Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 670

"Comrades and Lovers": Glenn Ligon and Carl Hancock Rux Talk Whitman + American History + Art

'Reflecting on "Comrades and Lovers", Glenn Ligon's site-specific, Walt Whitman-inspired neon installation at The New School, Ligon discusses his exploration of American history, literature, race and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. Award-winning poet, playwright and novelist Carl Hancock Rux  responds through a live spoken word performance.' -- +The New School

Complexity and Contradiction: Conversation with Abstract Artist Sam Gilliam + Installation Artist Rashid Johnson

The abstract painter Sam Gilliam talks to Rashid Johnson, known for his installation art. -- New York Times Video

Between the Lines: Timbaland in Conversation with Jelani Cobb

[image error] 'Renowned music producer Timbaland talks about  his new book, Emperor of Sound, taking the leap to TV, and his legacy with Historian and New Yorker contributor Jelani Cobb.' -- +Schomburg Center 

Race in America, in Fiction & Nonfiction: Conversation with Joy-Ann Reid + Leonard Pitts

'In Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore. In Leonard Pitts’s new novel Grant Park, a disillusioned newspaper columnist is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicago’s Grant Park in 2008' -- Miami Book Fair

Homan Square: Where the Chicago Police Department 'Disappeared' 7,000 People

' +The Guardian lawsuit exposes fullest scale yet of detentions at off-the-books interrogation warehouse and reveals  that Chicago police brought more than 7,000 detainees to facility since August 2004.' 
 

#Chasing50: Cornbread + Edmund + Me by Mark Anthony Neal |

#Chasing50: Cornbread + Edmund + Meby Mark Anthony Neal  | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I was young enough to not know who Jamaal Wilkes was when my mother took me to see Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975), a film in which the former UCLA standout appeared as  a promising hoop star shot dead--in a case of mistaken identity--by police officers.  The film proved an exclamation point for Wilkes that year, when he was the NBA’s Rookie-of-the-Year and one of the stars of the last Golden State Warrior team to win a championship--before this year’s Steph Curry led squad.
My mother and I never talked about Cornbread, Earl & Me--that wasn’t her way--and I never really asked her about it. What I recall most about that first screening of Cornbread, Earl and Me, were the actual visuals of Cornbread being shot--in the rain, him running “in between” the raindrops, the Orange Nehi bottle he was carrying crashing to the ground, the near-riot that ensued in the aftermath of that shooting, and the extent to which the police were invested in covering up their “mistake.”
Wilkes, as “Cornbread” was only on-screen for a short time. The character who most held my attention was “Wilford Robinson”--the “Me” in the film’s title--portrayed by a teenage Laurence Fishburne (his mother played by the brilliant Roselind Cash), with  a maturity and pragmatism befitting a 12-year-old boy with the integrity to stand up to the State, when the adults in his life were unwilling. “Cornbread, Earl & Me was the first of many times that Mr. Fishburne’s characters were to inspire me--The Cotton Club (1984), Higher Learning (1995), Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998), Biker Boyz (2003), among those performances.
There was more context to the images I first watched as a child, when I saw Cornbread, Earl and Me as a 19-year-old college student. A decade earlier my mother had no knowledge that the film she forced me to watch as child would provide me with the framework to interpret a series of events that defined my coming into political consciousness, such as the December 1984 subway-shooting of Black teens by vigilante Bernhard Goetz, the police shooting of Graffiti artist Michael Stewart,  the police shooting of 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs (in the doorway of the apartment they were trying to evict her from), and the shooting death of 17-year-old Edmund Perry, killed by an undercover police officer, weeks before the prep school graduate was to leave for Stanford University.
Perry's death was much more of an affair of the heart.  He was of that same cohort of Black New City boys navigating the demands of the street, the expectations of the ‘Hood, and the incessant call of the drum machines and the turn-tables, chasing dreams as well as shadows--real and imagined.  I knew I couldn’t be Kenny Smith or Dwayne “Pearl” Washington or Mark Jackson--all New York City school-boy basketballs legends, who were part of that cohort, but I could have of been Edmond Perry. 

Even Michael Jackson understood that he could have been Perry, casting himself as “Daryl” in a closer to myth depiction of Perry’s time at Exeter in the film short for “Bad” (1987), where Perry likely first experienced a cultural schizophrenia, perhaps naturalized by a generation of post-Civil rights babies, unprepared for the wages of Whiteness in real-time, and institutions equally unprepared and dismissive of the worlds (real and imagined)  that some of these young Black folk were bringing with them to their campus--and the worlds (real and imagined) that these institutions and their white constituencies seemed to conjure on behalf of these students.
If so many of these institutions were suffocating the minds and killing the spirits of so many young brilliant Black students--albeit with the promise of high five-figure salaries awaiting in the end--Perry’s death provided clarity to the State’s decidedly anti-Black view of our Bodies.  There are now internationally known reverends and disbarred attorneys who came to prominence in New York City shortly after Perry’s death--largely in response to the kinds of not-so-random anti-Black violence by Whites that elicits media spectacles like the George Zimmerman trial.
Clearly defined and sustainable responses to State-sanctioned anti-Black violence proved more elusive in that era. It is not lost on me that the most sustained national efforts to address such violence in the past 30-years  have occurred among a generational cohort that is not much older than the fictional “Cornbread” or Edmund Perry. 

As I write this (marking the time to the closing of my 50th year the only way that I know how) the nation acknowledges the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of 12-Year-old Tamir Rice (his police shooter still unindicted) and the release of video footage of the shooting death of Laquan Mcdonald (his police shooter just indicted, more than a year after the shooting). I don’t think my mother could have imagined either of these deaths--the shooting of children in the streets by those charged to serve and protect them--but she knew to prepare me for the inevitability of them.

Strange Fruit: Voting Rights Restored for Kentucky Felons

'Outgoing Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear announced he would restore voting rights for Kentuckians convicted of most non-violent felonies. "The right to vote is one of the most intrinsically American privileges," Beshear said, "and thousands of Kentuckians are living, working and paying taxes in the state but are denied this basic right." Kentuckians for the Commonwealth's Sean Hardy joins Strange Fruit with hosts Dr. Kaila Story and Jaison Gardner  this week to talk about the importance re-enfranchising voters.'

The Global African: Sheltering Liberation--A Short History of Maroon Settlements

'  +The Global African   starts a new series exploring the Maroon presence in Latin America. In this episode an examination of Maroons in Panama and Colombia. Also, a new bill granting Afro-Mexicans legal recognition in the Mexican constitution is being debated. What are the implications of this bill for Afro­Mexicans? The Global African host Bill Fletcher looks at these issues with Dr. Sheila Walker, Executive Director at AfroDiaspora Inc, Dr. Msomi Moor, Professor at University of the District of Columbia, and Walter Thompson­ Hernandez, researcher at the Center for Immigrant Integration at the University of Southern California.'

Harry Belafonte on Race + Arts + America

'Harry Belafonte exposed America to world music and has spent his life challenging and overturning racial barriers. He played a key role in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington, led in the development of the Grammy-winning song “We are the World,” and was active in efforts to end apartheid in South Africa and obtain the release Nelson Mandela. He recently founded the Sankofa Justice & Equity Fund, a non-profit social justice organization that utilizes the power of culture and celebrity in partnership with activism. Belafonte discusses his lifetime of art and service, and explores the unique power of the arts to address the political issues that trouble us today.' -- +The Aspen Institute 

ReelBlack: Guthrie P. Ramsey Discusses His Documentary 'The Amazing Bud Powell'

'RBTV's Mike D. spent a few moments with Professor/Musician/Filmmaker Guthrie P. Ramsey  to discuss his short documentary, Amazing: The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell at the 2015 BlackStar Film Festival. Based on his recent book, the film features interviews and rare footage.'-- +reelblack