#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.