Rampaging “The Help” Movie: Stereotypes and More

• • African Americans, gendered racism, media, stereotyping, white racial frame



In the summer I barely read emails. This summer in particular, I am too concerned with enjoying the midwestern summer while I sit outside attempting to write my second book before the academic year begins again and I become lost in the day-to-day grind. Deciding to check it a few days ago in order to simply rid myself of spam, or the ridiculous comment notices from Facebook of my so-called “friends” I have collected over the summer, I came across an interesting message. It was from a sociology listserv. It was titled, “Black Female Historians Slam ‘The Help.’” Since every female in my life to my mother has talked about no other anticipated movie this summer, the message caught my attention and forced me to put on my academic propeller cap and become engaged. Here is what the message said:

The Association of Black Women Historians has joined the tide of negative voices rising up against The Help. The group has released a statement urging fans to reconsider their support of the wildly popular film, saying it portrays African-American women in subjugated roles and relies on tired stereotypes of black men.

An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women’s employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy –a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Now, I must confess, I have no inclination of ever seeing the film due to the fact that I simply do not gravitate toward heartfelt sobbing movies that neither make me want to put on ultra tight uniform and adopt a cool superhero name or ones that remind me to either laugh hysterically or be terrified of the dark. Nevertheless, I began to receive group texts from my academic Black female friends calling all to boycott the film. The comments made by them and the Association of Black Women Historians made me think and say, “You have got to be kidding me.” Now this may anger many of my Black female peers, but I was a bit upset. Why? My argument is not with the totality or rationality of their concerns, but the fact that the initial email also mentioned the depiction of Black males. The beginning of the email said the movie, “…portrays African-American women in subjugated roles and relies on tired stereotypes of black men.” If that is the case, why was there no mention to Black males in the official open-statement made by the organization? The next notion that seeped through my psyche was concerning the fact that over the past years, where was the outcry against, let’s see—The long list of Tyler Perry movies, Terry McMillian’s male hating movies, The Color Purple (1985), and the buffoonery and modern-day Amos and Andy Soul Plane (2004) just to name a few.

Researching the Black male reaction to movies such as The Color Purple I discovered a few accounts of Black males picketing the movie due to the demeaning manner in which males were depicted. Regardless of comments made by the great Spike Lee who believed the film was only produced due to the fact that the movie depicts Black males as “‘ “one-dimensional animals,’” the film received a larger Black female pool of constituents who rallied behind in support of the movie.

As I am writing my new book on the oppression of Black males in education, I have begun interviews with other Black males in regards to their perspective on education and why Black females are moving ahead of them (i.e., graduation in realms of public and higher education). One question that I ask them is, “Why has the plight of Black and Latino males not received a great degree of public attention?” Unanimously from the diverse pool, they all have noted that the reason is due to the fact that they are the invisible population—The Whipping Boys. One participant noted,

Black males have always been the population that receives little attention and the most overall abuse. It is easy in the world to make us look like the bad guy. Both Whites and Black females accept it. Look at the depiction of us in the media. My own people have bought in to this crap.

When I asked if Black females were the ones with the lowest graduation rates and killing each other in the urban streets of America, what do you feel would happen? One ex-convicted felon told me that, “Hell would pay. Black women know how to organize. They come out for their own. We barely believe we are worthy of life at times.”

This way of thinking and thus reacting to the presence of Black males through the social vehicles within the media today are nothing but a continuation of the influences of the white racial frame that supported the demonization and oppression of people of color. The power of the frame has undoubtedly influenced people of color as well. Therefore, today exists ingredients of centuries-old faming that have not withered, but have been overhauled and updated in order to go easily undetected in order to continue the centuries old thinking that Black males are simply “the inferior” and deserve to be treated as such.

The depiction of Black males males as dumb, lazy, and at times childlike in commercials and movies is rampant. You know: If we are educated, we have lost connections with our heritage as we drive in our expensive European cars alongside a blond haired beautiful female. If we are uneducated, we are violent, drug dealing, or buffoons. This happens so much that few like the Association of Black Women Historians and others deem it necessary to combat it. So I say to the opponents of The Help, do not forget about me… that is, us.

One More Reason to Oppose Secure Communities Policy: It’s Racist

• • anti-immigrant, immigration, law, racism

The secure communities policy is driving a massive increase in deportations. Since President Obama took office, we have seen one million deportations. In 2010, the United States deported 400,000 people, more than in the entire decade of the 1980s. The secure communities policy is also racist.

(Photo by Runs with Scissors)

This rise in deportations is due to laws passed in 1996, and a massive infusion of money into draconian enforcement of immigration law with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). With an annual budget of $60 billion, DHS has been able to expand its operations far beyond those of its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

When we look at who is getting deported, however, it’s clear that Asian and European immigrants are almost never deported, yet blacks and Latinos are deported in massive numbers. And, nearly all deportees are men. Sound familiar? Yes, racial and gender disparities in immigration law enforcement look a lot like those in criminal justice law enforcement.

Police are much more likely to arrest blacks and Latinos. In New York State, 94% of those arrested on drug charges are black or Latino. And, yes, whites and Asians do use and sell drugs. They are just rarely arrested.

Now that President Obama has forced more cooperation between police and immigration law enforcement through the Secure Communities program, we can expect to see more blacks and Latinos deported.

Kathryn Stockett Is Not My Sister and I Am Not Her Help

• • civil rights, popular culture, white privilege, women of color

I did not attend Wednesday’s movie release of “The Help” from DreamWorks Pictures, based on the New York Times best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett.  Why, you ask? Because I read the book.

Last week New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni saw an advance screening of the movie and referred to it as  “…a story of female grit and solidarity — of strength through sisterhood.”  He wrote, “The book’s author, Kathryn Stockett, told me that she felt that most civil rights literature had taken a male perspective, leaving ‘territory that hadn’t been covered much.’” What neither Bruni nor Stockett acknowledge is that the real territory remaining uncovered is civil rights literature written by the Black women who experienced it.

I recently read The Help with an open mind, despite some of the criticism it has received.  I assumed the book would be racially problematic, because for me, most things are.  The novel opens on the fourth Wednesday in August 1962, at the bridge club meeting in the modest home of 23-year old, social climbing Miss Leefolt.  The plot unfolds when her “friend” and the novel’s antagonist, Miss Hilly, the President of the Jackson, Mississippi Junior League, announces that she will support legislation for a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative,” a bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help. (10)

We learn early on that Miss Skeeter, the only bridge club lady with a college degree and no husband, opposes the idea.  By page 12, she asks Miss Leefolt’s maid Aibleen, “Do you ever wish you could…change things?”  This lays the groundwork for a 530-page novel telling the story of Black female domestics in Jackson.

The first two chapters were written in the voice of a Black maid named Aibileen, so I hoped that the book would actually be about her.  But this is America, and any Southern narrative that actually touches on race must focus on a noble white protagonist to get us through such dangerous territory (in this case, Miss Skeeter; in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch).  As a Black female reader, I ended up feeling like one of “the help,” forced to tend to Miss Skeeter’s emotional sadness over the loss of her maid (whom she loved more than her own white momma) and her social trials regarding a clearly racist “Jim Crow” bill.

What is most concerning about the text is the empathy that we are supposed to have for Miss Skeeter.  This character is not a true white civil rights activist like the historical figure, Viola Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965), a mother of five from Michigan murdered by Ku Klux Klan members after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama.  Instead, Skeeter is a lonely recent grad of Ole Miss, who returns home after college, devastated that her maid is gone and that she is “stuck” with her parents.  She remarks, “I had to accept that Constantine, my one true ally, had left me to fend for myself with these people.” (81) Constantine is Miss Skeeter’s Black maid, and it’s pretty transparent that Stockett is writing about herself.  We learn this in the novel’s epilogue, “Too Little, Too Late:  Kathryn Stockett, in her own words.”

“My parents divorced when I was six.   Demetrie became even more important then.  When my mother went on one of her frequent trips[…] I’d cry and cry on Demetrie’s shoulder, missing my mother so bad I’d get a fever from it.” (p. 527)

“I’m pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family.  It never occurred to us to ask.  It was everyday life.  It wasn’t something people felt compelled to examine.  I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie the same question. She died when I was sixteen.  I’ve spent years imagining what her answer would be.  And that is why I wrote this book.” (p. 530)

It would have behooved Stockett to ask her burning question of another Black domestic, or at least read some memoirs on the subject, but instead she substitutes her imagination for understanding.  And the result is that The Help isn’t for Black women at all, and quickly devolves into just another novel by and for white women.

But when the novel attempts to enter the mindset of the Black women, like Aibleen or her best friend Minny, suddenly we enter the realm of the ridiculous.  Although Stockett’s writing shows her talent, her ignorance of the real lives of the Black women bleeds through.  Her Black characters lack the credibility reflected in Coming of Age in Mississippi, a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody, an African American woman growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1960s.  Moody recalls doing domestic work for white families from the age of nine. Moody’s voice is one of a real Black woman who left her own house and family each morning to cook in another woman’s kitchens.

So instead of incorporating a real Black woman’s voice in a novel purported to being about Black domestics, the Skeeter/Stockett character is comfortingly centralized, and I can see why white women relate to her.  She is depicted as a budding feminist, who is enlightened and brave.  But in reality, she uses the stories of the Black domestics in the name of “sisterhood” to launch her own career, and then leaves them behind.  In my experience, the Skeeters of the world grow up to be Gloria Steinem.

In a certain sense, The Help exemplifies the disconnect many Black women have felt from Feminist Movement through the second wave.  For 20 years, I read accounts of Black women who were alienated from that movement primarily populated by middle-class white women.  Black women have asserted their voices since the 1960s as a means of revising feminism and identifying the gap previously denied by the movement and filled by their minds, spirits and bodies. Yet, because I was born in the midst of the second wave and the Black Feminist Movement, I never felt alienated, myself, until the 2008 Presidential election.

It started with the extremely unpleasant showdown between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris Lacewell, (now Perry) surrounding Steinem’s New York Times op-ed about then-Senator Barack Obama. This was followed by the late Geraldine Ferraro’s dismissive comments that Senator Obama was winning the race because he was not White. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. … He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

And even now that we have an elegant Black First Lady, I’m troubled that our popular culture obsession is with the “largely fictional” book, The Help.  Sounds like an opportune moment for second wave feminists to engage in some serious deconstructionist critical analysis.

Or maybe not.

Once again, it seems that the sisters who make up the “sisterhood” are left to fend for themselves, while second wave feminists like Salon.com writer Laura Miller give a tepid analysis of the legal controversy surrounding the novel.

In February, Ablene Cooper, an African-American maid and babysitter working in Jackson, Miss., where “The Help” is set, filed suit against Stockett. Cooper accused Stockett of causing her to “experience severe emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation and outrage” by appropriating “her identity for an unpermitted use and holding her to the public eye in a false light.”  In her article, “The Dirty Secrets of The Help,” Laura Miller writes:

“Cooper’s lawsuit does manage to unearth two remarks from the novel in which Aibileen seems (arguably) to disparage her own color, but they are tiny scratches on an otherwise glowing portrait.”

Here’s one of those “tiny scratches” posted on ABCnews.com.

“That night after supper, me and that cockroach stare each other down across the kitchen floor,” Aibileen says in the book. “He big, inch, inch an a half. He black. Blacker than me.”

Laura Miller sees no problem with this, and focuses more on the depiction of the white women in the text:

“Although it’s difficult to believe that anyone would feel “outrage, revulsion and severe emotional distress” at being identified with the heroic Aibleen, her employer, Miss Leefolt, is another matter. A vain, status-seeking woman married to a struggling, surly accountant and desperately trying to keep up appearances in front of fellow members of the Jackson Junior League, Miss Leefolt is the one who insists on adding a separate “colored” bathroom to her garage. She does this partly to impress Miss Hilly, the League’s alpha Mean Girl (and the novel’s villain), but she also talks obsessively about the “different kinds of diseases” that “they” carry. Furthermore, Miss Leefolt is a blithely atrocious mother who ignores and mistreats her infant daughter, speaking wistfully of a vacation when “I hardly had to see [her] at all.” Like all of the white women in the novel (except the journalist writing the maids’ stories), Miss Leefolt is cartoonishly awful — and her maid has almost the same name as Stockett’s sister-in-law’s maid. Fancy that!”

Of course, Miller insinuates that the real life Aibleen lacks the agency to have initiated the lawsuit, and that Stockett’s sister-in-law surely coerced her.

I have never met the real-life Aibleen, but if she went to the grocery store yesterday, she would have seen that The Republic of Tea introduced its new limited-edition The Help Tea – Caramel Cake Black Tea, and despite her educational background, she would have understood that she won’t get a cent of the royalties.  According to the website, The Help Tea – Caramel Cake Black Tea, is inspired by Aibleen’s best friend Minny’s famous caramel cake. The tea is being marketed to drink with friends in celebration of a movie where a “remarkable sisterhood emerges.”

What no one wants to acknowledge is that the fictionalized Skeeter leaves the Black domestics in the South—similar to the white freedom riders during the Civil Rights Movement.  In real life, after appropriating the voice of working class Black women, profiting, and not settling out of court, Kathryn Stockett admits in a Barnes and Noble audio interview that even her own maid was not fond of the novel:  “My own maid didn’t really care for it too much, she said it hit a little too close to home for her,” Sockett reports seven minutes and 35 seconds into the 10 minute interview with Steve Bertrand.  So, in the end, The Help and the lawsuit are about white women who don’t want true sisterhood.  They just want Help.

~ Duchess Harris, PhD, JD is Associate Professor of American Studies at Macalester College, and the author of Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton and Racially Writing the Republic. This post originally appeared on FeministWire.  You can follow her on Twitter @DuchessHarris.

Historian: “whites have become blacks”

• • video

British historian David Starkey (h/t Global Sociology blog) on recent events in the UK opines that “whites have become blacks” in this clip (10:20):

The racist stereotypes seem to just trip off his tongue. What’s worth noting here isn’t the stereotypes, these are centuries old, it’s that someone is invited to say such things on the BBC. Of course, we have Pat Buchanan, so we’re not doing much better here in the U.S.

if you think Starkey should apologize for his remarks, you can use visit this petition and add your name.

Local Rioters Speak of Crimes at the Top of British Society

• • Europe, inequality, police, politics

Reuters had a very interesting set of comments on the racial and class riots in Britain, titled “Riots shake faith in UK austerity, stability.” The journalist quotes an establishment figure, Pepe Egger, an analyst of London’s consultancy called Exclusive Analysis:

I don’t think the implications of this have been fully thought through or accepted yet . . . . What we have here is the result of decades of growing divisions and marginalization, but austerity will almost certainly make it worse. Yes, the police can restore control with massive force but that is not sustainable either in the long term. You have to accept that this may happen again.

When even some in the elites can see that decades of great inequality can bring down Western political and economic systems, it really suggests to me just how far we are into the decline of Western nations and empires. The article then adds the views of the young people, most of them people of color presumably, in the streets. They add that the “division” involves real wealth inequality and racial prejudice:

Speaking to Reuters late on Tuesday, looters and other local people in east London pointed to the wealth gap as the underlying cause, also blaming what they saw as police prejudice and a host of recent scandals.

By scandals, they mean the massive financial scandals that have created near Depressions in Western countries. The article goes on to suggest for some British folks (maybe even Reuters journalists?) the scandals and crimes of the wealthy outshine what many see as the crimes in the streets from rioting. Fairly insightful for mainstream media? And very interesting that people in the streets are quite aware of the white collar crimes at the top of British society. Are folks in the US as savvy?

Racial and Class Revolts (“riots”) in Britain

• • Europe, police, politics, racism, urban, violence, white racial frame, whites

An article in the Grio by Lola Adesioye, a Black British writer, is titled “Riots were a long time coming for black Britons,” and helps to explain some of what is going on in the London and other urban rioting. She notes that

The riots have been ferocious. Buildings have been burned down, shopping centers looted, police and firemen attacked. People are afraid for their lives and their livelihoods.

And that many people there are calling even for the British army to come in and put down the rioting. We might note that the U.S. used military units to put down black revolts in the 1960s in several major cities, so this public and political orientation is not new.

Adesioye points out that the rioting started in the Tottenham area of North London, where conflict between the mostly white police and young black men has been at a high level for decades. Indeed there was another major riot in that area some 26 years back, involving earlier generations of white police and black Britons. The riot in 1985, as with these riots, started because of an apparent police malpractice incident. The Tottenham rioting reportedly started when a mostly white police unit called Trident shot and killed a black man, father of two, and nonviolent protests over that killing turned violent. The Trident unit had been started as a community-generated attempt to deal with black-on-black killings in the area, but she notes that many in that community now see it as “just another way in which the police can oppress young black men,” much like they do in the United States.

Adesioye summarizes her view of the causes of the riots by black Britons this way:

This violence is as a result of . . . unexamined racial issues, a crumbling sense of community among black people with no real leadership, unresolved class issues, social exclusion coupled with a lack of opportunities, a deep recession in addition to an extremely high cost of living, a new government who has been cutting back on services for youth, disenfranchised young people, and a dependency culture. . . . Black people are underrepresented in all areas of public British life from politics, to economics. . . . and we are overrepresented in crime and incarceration.

She further notes that the rioting has spread to other areas and involved nonblack young people, especially working class white youth, who also face major economic and social class barriers, especially under the new austerity policies of the new conservative British government.

What is entirely missing in Adesioye’s article, however, as in almost all research on U.S. rioting in the 1960s-1970s (and most research on racism and racial inequalities today), is a clear focus on the white, mostly male elite decisionmakers who are immediately or ultimately responsible for most of the underlying conditions of these British riots. These “racial issues” seems a very tame and deflecting way of saying “white racial oppression.” The white elite’s drive to keep British (and U.S.) society highly unequal lies behind most items in her list, yet even she does not call out these powerful whites. The beginning of wisdom on these matters is the what Michael Parenti calls the “reality principle,” that is the necessity of calling out and making transparent the underlying oppressive reality and the main agents in that reality. Race riots are always about oppressive underlying conditions, and often triggered by precipitating incidents caused by the police.

And do look at the individual comments made by people after the end of her article. Numerous whites make extraordinarily racist comments. And there are several comments about the possibility of racial riots in the United States. Of course, we as a country hold the record for the number of race riots over a few years in the 1960s and early 1970s—more than 500, with many lives lost and many people injured.

Given the extreme and growing economic inequality in this country between white and black Americans, and indeed between rich and working class whites, how long will it be before we see similar urban rioting in the United States?

Systemic Racism Eludes Millennials

• • African Americans, racism, youth

I recently read a study conducted by The Applied Research Center (ARC) titled Don’t Call Them “Post-Racial”: Millennials’ Attitudes on Race, Racism and Key Systems in Our Society.

What’s interesting about this 42-page study is that Millennials, the18-30 age group, do not link racist behavior to the history of systemic racism in U.S. society.

Millennials believe racism is personal and only occurs on the interpersonal level. In other words, it has nothing to do with America’s overt racist past, and they see no reason to label it as that. In fact, another study conducted by ARC explains that Millennials have “difficulty defining present-day racism when initially asked.”

They are more progressive in their thinking about interracial dating, have the highest percentage of interracial marriage than previous generations, and voted for President Obama.

If Millennials limit racist behavior to interpersonal acts, do they recognize the attacks on the first African American president on the macrolevel are racist? Even though systemic racism eludes Millennials, they do believe it poses a problem in key systems such as education, housing, employment, criminal justice, and healthcare, decades-old targets of systemic racism for African Americans and other Americans of color.

Sleeping Problems Linked to Racism

• • health

Have a racist encounter during the day? Chances are, if you were on the receiving end of that encounter, you’re not sleeping well tonight. New research suggests that experiences of racial discrimination are associated with an increased risk of problems sleeping. These problems may in turn have a negative impact on mental and physical health.

My sleeping Angel
(Creative Commons License photo credit:Michael Brindley) 

The study involved an analysis of data from the 2006 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which is administered by the CDC. The BRFSS is the largest, ongoing telephone health survey of American adults, administered annually to people selected by states and random-digit-dialing. Researchers analyzed responses from 7,093 people in Michigan and Wisconsin, which were the only states to collect data on both sleep and racism.

The results of the study show that there was a link between experiences with racism and self-reported problems with sleeping. Experiences of racism – which the health disparities literature insists on referring to as “perceived racism,” as if the problem is with perception – is assessed with the question: sorted into two cateogires as either “worse” or “same or better.” Respondents were classified as having problems with sleep if they reported having difficulty sleeping at least 6 nights in the past 2 weeks. Lead researcher and author Michael A. Grandner, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, is quoted in an interview saying:

“This study found that an environmental stressor that exists purely at the social level—perceived racial discrimination—had a hand in how likely a person was to experience disturbed sleep. The most surprising finding in this study was that individuals who perceived racial discrimination were more likely to experience sleep difficulties, and it did not matter if they were black or white, men or women, rich or poor, or even if they were otherwise depressed or not, since these were adjusted for in the statistical analysis.”

There are a couple of things to note about this research. First and foremost is the somatic, bodily impact of racism on those who experience it.  Second, the overly cautious academic language of “perceived racism” undermines the voices and experiences of those in the studies who shared their experiences with researchers, relegating them to the realm of “perception,” the truth of which is to be determined later and by someone else, more removed, objective, and whiter.

Finally, what struck me about this research was that it’s framed within the language of health disparities in which the focus is always on African American, Latino, Asian and Native American folk. This is fine as far as it goes, as when it highlights the unequal burden placed on some when it comes to health.

What’s missing from this analysis is the unequal benefit that white people reap in all this. Encounters with racism are sometimes structural, sometimes personal. Over and over again in research like Living with Racism and The Myth of the Model Minority and Racism without Racists and Everyday Injustice and Racism in Indian Country, scholars have documented the experiences of Black, Asian, Latina/o and Native Americans with racist whites and with white power structures. Yet, the health disparities literature still frames these experiences as “perceptions” and white actors are rendered invisible through the academic use of the passive voice.

My guess is that most white folk are not losing sleep at night because of racism, and as a result of that, get an unearned benefit of greater physical and mental health.

James Baldwin: Black, Gay, Brilliant Writer

• • African Americans

American born writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin was born this day in 1924. He would have been 87 today. When people ask me how I, as a white girl raised in the south, started to think differently about race, I often point to the writing of James Baldwin. His writing, like that of a handful of others, had a profound, even life-changing impact on me. If you’re not familiar with him, this short (4:40) clip provides a brief introduction (h/t to Johnny Eric Williams):

Baldwin, like other notable African Americans such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Josephine Baker, became expatriates from the U.S., so disgusted were they with the systemic racism here. Baldwin, like Wright and Baker, went to Paris (DuBois to Ghana).

If you’re not familiar with Baldwin’s work, do yourself a favor and find one of his books, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, or The Fire Next Time, or the lesser known (with Margaret Mead) A Rap on Race, and spend some time with Brother Baldwin. You can also check out the full-length documentary (extended version of the clip above) California Newsreel, “The Price of the Ticket.”

I’m surprised Google didn’t feature Baldwin in a creative logo (aka, “Google Doodle”) as they often do other notable people’s birthdays. Curious, that.