Oakland screening offers opportunity for reflection, community dialogue (Review) http://oaklandlocal.com/article/black-power-mixtape-oakland-screening-offers-opportunity-reflection-community-dialogue-revie
Published on Tuesday, August 30, 2011 This past Sunday at the House of Music, Black Panther Party icons practically leapt off the screen and into the middle of an engaging panel discussion on community empowerment, in the process traversing four decades. One minute, a youthful Bobby Seale was outlining the Panthers’ 10-Point Program on 16mm celluloid; the next, the real Seale, considerably older and greyer, was telling the audience, “It’s one thing to talk about power. It’s another thing to go after the power seats.” The occasion was a sneak preview of “ Black Power Mixtape ” - a new documentary built around the discovery of rare archival footage assembled between 1967-75 by a group of Swedish filmmakers attempting to understand the Black Power movement from a non-American perspective. The footage, which features Seale, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver and others, is fleshed out by interviews with contemporary figures such as actor Danny Glover and rapper Talib Kweli, with a score by Questlove. The film, which premiered at Sundance to good reviews, is slated for a September release. An Oakland audience of about 100 got an early peek at snippets from the film, courtesy of Rocky Seker of Black Cinema at Large. The Oakland film buff and black film blogger organized the discussion with the help of East Side arts Alliance, putting together a gender-balanced panel, which consisted of Seale, ex-Panther and Oakland resident Ericka Huggins , poet and hip-hop theater artist Aya De Leon and ESAA’s Greg Morizumi. The film snippets did more than jog the collective memory banks of Seale and Huggins, who were both political prisoners during their Panther days. They also created a context for a discussion, which touched deeper on some of the issues raised by the film, as well as the Panthers’ actual legacy and the relevance of that legacy to today’s youth culture, organizing around social justice and community activism efforts. Seale began by reflecting on the birth of the Panthers and dispelling common misperceptions that the group was a black separatist organization. The Panthers, Seale said, were “not about revenge,” but had a credo to be a “catalyst to help revitalize the world.” DeLeon, who was born in 1967, talked about the influence the Panthers and Black Power had on the hip-hop generation, which “sampled” the image and in some cases the words of the BPP. She then offered her take on their legacy. It wasn’t about going to war with police with black berets and guns, but “winning the hearts and minds of the people by providing services.” What’s important about "Black Power Mixtape," Huggins said, was its perspective: “It doesn’t have an American slant.” The interview with Carmichael touched her deeply, she related; watching the old footage “caused so much reflection for me – not about media, but about the quality of life as human beings.” Morizumi acknowledged that much of what we think we know about that era of radical politics is framed through a mass media microscope. But “we don’t talk about repression [through] mainstream media.” The Panthers, he said, faced “severe repression at the hands of a police state” – a reference to COINTELPRO , the infamous FBI counter-terrorism program, which targeted Panther leaders for assassination and infiltrated the ranks with agent provocateurs to discredit the organization. Seale then remarked how Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in April 1968 sparked an expansion in Panther membership, which grew to 49 chapters and 5,000 members across the U.S. “People began to flood in,” he said. Some of those people, however, were FBI informants, who trafficked in illegal guns and in some cases, enlisted Panthers in dubious, and criminal, activities. “Our guns were always legal,” Seale emphasized. Black Power, Morizumi said, wasn’t a contradiction with people power; in his view, there is “no democracy in America without it.” Eventually, the discussion turned to these times. “The situation is essentially the same,” Morizumi noted. But what can be learned from the Panther legacy, according to de Leon, is the need for a connection between movements. “We need to fight unequal power relationships,” she said. “It’s essential to love yourself if you want to serve the people,” offered Huggins. It’s also essential, she said, not to romanticize the notion of revolutionary radicalism, but to dig deep for pragmatic solutions. "This is not to be fantasized and put on a pedestal. Remember to build coalitions.” Seale also mentioned the Panther newsletter, an early form of hyperlocal journalism, which delivered local and community news for the people long before Internet access was available to households. Meanwhile, at the back of the room, Emory Douglas, the political poster artist who was the art director for the newsletter, just smiled. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sixties-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
