocio Nunez
9. Thinking While Black | Mark Anthony Neal 10. iPhones and Eyeshades: Journalism and the University's Role in Promoting a Dynamic Public Sphere | Michael Bromley 11. Making Art Matter: Navigating the Collaborative Turn | Ien Ang and Philip Mar 12. Metaphor and Institutional Crisis: The Near-Death Experience of Antioch College | Paula Treichler
Part IV Economies of Knowledge Introduction Resistances and Affordances of the Economic "Bottom Line" | Mario Rodriguez
13. Post-Neoliberal Academic Values: Notes from the UK Higher Education Sector | Nick Couldry 14. Claims of Time(s): Notes on Post-Welfare Public Reason | Risto Kunelius 15. The Entrepreneurial University: Or, Why the University Is No Longer a Public Space (If It Ever Was) | Don Mitchell 16. Outlearning | John Hartley
Part V Institutionalization and Technology Introduction: Assessing the Influence of Institutional and Technological Change |Angela M. Lee and Deborah Lubken
17. The Institutional Transformation of Universities in the Era of Digital Information | Dominic Boyer 18. How to Read Hyper-Text: Media Literacy and Open Access in Higher Education | Richard Cullen Rath 19. Lost in Abundance? Reflections on Disciplinarity | Kaarle Nordenstreng 20. Another Plea for the University Tradition: The Institutional Roots of Intellectual Compromise | Jeff Pooley
Part VI Default Settings and Their Complications Introduction: Politics By Default and Choice | Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt
21. Models of Transnational 'Cooperation': A Site of Geopolitical Struggles? | Elizabeth Jelin 22. Legal Education and the Rise of Rights Consciousness in China | John Nguyet Erni 23. The Academic Career Pipeline: Not Breaking But Pouring | Katherine Sender 24. Producing Cosmopolitan Global Citizens in the U.S. Academy | Radhika Parameswaran

Spike Lee's 'She's Gotta Have It' Turns 25

Grown and sexy: The director's daring film changed the game in Hollywood -- and assumptions about black women's sexuality.
Spike Lee's 'She's Gotta Have It' Turns 25 by Salamishah Tillet | The Root
On the hot night of Aug. 8, 1986, a line of young black people wrapped around the corner of New York City's Cinema Studio 1, eager to catch Spike Lee's much-buzzed-about debut feature film, She's Gotta Have It. Eighty-five hot and sexy minutes later -- which included Mars Blackmon's carnal plea, "Please baby, please baby, please baby, baby, baby, please!" -- they weren't disappointed with Lee's cinematic achievement.
The following day, the New York Times review said that the movie "has a touch of the classic." And the Washington Post praised its "rare quality: a sense of place."
She's Gotta Have It is now cinema and book history, but back then, a 29-year-old Lee, wunderkind director and NYU film-school graduate, turned the Hollywood establishment upside down by setting the film in black Brooklyn, shooting it in 12 days on a starting budget of $20,000 (the final budget was $175,000), securing a distribution deal with Island Pictures, winning the Prix de Jeunesse at Cannes and grossing more than $7 million that year.
The provocative heroine of his film, Nola Darling, and its taboo subject matter, a black woman's sexual independence, marked a radical departure from anything ever seen on the American screen before. In the words of cultural critic and director Nelson George, who was one of the film's early financiers, on Aug. 8, 1986, "the first successful black cult film" was born.
A Revolution in Black Film
Twenty-five years later, it's clear that She's Gotta Have It was a hit for so many reasons. The plot, featuring a young woman, Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns), and the three lovers who courted her -- the romantic poet, Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks); the narcissistic model, Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell); and the now-iconic hip-hop bike messenger, Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) -- might have been anticipated by the prose of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The sexual context and contests of Lee's movie, however, were unchartered waters in black cinema.
Read More @ The Root

BET's Commercial vs. Community Interests

BET's Commercial vs. Community Interests: Questions Linger After Killer Mike Ban by Janell Ross | HuffPost BlackVoices
July was supposed to be a busy month for Michael Render, aka Killer Mike, aka Mike Bigga.
His second national appearance as mentor to a want-to-be rapper would air on MTV's "Made." And before he left the country for a European concert tour, he had all sorts of promotional appearances for "Burn," a politically-charged single from Render's latest album, "PL3DGE." But that kind of pop-star schedule didn't even include the biggest thing to happen to Render in July.
Before the month was over, Black Entertainment Television (BET) would refuse to air the "Burn" video for what the channel described as violent and "convoluted" content. "Burn" voices a musical cornucopia of post-recession frustrations ranging from elevated joblessness and home foreclosures, to corrupt civic and religious organizations, the bank bail-out and police brutality. The network's decision to ban the video reignited a long-running debate about the politics, place and purpose of the 31-year-old network and made BET the target of what can best be described as a 21st-century mob.
On Twitter, Facebook and in the comments section of several Web sites, people openly critiqued not just the decision to ban Killer Mike's "Burn" video, but also an alleged double standard at work at BET. BET embargoed what several people described as a timely social critique while at the same time airing videos and reality shows that tacitly endorse stereotypes, and feature nearly-naked women and staged acts of violence.
By the month's end, BET reversed its decision, announcing on Twitter that the ban on "Burn" had been lifted. (The video has not aired on BET as of this writing.) What happened with Render's video highlights just how BET has evolved and, some might say, not quite resolved a conflict built into the organization's foundation: Can commercial and community interests really reside harmoniously under one network's roof?
BET did not respond by deadline to requests for comment about its initial decision to ban the video or the subsequent announcement that "Burn" would be added to the network's rotation.
"OK, I'm not faulting BET for this alone," said Render, 35, from his Atlanta home. "They aren't the only network that makes room for just about any party song, mine included. But since this company professes to be a proponent, an agent of help and change for the African-American community, I think they also have a responsibility to air a voice like mine when I have something to say on behalf of the working class and the working poor."
In July, the Associated Press reported that The Great Recession has not only left the country with an overall unemployment rate above 9 percent and black unemployment approaching 20 percent but has also erased many of the economic gains made by minorities over the last 25 years.
Robert Johnson, a Princeton graduate and one-time cable industry lobbyist, founded BET in the early 1980s, right around the time that mainstream news publications first began to take note of a growing black middle class. According to Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke who has written extensively about black music, culture and institutions, Johnson was able to convince cable providers to carry the network, in part, by arguing that its programming would speak to an underserved audience, African Americans. And to potential viewers Johnson sold the idea that BET was a special vehicle, a tool for community uplift; it was that rare thing: a black-owned network, "by us and for us," Neal said.
From the beginning, BET has blurred the line that tends to distinguish a business from a social service agency. That made it particularly susceptible to criticism, Neal said. CBS, NBC and HGTV are free to entertain. No one implies that the mental health, public esteem or opportunities available to every lawyer, police officer or decorator/designer rest in the programming that these networks air. But BET's critics have for years argued that the network should produce more original content, limit or ban raunchy, misogynistic and violent videos, and create opportunities for black writers, directors, actors and musicians to curate and showcase their talent.
Almost nowhere on the network was the tension between serving and uplifting the "black community" and turning a profit more clear than in the volume and content of music videos. Music videos -- unlike original programming or even syndicated series and old movies -- are financed and produced by artists and record labels. They can be aired at virtually no cost to BET.
Read More Here