A Time Line to Post-Soul Black Culture | The Village Voice

From ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ in 1971 to Spike Lee’s ‘Malcom X’ in 1992. 1971  ■ MELVIN VAN PEEBLES’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baad­asssss Song premieres in Detroit in March, signaling a new direction in African American film and culture. Directed guerrilla-style in Watts, it ridicules SIDNEY POITIER’s ultra-assimilated image, instigates Holly­wood’s blaxploitation era, and projects rebellious black heroism in visual…

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Tracing the Real Betty Boop back to a Notorious Bootlegger’s Club in 1920s Harlem | Messy Nessy Chic

Natalie McKane, Messy Nessy Chic 1920’s in Paris may have been roaring, but over in Harlem, they were stomping. New York’s playground was not short of an underground boozer, but there was one place in particular that dominated the scene; The Cotton Club. Patron Saint of jazz, notorious bootlegging and the home of the original…

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Thomas Allen Harris Goes Through a Lens Darkly | PBS.Org

The first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People probes the recesses of American history through images that have been suppressed, forgotten, and lost.

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A Hidden Hero Of Jazz

Williams didn’t just change, she grew; the brilliant ideas that were present in her earlier work expanded on contact with new musical realms, and she found herself doubling back on prior resistance to the strongest and most difficult new styles to incorporate both their freedom and their complexity into her playing.

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