richardmurray

well there was a time in the usa, the white male/black female partnerships were larger than ever after. Just in case anyone doesnt know i am speaking about blacks complete enslavement to whites in the usa or the european colonies that preceded it. The usa has a combined human populace of over 300 millions which means ten percent is a solid 30 million. 30 million interracial relationships including : muslim with jew/black with white/asian with european and similar seems like a lot but it isn't. In NYC you always see all sorts of interracial relationships but they are never more than the mono racial, not even close, 90% of relationships are black with black/white with white/christian with christian or one with the same. I think you see in very particular demographic zones examples against the norm and again , like white people who also complain about interracial relationships alot, what i see are a group of people whether they be black or non black in the usa, who seem to like to cry danger when they perceive more interracial relationships than they can stand, which is funny cause the usa which is the most multiracial populace in humanity and quite large, over three hundred million. And ad d the fact that interracial relationships were the most plentiful during enslavement more than any time after, which produced tons of children... well, i think many in the usa are in simple denial about the truth of the usa or its parts. thank you @Troy the real topic in this post for me is perception to interracial relationships not their true condition. And again, what i see is a black person who joins his non black brethren who like to suggest their populace is being whittled or lessened by a growing quantity of interracial relationships that is simply not true. oh and please troy check your emails ok:)

The lesson in Percy Julian's story isn't that in the usa whites stop blacks from all things but in the usa whites defer blacks from their true goals. Yes, PErcy Julian became a chemist but by his own words this was a life as a chemist he didn't envision. It was a poisoned deal between getting something remotely similar to what you want because of white power while still holding on and embracing the usa NARRATOR: Looking back in the autobiography he would never finish, Julian offered his own assessment of his life in science. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I feel that my own good country robbed me of the chance for some of the great experiences that I would have liked to live through. Instead, I took a job where I could get one and tried to make the best of it. I have been, perhaps, a good chemist, but not the chemist that I dreamed of being. Percy Julian should had remained at Fisk and figured out how to make a foundry to make better euqipment. His first stop was Fisk University in Nashville, one of the best Negro colleges in the country. His idol, St. Elmo Brady, had studied at Fisk. But Julian chafed at the limitations of the black college system: overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries and poorly equipped laboratories. After two years, he was on the move again. Julian had won a scholarship to study chemistry at one of America's most famous universities. It's funny we tell children to stay away from bullies but then as adults we call ourselves coward if we leave, if your neighbors nearly burn down your house you aren't a coward for leaving PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay. To leave would have been cowardly and wrong. The right of a people to live where they want to, without fear, is more important than my science. I was ready to give up my science and my life to bring a halt to this senseless terrorism. Percy Julian realized as james Bladwin in the 1980s said, the nonviolent educated negro deosn't advance the black populace in the usa, the truth is they become a transparent veil for the white populace in the usa NARRATOR: By the late 1960s, Julian had come to support the more confrontational tactics of his son's generation. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My father wrote, later, it wasn't going to be enough just to be a model citizen, to be educated, to do all the things that anybody could possibly expect of you, because none of that would ever change the fact that you still couldn't go and eat in a restaurant that didn't want to serve you. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Branded, first, unfit to spend their money for food or drink in public places along with other Americans; denied the ballot and confined to ghettoes that stifled hope and ambition, victims of murder of the mind, heart and spirit: this is the story of the American Negro. TRANSCRIPT Forgotten Genius PBS Airdate: February 6, 2007 NARRATOR: 1939: A chemist at a midwestern paint company makes a startling discovery, one that could improve the health of millions of people. The company wants him to stick to making paint, but this man has always gone his own way. He was the grandson of Alabama slaves, yet he went on to become one of America's great scientists. HELEN PRINTY (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : He had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America. JOHN KENLY SMITH (Historian) : The chemical world was a club, and outsiders were not really all that welcome. PETER WALTON (Julian Laboratories Employee) : We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment. NARRATOR: Outside the laboratory, he faced challenges of a different kind. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was angry when he came home, and clearly ready to fight. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : For more than a century we have watched the denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland. NARRATOR: He found freedom in the laboratory. His science helped unlock the secret chemistry of plants, a discovery that would help relieve one of the most crippling human diseases and plunge him into one of the fiercest battles in the history of science. GREGORY PETSKO (Chemist) : This is one of the towering figures of chemistry in 20th century and one of the great African American scientists of all time. NARRATOR: A brilliant chemist, a volatile personality, a man whose devotion to science would not be denied. WILLIE PEARSON (Sociologist) : This man was "Exhibit A" of determination and never giving up. V/O (Dramatization of Senate Hearings) : Please state your full name for the record. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : My name is Percy Julian. NARRATOR: Every spring, in Oak Park, Illinois, people from all over the village would go out of their way to see the explosion of color at the home on the corner of East and Chicago Avenues. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The tulips just went on forever. My dad, he'd be out there in his black beret, and my sense was that he had this love affair with growing things. NARRATOR: What many passersby didn't realize was that the tulip grower was also one of America's great scientists. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Well, ladies and gentleman, essentially, I'm going to talk to you about three plants, three marvelous plants, three marvelous plants that make the words of the Psalmist come true and ring true again, "Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed like one of these." NARRATOR: It was not simply the beauty of plants that captivated Percy Julian, but their ability to produce an endless variety of powerful chemicals. In the 1930s, Julian set out to tap what he called the "natural laboratories" of plants, to make a new class of drugs that would help millions of people. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled? NARRATOR: Julian fought through extraordinary obstacles to make a place for himself in a profession and a country divided by race. JAMES ANDERSON (Historian) : The message from white society is very clear: it is not your achievement or your merit or your accomplishments that matter, it's the color of your skin, and because of that you're rejected. GREGORY PETSKO: Yet over and over again, he doesn't let this stop him. He presses on, sure that his vision of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there is right. JAMES SHOFFNER (Chemist) : After Percy Julian, nobody could say anymore that blacks couldn't do science, because he was at the very top of his profession. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : The story I will tell you tonight is a story of wonder and amazement, almost a story of miracles. It is a story of laughter and tears. It is a story of human beings, therefore, a story of meanness, of stupidity, of kindness and nobility. One beautiful morning, when I was 12 years old, I went berry-picking on my grandfather's farm in Alabama. I shall never forget how beautiful life seemed to me that morning, under the spell of an Alabama forest. But in the midst of that beauty, I came across a Negro body hanging from a tree. He had been lynched a few hours earlier. He didn't look like a criminal; he just looked like a scared boy. On the way back, I encountered and killed a rattlesnake. For years afterward, every time I saw a white man, I involuntarily saw the contours of a rattlesnake head on his face. Many years later, a reporter asked me what were my greatest nightmares from my childhood in the South. I told him, "White folks and rattlesnakes." NARRATOR: Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899, at a time when southerners lived under a system of forced segregation called Jim Crow. JAMES ANDERSON: I think the greatest consequence of Jim Crow is fear. You knew if you said the wrong thing or went in the wrong door or drank out of the wrong water fountain...that any of those things could lead to your death. NARRATOR: To shelter his children from this oppressive atmosphere, Julian's father turned to the world of ideas. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Every penny my father could scrape together went into building a wonderful library for his children, for the public library was closed to us. My father created, in my imagination, brave new worlds to conquer. NARRATOR: As a young man, James Julian had been a schoolteacher. His wife Elizabeth was a teacher, too. They believed education offered the path to a better life for black people. Denied his own chance to go to college, James made it his mission to send his children instead, but it would not be easy. In Montgomery, and across most of the South, public schools for black children simply stopped after the eighth grade. JAMES ANDERSON: The message from white society, to black students, was that you should have just enough education to be good field hands and good laborers, cooks and maids and so forth. NARRATOR: With no high school to attend, Percy Julian completed two years at the local teacher training school for Negroes. In 1916, with barely a 10th grade education, Percy Julian became the first member of his family to live out his father's dream. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : During the hectic week of preparations, my father had taken me aside for a long talk. "This is the greatest moment of your life," he told me. "But it is also a great responsibility, for you are now beginning to create a family, a family of educated people." There they were, three generations of hope and prayer, waving to a fourth generation that was going off to college! And why? Because they had the simple faith that the last great hope of the Earth is education for all the people. NARRATOR: Julian's destination was DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Greencastle, Indiana. DePauw had accepted a few black students since the Civil War, but expected them to know their place. JAMES ANDERSON: A black student entering a white university, if they didn't know before they arrived, they found out, pretty quickly, that they were not welcome in the university or in the community. NARRATOR: Instead of being assigned to a dorm like his white classmates, Julian was shown to an off-campus room with a slop jar for a toilet. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I soon got up enough courage to ask Mrs. Townsend what time we would have dinner, but she tersely informed me that she was not expected to give me my meals. NARRATOR: Julian wandered the streets of Greencastle for a day and a half before finding a diner that would serve a Negro. He would continue to take his meals off-campus until he learned of an opening at the Sigma Chi fraternity. In exchange for waiting on his housemates and firing their furnace, Julian could have a room in the basement. He soon felt at ease in the fraternity; the classroom was a different matter. JAMES ANDERSON: You sit in a classroom with kids who have read things that you never heard of, they've taken math courses that you haven't taken, and so one of the academic challenges is trying to hold on until you can catch up. NARRATOR: For two years Julian would take remedial classes at a local high school in addition to his normal course load. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I remember writing to my father, "I know you and Mother have always known what was best for me, but I think you made a mistake by sending me to compete with these white students. They are so brilliant that I am always hopelessly behind." NARRATOR: But by his sophomore year, Julian was gaining fast on his white classmates, thanks, in part, to the encouragement of chemistry professor William Blanchard. Blanchard had what one student called "a contagious enthusiasm for discovering the unknown." Under his tutelage, Julian began to dream of a career as a research chemist. Only one African American had ever earned a doctorate in chemistry. His name was St. Elmo Brady. Julian decided that if Brady could do it, so could he. After four years, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : At commencement time, my great-grandmother bared her shoulders, and she showed me, for the first time, the deep scars that had remained from a beating she had received when, one day, during the waning days of the Civil War, she went through the Negro quarters and cried out, "Get yourselves ready, children. The Yankees are coming. The Lord has heard our prayers!" And then, proudly, she took my Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, "This is worth all the scars." NARRATOR: Encouraged by Percy's success, his father moved the whole family north to Greencastle to send the rest of the children to DePauw. Eventually, Julian's two brothers would become doctors, and his three sisters would earn master's degrees. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I shall never forget an anxious week of waiting, in 1920, to see if I would get into graduate school. I stood by as, day by day, my fellow students in chemistry said, "I am going to Illinois," "I'm going to Ohio State," or "I'm going to Michigan." "Where are you going?" they asked. And they answered for me: "You must be waiting for the Harvard plum!" I could stand the suspense no longer. I went to Professor Blanchard. And there he showed me numerous letters from men who had really meant "god" to me, great American chemists of their day. "Discourage your bright colored lad," they wrote. "We couldn't get him a job when he's done, and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that." JAMES ANDERSON: What happened to Julian was something that would have been common throughout the land. To have a good college education was way beyond anything that one would expect for an African American. And so there's the sense that he'd had enough. "Stop here. Be content with this. Go back and teach your people." NARRATOR: In 1920, Julian reluctantly returned to the south to teach, but he clung to the dream of earning his Ph.D. At 21, he was embarking on a quest that would last more than 10 years. His first stop was Fisk University in Nashville, one of the best Negro colleges in the country. His idol, St. Elmo Brady, had studied at Fisk. But Julian chafed at the limitations of the black college system: overcrowded classrooms, inadequate libraries and poorly equipped laboratories. After two years, he was on the move again. Julian had won a scholarship to study chemistry at one of America's most famous universities. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : No Negro has yet obtained his master's degree in chemistry at Harvard, and so I'm up against a hard situation again. JAMES ANDERSON: When Julian arrived at Harvard, in 1922, the racial climate was probably worse than it had been at any point in the 20th century. NARRATOR: President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had set the tone by banning black students from the dorms in Harvard Yard. Julian sailed through his first year and earned his master's degree in the spring of 1923. He continued his studies for three more years but left Harvard without his doctorate. Years later, he would bitterly tell friends he had been denied the teaching assistantship he needed to stay in school. JAMES ANDERSON: If you were going to be a teaching assistant and teach white students, that was a no-no. That's just hardly acceptable at that time and that place. If you were denied that, you were also denied the opportunity to finance your education. NARRATOR: Julian spent an unhappy year teaching at a small black college near Charleston, West Virginia. Then his fortunes turned. He was invited to join the faculty at the nation's most distinguished black university: Howard University, in Washington, D.C. He was replacing St. Elmo Brady, who was returning to Fisk. Julian went straight to work, designing a new chemistry building and honing a distinctive lecture style. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I should warn you that scientists are traditionally poor speakers, because they have a hard time letting go of their gobbledy-gook. "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home," becomes impossible when you must call the ladybird "coccinella bipunctata." NARRATOR: Despite his growing stature at Howard, Julian was still determined to earn his Ph.D. In 1929, he finally got his chance. He won a fellowship that allowed him to take a leave from Howard to study at the University of Vienna, in Austria. He was about to begin a lifelong inquiry into the chemistry of plants. GREGORY PETSKO: For thousands of years, long before there was such a thing as a science of chemistry, people were fascinated by plants, because they knew that plants contained substances that could affect people. Coffee will keep you awake. Tobacco contains something that will calm your nerves. Foxglove contains an extract that'll affect your heart. And the whole goal of chemistry in the early part of the 20th century was to understand what these natural products were, to characterize their chemical structures, and figure out how to make them. This was called "natural products chemistry." It was the main branch of chemistry. And in 1929, Vienna, in Austria, was the seat of natural products chemistry. And that's why Percy Julian went there. NARRATOR: Julian arrived at Vienna's Chemische Institut with huge crates of ground glassware, items the Viennese students had heard about but never seen. BERNHARD WITKOP (National Academy of Sciences Member) : The unpacking became a big ceremony surrounded by fellow students, who "oohed" and "aahed" about the wonders that came out of these crates. NARRATOR: Among the onlookers was Josef Pikl, a chemist who would become one of Julian's closest friends and collaborators. They had come to Vienna to study under the renowned scientist Ernst Späth. Späth was a giant in the field of natural products chemistry. He had a particular interest in a family of compounds called alkaloids. GREGORY PETSKO: Of all the natural products, the ones that fascinated people the most were the alkaloids, because they seemed the most powerful. A thimbleful of some alkaloids would bring down an elephant. NARRATOR: It's believed that many alkaloids evolved to protect plants from organisms that might eat or harm them, but these same compounds can have unexpected effects on people. GREGORY PETSKO: We now know, for example, that it's an alkaloid, caffeine, that's responsible for the stimulant effect of coffee beans. We also know that it's an alkaloid called nicotine that's the calming influence in tobacco plants. Other alkaloids are things like morphine, strychnine, cocaine. A whole host of things that we now know are drugs turn out to be plant alkaloids. NARRATOR: By 1929, it was known that an alkaloid from the root of a common Austrian shrub called Corydalis cava was effective in treating pain and heart palpitations. Späth asked Julian to find out why. DAGMAR RINGE (Chemist) : And so the question was which compound, which precise compound in this tuber, is responsible for the biological effect that one is seeing? NARRATOR: Isolate the active ingredient in Corydalis cava, and then identify its chemical structure: this was the challenge Julian would have to meet to earn his Ph.D. Free, at last, of teaching and administrative duties, he threw himself into his research as never before. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : For the first time in my life, I represent a creating, alive and wide-awake chemist. I recognize that publications and research will be, for me, as natural a thing as going to bed and eating a meal. Truly, I was the luckiest guy in all the world to land here. NARRATOR: Just outside the laboratory was a vibrant world that Julian was eager to explore. A fellow student, Edwin Mosettig, took the American under his wing. Soon Julian was joining the Mosettig family for ski trips, swims in the Danube and the opera. BERNHARD WITKOP: The mother of Edwin Mosettig was a famous musician, and the Mosettig house was a center for social activity. So, in that way, Percy got access to layers of the society that were inaccessible in America. Black persons in Europe were very rare, and Percy, for the first time in his life, fully unfolded, because he was admired there. NARRATOR: For Julian, the sense of freedom was exhilarating. In letter after letter, he described his busy social life to colleagues back at Howard. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And now a little news: I have the prettiest girl in Vienna. You have never gazed on such beauty. Monday night, we were in the opera and heard Beethoven's Fidelio . Nature makes its demands, so I've made a date with my little German sweetheart. They didn't lie when they talked of beautiful Viennese women. Afterwards, we went to the sweetest wine cellar you ever saw and drank 'til 3 a.m. NARRATOR: But at 7:55 each morning, Julian was back in the laboratory, working under the watchful eye of a man so severe he would immediately fail a student he considered lazy or untalented. The pressure was mounting on Julian to isolate the elusive alkaloids on which his dissertation depended. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : The last two months, I have passed through a hellish siege of work. Reaction upon reaction, and yet I stand at the door and knock, as it were. I don't know a damned thing. NARRATOR: The alkaloids that puzzled Julian, like most of the molecules of life, are made, primarily, of carbon. GREGORY ROBINSON (Chemist) : Carbon is really the Super Glue of the chemical world, in the sense that carbon can bond to itself in almost an infinite number of ways. DAGMAR RINGE: In this model, for instance, I can make a chain of carbons that continues, practically, infinitely. However, it can also come together into a ring structure, in this case a six-carbon ring structure. NARRATOR: The carbon ring is one of nature's fundamental building blocks, found in an endless variety of compounds. Members of the alkaloid family all have one or more nitrogen atoms. But otherwise their structures vary widely, which presented Julian with a formidable challenge. NED HEINDEL (Chemist) : He was working in some very difficult chemistry. When you don't know anything about what the structure is of the material you're isolating, you have to tear your molecule apart, atom by atom, and try to deduce the structure. DAGMAR RINGE: It's like finding a needle in a haystack. It requires stubbornness. It requires focus. It requires repeating, over and over, the same kinds of processes, until the answers come out. NARRATOR: Slowly the answers did come. In his second year, Julian finally identified the active alkaloid in Corydalis cava, his first chemical triumph. This work with Späth would be the foundation of his future career. BERNHARD WITKOP: When Ernst Späth was asked about his student, Percy Julian, he characterized him and said, "Ein ausserordentlicher Student wie ich in meiner Laufbahn noch nie gehabt habe," "an extraordinary student, the likes of which I have never had before in my career as a teacher." NARRATOR: Julian returned to America, in the fall of 1931, with the doctorate he had pursued for more than a decade. The years in Vienna had dramatically increased his self-confidence. But they had also sown the seeds of a personal catastrophe that awaited him at Howard. Back in Washington, Julian set out to turn Howard into a center for true chemical research, something his predecessor had been unable to do. Burdened with teaching responsibilities, St. Elmo Brady had not published a single research paper in the 15 years since earning his Ph.D. Julian was determined this would not happen to him. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I am going to give every damned ounce of my energy towards plans to flood the chemical market with as much research as the day's hours and my strength will allow. NARRATOR: He brought Josef Pikl over from Vienna, and the two went straight to work on a series of papers. When their first was accepted for publication, Julian proudly noted it was the first with a black chemist as senior author. Percy Julian was now America's preeminent black chemist and, at Howard, one of President Mordecai Johnson's rising stars. But Johnson had made many enemies in his five years at Howard. Soon Julian would be caught up in university politics, with disastrous results. The trouble began when Julian, at the president's request, goaded a white chemist named Jacob Shohan into resigning. Shohan retaliated by releasing to the local black press the letters Julian had written to him from Vienna. Julian's accounts of his romances, his criticism of faculty members, suddenly it was all public, ammunition to be used against Julian and Johnson by the president's enemies. Just as Julian's letters began to appear in the press, there was another bombshell. His laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson, charged he had found his wife and Julian together. Lawsuits flew between Julian and Thompson. When Thompson was fired for going public with his charges, he released the letters that Julian had written to him from Vienna. Through the summer of 1932, the Baltimore Afro-American published letter after letter from the man the newspaper dubbed "Howard's Prize Letter-Writer." Finally, under pressure from Johnson and the Board of Trustees, Julian resigned. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Julian was a chemist without a laboratory, a black man without a job. Only a year after his triumphant return from Vienna, the career he'd worked so hard to build was in ruins. When all seemed lost, Julian's mentor, William Blanchard, threw him a lifeline, bringing him back to DePauw as a research fellow to supervise lab sections. It was a big step down from full professor and department chairman, but he had a lab again, and his research partner, Josef Pikl, would join him at DePauw. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : In much of my life I've had to pick up the broken fragments of chance and turn them into opportunity. NARRATOR: Over the next three years, 11 of the student projects Julian supervised would lead to papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society . NED HEINDEL: Eleven undergraduate papers published in JACS , out of a student body of that size, was not only unusual for the 1930s, it would be unusual now. Julian took the talent in those students and put that institution on the map for undergraduate research. NARRATOR: DePauw's newest instructor left a powerful impression on undergraduate Ray Dawson. RAY DAWSON (DePauw Alumnus) : He put on a grand show. He would come into his lectures, in his white lab jacket, with a flourish. He was oratorical in a way some great scientist from London or Berlin might be. It was just a show, but a very good one. NARRATOR: Julian had finally found fulfillment, a place where he could teach and research. But when the local American Legion assailed the school for hiring a Negro who had been dismissed from Howard University, Julian was forced to stop teaching. He could stay on as long as his research grant lasted, but his days at DePauw were numbered. Everything he'd work for was about to collapse again. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I decided I had to do things that would make people take more notice of me. NARRATOR: What he did was take on a high-stakes research project, one that would either make him or break him. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : It all began with a simple little bean, the Calabar bean. It was a beautiful, purple bean when I first got it. But it is not only beautiful in its appearance, but also in the laboratory it has within it. NARRATOR: Chemists had been fascinated by the Calabar bean ever since British missionaries brought it back from Africa in the mid-1800s. From the bean, they had isolated an alkaloid called physostigmine—used to treat glaucoma—but no one had been able to synthesize the complex molecule. GREGORY PETSKO: Synthesis is the process of making a natural product, or some other substance, artificially, in the lab, one step at a time, from extremely simple building blocks. NARRATOR: Synthesis was the highest calling for a chemist in the 1930s. A successful synthesis could bring great medical benefits, by making a scarce natural product more widely available. Just as important, it proved beyond a doubt that the chemist understood how the molecule was put together. NED HEINDEL: There were very few alkaloids that had been made from scratch in Julian's time. The synthesis of physostigmine would bring recognition to whoever achieved it. And that's what Percy Julian set out to do. NARRATOR: But Julian was not alone. At Oxford University, another chemist was at work on his own synthesis. His name was Robert Robinson. NED HEINDEL: Sir Robert Robinson was sort of the dean of organic chemists in England. He was a much-respected creator of molecules, a trainer of many Ph.D. students. He was the premier organic chemist of his time. NARRATOR: Moving step-by-step toward a final synthesis, Robinson had already published nine papers on physostigmine in Britain's leading chemical journal. NED HEINDEL: It's a little bit of intimidation. The world is supposed to know, "I've got this domain; you stay out of it." NARRATOR: But to Julian, Robinson's approach seemed clumsy. Convinced there was a simpler way, he set out to beat the Englishman to the synthesis. A high-profile scientific victory would be just the thing to get his career back on track, but it wouldn't be easy. Physostigmine was unlike any molecule that had been synthesized before. NED HEINDEL: It bristled with spots around the molecule where methyl groups were hanging, that's a carbon with three hydrogens. There are actually four of these, and getting them in the right place is essential to making nature's molecule. It was a formidable chemical challenge for anybody to tackle in the early 1930s. NARRATOR: Julian tackled it the way all chemists do: one step at a time. GREGORY PETSKO: When you synthesize a molecule, you start with very small substances, substances you can buy or that you know how to make already. You then start assembling those into fragments of the thing that you're hoping to make in the end; they're called "intermediates." And what you're doing is you're following a particular path. This path takes you from the simple starting substances all the way to the final product, the natural product. NARRATOR: To build his molecule, Julian drew on a battery of techniques for manipulating atoms. NED HEINDEL: One can heat something to a very high temperature; that usually gets the atoms vibrating and makes new bonds possible. You can oxidize something—you can add oxygen to it. You can take oxygen out of a molecule; that's a reduction. We can expose it to pressure. Sometimes, we can expose it to light, to cajole the atoms to do what we want. NARRATOR: At each step, Julian had to verify that he'd actually made the compounds he intended to. For this, he relied on a device called a combustion train. NED HEINDEL: This technique takes an organic molecule which contains carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and burns it. NARRATOR: By weighing the resulting gases, Julian could tell what atoms were present and in what ratio. GREGORY PETSKO: How much carbon does it have? How much hydrogen does it have? How much nitrogen does it have? If your compound has the right ratio, you're a long way towards being sure you've made what you thought you made. NED HEINDEL: And then you repeat this process of purification and of analysis for each intermediate, until you finally get to the natural product. NARRATOR: Julian was under tremendous pressure to complete the research, pressure compounded by events in his personal life. He was engaged. His fiancée was the woman who'd been at the center of the Howard scandal, the former wife of his laboratory assistant, Robert Thompson. Born Anna Roselle Johnson, she was a member of a prominent African American family from Baltimore. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was now working toward a Ph.D. in sociology. RAY DAWSON: They'd already set, I believe, two wedding dates, which he had canceled, and she told him that this was the last time. Unless he kept the new latest date, she would break off their engagement. And he was quite upset by this, but he had no choice but to proceed, because we were only a few weeks away from the end. NARRATOR: In 1934, Julian and Pikl sent off their first paper on physostigmine, outlining a new approach to the synthesis. Julian attacked Robinson in the beginning lines of the paper. NED HEINDEL: To have a young upstart taking on the pope of organic chemistry in England, naming him, and coupling the words "failure" and "embarrassing" and "low yield" is almost unbelievably aggressive. GREGORY ROBINSON: In many regards, that was a pivotal point in Julian's career. If he were wrong, he could effectively, almost, write off any research career at that point. NARRATOR: Working around the clock, Julian and Pikl synthesized a compound that was one step removed from physostigmine. Since that last step was already known, this would count as a complete synthesis. But before they could publish, Robinson struck again with his own synthesis of the same compound. The race was over. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : The shock was almost unbearable. We were not the first, just the "me toos." Why did he, of so much fame, who didn't at all need the glory, have to snatch the prize from us? Suddenly, my eye caught something. "Look, Josef, he's made a big blunder." Our crystals melted at about 39° Celsius, body temperature. Indeed, we were able to melt them by closing them in our armpits. His compound melted not at body temperature, but almost 50 degrees higher. "He hasn't got it!" I cried. NED HEINDEL: The melting point of a molecule is a fingerprint. If Julian's melting point is correct then Robinson's can't be, and these can't be the same substance. And Julian quickly grasps on that and says, "You've got the wrong compound." NARRATOR: Julian hurriedly wrote an addendum to their next paper. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : "We believe that the English authors are in error." Josef was a very unhappy man. "If we are wrong, we are irretrievably ruined," he said. It hit like a bombshell. Telegrams came in from all over the world. My old professor, Kohler of Harvard, he wrote: "I pray that you are right. If not, the future may be dark for you." NED HEINDEL: Part of what he's just done here is a go-for-broke plan. He's working as an underpaid assistant in a liberal arts college. He desperately needs a break. NARRATOR: Now the pressure was on Julian and Pikl to prove they were right. RAY DAWSON: Percy was a bundle of nerves, but, yet, he had this underlying drive that didn't permit him to stop, to run away, to give up. NARRATOR: To confirm his synthesis, Julian needed to take one final melting point. DAGMAR RINGE: When chemists took a melting point, they would put some crystals into a capillary tube, strap that capillary tube to a thermometer, and then place the complete assembly into an oil bath. They're looking to determine the exact moment when the crystals begin to melt. NARRATOR: To claim victory over Robinson, Julian had to show that another set of crystals from his synthesis melted at the same temperature as their natural counterpart, 135 degrees. NED HEINDEL: This has got to be the ultimate high. "I've taken on the master, and I've beaten him." NARRATOR: The physostigmine papers were immediately recognized as a milestone in American chemical history, an early example of what chemists call "total synthesis," the complete assembly of a complex molecule from basic chemical building blocks. NED HEINDEL: Julian's pathway to physostigmine is so simple that it can be summarized in essentially two publications. Chemists look at them and marvel at..."How did he do that in so elegant of a sequence?" JAMES SHOFFNER: To call a process "elegant" means that the synthesis is achieved in the minimal amount of steps necessary in order to bring about a product. And so that's really to give it the highest accolade that you can give, that it is elegant. NARRATOR: In 1935, Percy finally married Anna in a private ceremony on Christmas Eve. As his bride went back east to finish her doctorate, Julian looked forward to new career opportunities his triumph would bring. On the strength of the physostigmine work, William Blanchard had recommended his protégé for a permanent faculty position at DePauw. DONALD "JACK" COOK (Former DePauw Chemistry Chairman) : If DePauw had recognized Percy's capabilities and put him on the staff at that time, it would have been a historical event. It didn't happen. NARRATOR: Julian applied to other universities, with the same result. JAMES ANDERSON: Most institutions would not even tolerate, for a second, having an African American in the role of a teacher or a faculty. WILLIE PEARSON: This was during a time of rampant scientific racism. There were a number of scholars at Harvard and other institutions that were doing scientific studies and reporting that African Americans did not have the capacity to do science, because they were actually an inferior race. NARRATOR: In early 1936, Julian's research grant ran out. Now, with no hope of an academic career, he turned his attention to industry. America's leading chemical corporation, DuPont, had invited Julian and Pikl for an interview. DuPont executives offered Pikl a job. To Julian, he later recalled, they offered an apology: "We didn't know you were a Negro." JOHN KENLY SMITH: The world of chemical research and development in industry, in this period, was overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, and outsiders were not really all that welcome. NARRATOR: At Julian's insistence, Pikl took the job at DuPont and spent the rest of his career there. Julian returned to the job hunt. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Day by day, as I entered these firms, presented my credentials and asked for a job, the answer almost seemed like it had been transmitted by wire from one firm to the other. It ran like this: "We've never hired a Negro research chemist before. We don't know how it would work out." NARRATOR: Finally, Julian caught a break. The Institute of Paper Chemistry, in Appleton, Wisconsin, was prepared to make him an offer. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And then they were informed by city attorneys that an old Appleton statute forbade Negroes from being housed in Appleton overnight. This, in the Year of our Lord, 1936! But in that meeting, sat a board member, an Irishman named William J. O'Brien. NARRATOR: O'Brien was vice president of the Glidden Company. He'd been looking for a sharp chemist to run the company's new Chicago laboratory. He offered Julian the job of Director of Research. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I had already wired Anna, several times, that I had landed jobs, so this time I was a little more cautious: "Am considering offer Glidden Company in research at $5,000." Her reply came back: "What do you mean `considering?'" JOHN KENLY SMITH: The fact that Percy Julian was hired to be the director of a laboratory, not just a member of a laboratory, is truly remarkable and unprecedented. JAMES SHOFFNER: That was 10 years before Jackie Robinson. You know? And we look toward the Jackie Robinson example as being pivotal in opening up not just baseball, but a whole lot of other opportunities for black people. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And so I came to Chicago and started in on another fascinating plant, the soybean. NARRATOR: Neither Julian, nor anyone else in 1936, had any idea what a powerhouse the soybean would become. Today the soybean is one of the pillars of American agriculture, second only to corn among the major crops. Seventy million acres of farmland are planted in soy, with an annual harvest worth more than $20 billion. Soy is used in a wide range of products, from food and medicine to paper and plastics. TODD ALLEN (Soybean Farmer) : It's a very widely used commodity. If you go down to the grocery store and look at the label, you'll find soybean oil in there somewhere. Soybeans originally came into this country from China, as a hay crop for grazing, for beef cattle. But, also, it manufactures its own nitrogen, and back in the 1920s, well, then everybody needed that, because we didn't have a lot of commercial fertilizer back then. But then, as our machinery developed, we learned that we could cut and process these soy beans and break them down into feed for our animals and soy oil for human consumption. NARRATOR: But soybeans really took off in the 1930s, when industry discovered the plant, thanks, in part, to the efforts of an unlikely champion: automaker Henry Ford. Ford planted thousands of acres of soybeans, and alongside his Dearborn auto plant, he built a soybean laboratory and processing factory. JOHN KENLY SMITH: Ford sets up a laboratory in the early 1930s, hires a young, self-trained chemist to run the laboratory, and they begin doing lots of experiments trying to figure how you could use soybeans in making cars. NARRATOR: Out of his lab came new soybean-based auto paints, lubricating oils and soybean-based plastics that Ford turned into steering wheels, gearshift knobs and dent-proof fenders. V/O (Film Clip) : Industrial chemists are working to find new uses for soybean oil and soybean meal. NARRATOR: Soon other industrialists were following Ford's lead, building soybean processing plants across the Midwest. One of the first to embrace the "miracle bean" was Percy Julian's new boss, Adrian Joyce of the Glidden Company. Under Joyce, Glidden had grown from a single paint store in Cleveland into one of the nation's leading paint manufacturers. JOHN KENLY SMITH: But Joyce didn't stop there. He diversified into a wide range of products. Durkee Famous Foods was a Glidden brand. He also moved into soybean processing. NARRATOR: Convinced the soybean would be critical to Glidden's future, Joyce set up a new Soya Products Division in Chicago. The first assignment for his new research director: isolate the protein of the soybean, something that had never been done on an industrial scale. Julian plunged into his new job, keenly aware that people were watching to see how this black chemist would measure up. PETER WALTON: The people in the plant were always mindful of a white laboratory coat, a blur that might swoop down at any moment. HELEN PRINTY: He would pester you at many times. He would keep, you know, wanting to know what was new, every half an hour, almost. RISHER WATTS (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : And he expected you to tell him something different every time he came in there, something that was favorable. NARRATOR: But for more than a year, the news was not favorable. RISHER WATTS: In chemistry, things don't ever go the way you plan it, because you've got reactions that are very critical; even a little variation in temperature, in concentration and time, and everything will give you a bad outcome. NARRATOR: Eventually, Julian's chemists found just the right combination of time, temperature and acidity to pull the protein out of the soybean. Julian's "Alpha protein" was the first vegetable protein produced in bulk anywhere in America. It made millions for Glidden as a new industrial paper coating. Later it would be a key ingredient in one of the first water-based, or "latex" house paints, Glidden's Spred Satin. V/O (Paint Commercial) : Get new Spred house paint. NARRATOR: After Alpha protein, Adrian Joyce urged Julian to turn his attention to other parts of the soybean. JOHN KENLY SMITH: Joyce was always trying to figure out every possible use for everything you have. Find out, "is there some chemical in here that we otherwise might be throwing down the drain, that we might be able to make money out of?" NARRATOR: Julian drove his staff to turn the soybean inside out. ARNOLD HIRSCH (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : Julian wanted everyone to perform to the best of their ability, and he did everything in his power to motivate people to do that. JAMES LETTON (Julian Laboratories Production Manager) : I always thought he was a master psychologist. I think he was very much aware of what he was doing and who he was doing it to. RISHER WATTS: His purpose was to get the best out of you. I think that's what it was all about. NARRATOR: The chemistry invented by Julian and his team led to scores of new products. From soybean oil came lecithin, to make chocolate smoother, new salad oils and shortenings for Durkee, and a new non-spattering margarine. HELEN PRINTY: Always when you were working on one thing, there was another thing coming up. You were always thinking ahead of time, what was the next big thing? NARRATOR: From soybean meal came plastics, linoleum, plywood glue, high-protein livestock feed and dog food. HELEN PRINTY: He was brilliant. He would set out a research project, and he would write the introduction and the description of the work, and a conclusion. He did everything except do the experiment. GENE WOROCH (Glidden Chemist) : And there would be a statement, something to the effect that, "The problem is solved; all that remains to be done is..." And many of us used to cringe at this, because it would be our responsibility to get this to work, and sometimes it didn't work. RISHER WATTS: He was very demanding. And that was on a daily basis, I mean, because he had his hands on everything that went on. V/O (Film Clip) : Yes, there's magic in this Cinderella crop, and we've hardly scratched the surface. NARRATOR: The stream of products coming out of Julian's lab joined the flood of household and industrial goods from Dow, DuPont and other companies whose chemistry was changing the way Americans lived. V/O (Film Clip) : ...nylon stockings, introduced in 1938. There's barely a minute of your time on Earth that is not in some way made secure and comfortable through chemistry. JOHN KENLY SMITH: There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for chemicals in the 1930s. V/O (Film Clip) : Here are the headquarters of a group of super-sleuths, engaged in solving some of the major mysteries of the universe. They take molecules apart and put them together again, in a different form, to make new and incredible things. NARRATOR: People saw the industry as sort of the leading edge of high technology, of providing goods and services that were going to make people's lives better and to keep the economy growing. V/O (Film Clip) : The nation's industrial skyline parted in the middle, to make room for the growing chemical industry. NARRATOR: Glidden's new soybean division was a success. Julian's reward was a raise that allowed him to be reunited with Anna. For the first three years of their marriage, she had been back east, earning her Ph.D. and working in the Washington public schools. Now she joined Percy in Chicago, at last. As the couple settled into their new home, in the Westside community of Maywood, Anna learned just how driven her husband could be when it came to chemistry. "Science can be a hard taskmaster," she would remember. "Dinner can be at seven or 11, as far as the true disciple of chemistry is concerned." Glidden was delighted with Julian's chemistry, but Julian was becoming restless. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I was itching to get away from dog foods, paint and oleomargarine, and to tackle nature again with more exacting methods. HELEN PRINTY: Doctor Julian loved chemistry. He used to take the people that were working on the products for the Glidden Company and sneak us off and do other things that he was interested in, on the side. NARRATOR: Julian was especially interested in a compound called progesterone. V/O (Medical Film Clip) : New ways of controlling fertility have begun to suggest... NARRATOR: Discovered in 1934, progesterone was called the "pregnancy hormone," because it plays a central role in preparing a woman's uterus for childbirth. HELEN PRINTY: Apparently, Mrs. Julian had had a couple of miscarriages. And doctors at that time had found that progesterone was essential to carrying a child to term. WOMAN IN LABOR (Medical Film Clip) : The pains are getting harder. NARRATOR: In the 1930s, nearly one out every six pregnancies in America ended in miscarriage or premature birth. DOCTOR (Medial Film Clip) : Relax, your baby is almost here now. NARRATOR: Hundreds of thousands of babies were lost each year. Julian realized that progesterone offered new hope. He and other chemists began looking for ways to make the hormone for pregnant women at risk. Progesterone is one of a class of compounds called steroids, which scientists were just beginning to realize played many key roles in the body. GREGORY PETSKO: They were involved in reproduction. They were involved in sexual development. They were involved in the response to injury and growth. And yet despite this enormous range of different physiological effects, these compounds all seemed to have similar chemical structures. DAGMAR RINGE: The group of molecules that we call steroids all share a common framework, composed of these four-ring systems right here: a six-membered ring, fused to a second six-membered ring, fused to a third six-membered ring, fused to a five-membered ring. NARRATOR: Dozens of steroid molecules are made by the body, ranging from cholesterol to digestive fluids to sex hormones, such as progesterone and testosterone. The anabolic steroids used by some athletes today are simply modified forms of the natural male hormone. NED HEINDEL: Once it was recognized that the family of materials we call steroids had such an impact on human health, there became a global push: "Can we get these materials? Can we make them available?" And, "What sources do they come from? NARRATOR: Chemists first tried isolating steroids from animal extracts like horse urine, but the process required vast amounts of raw material and yielded only tiny amounts of steroids. GREGORY PETSKO: The breakthrough, in making steroids available, was the realization that you could take substances from plants that could form the starting point for the synthesis of steroids. That would give you a leg up on the process. NARRATOR: In the mid-1930s, scientists had discovered that plants have steroids too, with the same four carbon rings found in animal steroids. DAGMAR RINGE: It was only a very small leap to realize that one could convert a plant steroid into an animal steroid. NARRATOR: The idea that plants made chemicals similar to human steroids was something Julian already knew. Back at DePauw, while researching physostigmine, Julian had set aside a dish of Calabar bean oil. A few days later, he found white crystals in the oil. Searching the literature, he found that these crystals were a plant steroid called stigmasterol. Small amounts of stigmasterol were also found in soybean oil, and Julian now had plenty of that at Glidden. He was confident that he could convert it into progesterone, if he could find a way to extract this stigmasterol from the oil. But Julian was not the only one who saw the potential of making steroids from plants. In 1938, a chemist named Russell Marker found a way to convert steroids from sarsaparilla root into progesterone, by chemically snipping off the "side chain" of extra atoms from the plant steroid. It was breakthrough chemistry, but progesterone made from sarsaparilla root was too expensive to be practical. The race was on for a cheaper source. GREGORY PETSKO: I think that both Percy Julian and Russell Marker understood the medical implications of what they were trying to do, that they knew if those natural products could be provided in quantity, that the face of medicine would be changed. NARRATOR: Marker published paper after paper, documenting his search for a plant that would yield cheap progesterone. Julian saw his chance slipping away. There wasn't much time for this kind of research amid the daily demands of his job. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : One day the phone rang, and the fellow said, "Doc, something's happened. Some water's leaked into Soybean Oil Tank No. 1, and it's spoiled. "Spoiled?" I said. "Spoiled? What do you mean spoiled?" Now, you understand, this tank contained 100,000 gallons of refined soybean oil bound for the Durkee Famous Foods plant. If it were ruined, Glidden would be out $200,000. And such a blunder might cost me my job, so I was over there in a jiffy. NARRATOR: Julian found the giant tank fouled with white sludge. But his despair vanished in a flash of recognition: there were crystals in the sludge at the bottom of the tank. They were stigmasterol, the same crystals he'd found in the dish of Calabar oil. Now he realized what had forced the stigmasterol out of both oils, water. JACK COOK: You couldn't destroy a 100,000-gallon tank of soybean oil to get this steroid out, but when you add a little water to it, it falls out. It precipitates. It separates on its own. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And it was this little accidental discovery—the kind that characterize the development of science so often—that led to a practical method for the isolation of steroids from soybean oil. NARRATOR: Now a step ahead of Marker, Julian developed an industrial process for converting stigmasterol into progesterone in bulk. NED HEINDEL: Julian did not discover the primary chemistry that took stigmasterol over to progesterone—that came out of a German group five years earlier—but he was the first person to realize that it could be scaled up. A company that's in the paint business suddenly becomes a player in the human sex hormone game. NARRATOR: In 1940, Julian sent a one-pound package of progesterone to the Upjohn pharmaceutical company. Shipped under armed guard and valued at nearly $70,000, it was the first commercial shipment of an artificial sex hormone produced anywhere in America. Testosterone and other artificial sex hormones soon followed, bringing millions of dollars in unexpected revenue to Glidden. Despite his growing stature, Julian was barred from a major hormone conference held at an exclusive resort in Maryland. Only after three days of protest by his white colleagues was he finally admitted. Within a year, Julian would face a new challenge: his rival, Russell Marker, had discovered a giant yam in Mexico. It was even richer in steroids than soybeans. In 1944, Marker and two partners formed a company called Syntex to make hormones from the yam. For the rest of the decade, Syntex and Glidden would produce most of the world's supply of artificial sex hormones. GREGORY PETSKO: I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants, rather than from animal tissues, was a landmark in the history of medicine as well as the history of chemistry. It meant that you could take steroids that before were so rare that you barely knew what they were, and you could inject them into animals or people and see their effects on a variety of conditions. The possibilities that that opened up almost were limitless. NARRATOR: The work of Julian and Marker would lay the foundation for a whole new class of medicines, including the birth control pill and a wonder drug that would soon take the world by storm. By the mid-1940s, Julian's work at Glidden had won him national acclaim. With the outbreak of World War II, his Alpha protein became the chief ingredient in "bean soup," a fire-fighting foam credited with saving thousands of servicemen's lives. He was even featured in Reader's Digest , one of America's most popular magazines. HELEN PRINTY: It was the beginning of white America's exposure to Dr. Percy Julian, and how he had to fight to overcome the odds of being a black man in America. And, in the context of the times, it made him a symbol. JAMES SHOFFNER: Here was a person who looked like me, who was not only in the field, but succeeding magnificently at the top of his profession. That was profound. NARRATOR: Julian was named to the boards of half a dozen colleges and universities. He was showered with awards and honorary degrees and sought after as a public speaker. The NAACP awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal, previously given to W.E.B. Du Bois, George Washington Carver, Paul Robeson and Thurgood Marshall. And the Chicago Sun-Times named him "Chicagoan of the Year." As Julian's stature grew, so did his personal responsibilities. Anna had given birth to a son, Percy Jr., in 1940, and a daughter, Faith, four years later. With so many demands on Percy's time, Anna shouldered the parenting duties. "For the children," she later wrote, "an after-dinner visit with their father was a rare treat." PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I hardly remember a weekend when he didn't work, but the time you had was quality time. NARRATOR: By the end of the 1940s, the family had outgrown their Maywood home. The Julians began looking for a bigger one in a neighborhood that suited their new social status. They set their sights on Oak Park, one of Chicago's most affluent and exclusive suburbs. The village was home to doctors, lawyers and wealthy businessmen. It had a reputation as a town for the educated and enlightened. VIRGINIA CASSIN (Oak Park, Illinois Resident) : It's always been a community that was...had a little sense of its importance as far as being, perhaps, a cut above others. V/O MAN (Radio) : Thanks to our good friends, the makers of Broadcast Brand corned beef hash. NARRATOR: Oak Park even had its own radio show, familiar to listeners all over America as Breakfast with the Johnsons . V/O CHILD (Radio) : Daddy, I have to give a report in school, so I'm going to give it to you. CLIFF JOHNSON (CBS radio host) : These days, they'd call it reality radio, and that's what it was; 7:30 in the morning, Monday through Friday. The microphones were all over the house. The children would wander in, and the milkman would come in. We talked about us and the world around us. NARRATOR: The world around the Johnsons was cultured, privileged and white. The few African Americans who lived in Oak Park worked as servants and laborers. ROBERTA L. RAYMOND (Sociologist) : When the Julians came along, I'm sure that this was a shock to many people who lived in Oak Park. Here they are, two very well educated people, both with Ph.D.s, he, a very successful chemist and businessman, and they purchased a house, a large house, on a large lot. CLIFF JOHNSON: There was some nasty tongue-wagging going on: "Who do these people think they are that they can move in here and take over our neighborhood?" NARRATOR: Trouble began even before the Julians could move in. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was out of town, and my mom got a call from the Oak Park Fire Department. "Something has occurred at the house," this is the fire department, "could you please come." Even as a 10-year-old I knew that this was arson. There was no attempt to hide this, to make it look like an accident. I see these bottles, these huge bottles, and I could smell gasoline. The stairs were soaked all the way up to the second floor. I think my mother was scared. But if she was, she didn't show it. They lit the fuse on the outside. The door caught on, but it was sealed so well that the flames couldn't get under the door. But had the bottles caught, the flames would have gone right up the stairwell—a natural chimney—and the house could've been a total loss. And I looked at my mom, and I said, "Why would anybody do this?" And she explained it: they didn't want us to live there and didn't want us to live there because of the color of our skin. NARRATOR: Now Percy Julian, accomplished, affluent, ambitious, was face to face with the same violence African Americans all over Chicago were encountering as they tried to move into white neighborhoods. VERNON JARRETT (Newspaper Reporter) : After the war, when the ghetto was bursting at the seams and people trying to move out, every first Negro, they said, to move in a block was going to catch hell. A mob would be out there to greet you. I've seen it, covered it. NARRATOR: There were no mobs in Oak Park, but the arson was a clear warning that some in the community would stop at nothing to keep the Julians out. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The arson attempt did not succeed in intimidating my mom and dad. Nor could it have. They were simply not intimidatable. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Once the violence began, Anna and I felt we had no choice but to stay. To leave would have been cowardly and wrong. The right of a people to live where they want to, without fear, is more important than my science. I was ready to give up my science and my life to bring a halt to this senseless terrorism. NARRATOR: The Julians moved in. And when a few months passed with no further trouble, Percy and Anna felt confident enough to go out of town, leaving the children with a babysitter. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: The first my parents saw of it was when they saw it in the paper the next day, with me pointing to the hole in the ground. CLIFF JOHNSON: I'll never forget the morning my daughter Sandra said, "Daddy, they bombed my friend Percy Julian's house last night." And then she said, "Daddy, why did they do that? Why would they bomb their house?" I put on a record, because I didn't have the answer. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My dad was angry when he came home, I mean really angry, and clearly ready to fight. He looked at this as an attempt to murder his kids. For him, there was nothing redeemable about them at all. I'm taking this in like there's no tomorrow. And actually, you know how everything has a good side? The good side was, as a kid I got to spend more time with my dad, and got to stay up late,'cause we'd sit in the tree outside. He'd sit there with a shotgun. And we'd talk about why someone would want to do this and how wrong it was and how stupid it was. NARRATOR: The Julians would continue to receive threatening letters for years after. No one was ever arrested. Many Oak Park residents were horrified at the violence against the family. VIRGINIA CASSIN: I think people were shocked that anyone should be treated that way. And there were people who came forward to say, there are a lot of us that don't feel that way. CLIFF JOHNSON: There was at least 200 or more people that marched right up in front of the Julian house on East Avenue and said "He stays, he stays." NARRATOR: Even as events in Oak Park threatened to upend his personal life, a new scientific challenge was drawing Percy Julian into one of the great medical dramas of the 20th century. At the center was one of the oldest and most painful of human diseases, rheumatoid arthritis. CHARLES PLOTZ (Rheumatologist) : Arthritis is a generic word for inflammation of the joints, and encompasses a lot of different diseases. But the disease that truly inflames the joint and causes destruction of the cartilage and the bone within the joint is rheumatoid arthritis. NARRATOR: Scientists had been seeking a cure for rheumatoid arthritis for hundreds of years. But by the middle of the 20th century those efforts had yielded only a bizarre assortment of mostly ineffective treatments: chin slings, gold injections, mineral baths, cobra venom, bee stings, even electricity. CHARLES PLOTZ: People would swear by them, but nothing, over the long run, worked. NARRATOR: The situation changed dramatically at the 1949 annual meeting of American rheumatologists. Philip Hench, of the Mayo Clinic, presented a film showing how arthritis patients responded to a new drug, called Compound E, and later named "cortisone." CHARLES PLOTZ: They were severely crippled, having to drink by holding a cup in both hands. And Philip Hench gave them an injection, and within 12 to 24 hours, the same patients were having no difficulty at all. It was one of the most astonishing things that has ever happened in medicine. You didn't need a double-blind study. You just saw it happen. And the audience stood up and cheered. Well, every patient with rheumatoid arthritis immediately wanted to be put on this magic drug. NARRATOR: The problem was there was none to be had. Hench had performed his tests with a few precious grams of cortisone sent to him by Lewis Sarett, a young chemist at Merck. Sarett had worked for years to synthesize cortisone from the bile of slaughtered oxen. But his chemical pathway was the most complex ever attempted in industry, requiring more than 30 steps. And thousands of cattle carcasses would be needed to make enough cortisone to treat a single patient for a year. To treat the millions suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, scientists would need to find more a plentiful starting material and simplify the process of producing cortisone. Chemists from all over the world sprang to the challenge, launching one of the most intensive research efforts in the history of medicine. Julian threw himself into the effort. JOHN KENLY SMITH: The only reason that Glidden is in the great cortisone race is because of Percy Julian. He knows this chemistry, and so he can establish a position for them. The American pharmaceutical industry, after World War II, is not the giant that we know of today. This business is really just getting going, so there is room for entrepreneurs in this period. NARRATOR: One of those entrepreneurs was Carl Djerassi, then a young chemist at Syntex, the small Mexican company that made hormones from yams. CARL DJERASSI (Syntex Chemist) : Julian and I were competitors, and we were in this race with people at Harvard, and at Oxford, and in Zurich, and at Merck, and, I mean, all the major companies. It was one time when basic research in industry competed on equal terms with that in universities. NARRATOR: The prize these chemists were after was not actually a drug but a natural hormone. Cortisone is one of the many hormones made by the adrenal glands, two small organs that lie atop the kidneys. Small amounts of cortisone are always circulating in the bloodstream, controlling the body's responses to stress and inflammation, but much larger doses of cortisone were needed to relieve the symptoms of arthritis. Julian hoped to make cortisone from soybeans, just as he had the sex hormones. Like progesterone, cortisone had the same four interlocking rings of carbon known as the steroid nucleus, but cortisone has an unusual feature: one of its oxygen atoms is in what chemists call position 11. Julian set out to make cortisone by first synthesizing an almost identical compound called Reichstein's Substance S, or Compound S. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Look at the two formulae. Compound S differs from cortisone by one lone little oxygen atom. And it couldn't possibly be so strikingly different in properties, I thought. And if it is, why in the devil, did nature have to put so much in the adrenal glands? Well, if you really think nature is smart, your guess would be that it's there as a reservoir from which the adrenals can make cortisone as the body needs it, by simply sticking in this one oxygen atom. NARRATOR: Julian hoped to convert Compound S into cortisone, as the body does, but he knew that inserting that one oxygen atom in exactly the right place would not be a simple matter. GREGORY PETSKO: In the body, there's a special enzyme that knows how to do this, and does it, very elegantly, in a simple reaction. But to do this chemically, in the lab, in large quantities, was fiendishly difficult. DAGMAR RINGE: In the laboratory, in order to add any atom to this carbon atom requires severe conditions, high heat, high pressure, very reactive reagents that will attack this atom. The difficulty with those conditions is that they will attack every other carbon atom on this skeleton as well. GREGORY PETSKO: You want to put the oxygen only in that position. It doesn't do you any good to put it there if, simultaneously, you put it somewhere else where it's not supposed to be. NARRATOR: Chemists across the world faced the same challenge. Whatever material they started with, plant or animal, they had to find a way to insert that one oxygen atom into just the right position. This was the single biggest obstacle to making cortisone. As Julian struggled to find a solution, Glidden executives were losing patience with his Compound S approach. GREGORY PETSKO: It's hard to read another chemist's mind, but I think that Julian probably knew that this was so close to the final structure of cortisone, that if he could make Substance S in large quantities, inexpensively, he would, eventually, or someone would, eventually, find a way to insert that troublesome oxygen into the 11 position, because that was the only remaining step needed to convert that substance into the full-blown hormone, cortisone. NARRATOR: But the problem of inserting that one oxygen atom continued to frustrate chemists for more than two years. The cortisone shortage became a crisis, as the price topped $4,000 an ounce, one hundred times the price of gold. CHARLES PLOTZ: I would get requests from all over the country, "Can't you get me some cortisone? Can't you get me a little cortisone for me? For my aunt? For my patient?" And I couldn't get it, for me or for anybody. NARRATOR: Finally, in the summer of 1951, four teams of chemists announced they had found new ways to make cortisone. The winners included teams from Harvard, Merck and Syntex. CARL DJERASSI: We got an enormous amount of publicity, including LIFE magazine and places like this, and that put Syntex on the scientific map. NARRATOR: But the chemists' glory was short-lived. Six months later, they were upstaged by a surprising discovery from scientists at Upjohn, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. V/O (Film Clip) : From laboratories in Michigan comes the new process for making unlimited quantities of cortisone. CARL DJERASSI: That bubble of conceit and pride and pleasure was completely punctured, when we discovered there were these yokels in Kalamazoo who, in one step, did something that took us 15 steps—very clever steps—to do. NARRATOR: These so-called "yokels" had discovered a common mold that could effortlessly insert an oxygen atom into the 11 position. GREGORY PETSKO: Upjohn figured out that they could do it by a fermentation process. In other words, it wasn't done in a chemistry lab at all. It was done by a microorganism that possessed an enzyme that was capable, just like the human body is capable, of attaching an oxygen in exactly the right place. NARRATOR: Upjohn's discovery was the breakthrough that would end the cortisone shortage. Its mold could work its oxygen-inserting magic on a range of steroid materials, including Julian's Compound S. GREGORY PETSKO: All of a sudden, Substance S was very important. This compound, that didn't have any particular important biological activities of its own, became ideal as a starting material to produce cortisone. And Julian was sitting on the process to make that. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Many well-meaning people have exaggerated my contribution to the chemistry of the cortisone family of drugs. I've even read somewhere that I was "the discoverer of cortisone." Not so. But we made a good choice, indeed, in choosing to synthesize Compound S as our first endeavor. Cortisone could now be made from Compound S simply by dumping it into a tank, throwing in a microorganism and fishing out cortisone after the organism has done its work. NARRATOR: But Julian's Compound S was not the only material Upjohn's mold could transform into cortisone. CARL DJERASSI: Suddenly, Upjohn came to Syntex—I still remember, because I was there—and said, "Would you quote us the cost of progesterone at a ton level." Well, we were completely flabbergasted. At that time, still, the world demand was a few hundred kilos. NARRATOR: The request could mean only one thing: Upjohn had decided to produce cortisone from progesterone made by Syntex, not from Julian's Compound S. Syntex had a big advantage: its starting material, the Mexican yam, was a richer source of steroids than the soybean, so cortisone made this way was cheaper. But other companies were also gearing up to produce cortisone. Julian could still win their business, if he abandoned soybeans and made Compound S from the Mexican yam. But when Julian appealed to Glidden's chairman to make the switch, the answer was, "No." PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I begged him to hold on; we could set up a simple yam processing plant in Mexico, and with Glidden's influence we could soon be masters of the field. But he had other plans for me in paint and varnish chemistry, new paint to prevent icing on airplane propellers, new shortenings that didn't spatter. JOHN KENLY SMITH: I think the steroid work that Julian was doing was just one of those little businesses that no longer were seen as important to the company and its future direction. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : They sent me to Europe, for a vacation, to forget about it. And, on my return, the chairman announced that Glidden was going out of the steroid business altogether. HELEN PRINTY: This was a blow to the heart of Doc. And he said he didn't know whether he'd be able to stand that, because if there was no steroid research, there was nothing that he could really interest himself in. NARRATOR: Joyce licensed Compound S to Pfizer and Syntex and ordered Julian to teach their chemists how to use the process he'd invented. HELEN PRINTY: And things just kept getting worse and worse and worse, until finally it just became untenable for him. NARRATOR: In late 1953, Percy Julian walked away from the job into which he'd put the most productive years of his life. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And when I left Glidden, I left behind 109 patents, for which I received $109 and other valuable considerations. NARRATOR: One of those patents was for Compound S. Just as Julian predicted, it went on to become a key ingredient in the production of cortisone, helping to make the drug available to millions at a reasonable price. GREGORY PETSKO: The fact that Julian could do what he did, while working in a paint company, strikes me as just remarkable. He didn't just do these things because glory would be his, if he succeeded. There always is, in Julian's work, this sense of aiming for something big, because it's going to be useful for people. NARRATOR: But to fulfill his ambition Julian would now have to reinvent himself as a businessman in one of the most cutthroat industries in America. Within a few months Julian was back on his feet as president of his own chemical company in Franklin Park, outside Chicago. HELEN PRINTY: We had left the Glidden Company and moved out to this place that was loaded with rats and mice and everything else. You couldn't eat your lunch without a mouse coming out. PETER WALTON: Working conditions, I guess, would be considered primitive. NARRATOR: But for Julian it was the chance of a lifetime. After 18 years at Glidden, he was his own boss, free to focus on work that excited him. His plan for success was simple: Julian Laboratories would make steroid intermediates, compounds that were often just one step short of a finished product. The big pharmaceutical companies would buy them, because Julian could make them faster and cheaper than they could. From his old friends at Upjohn, Julian quickly landed a contract for $2 million worth of progesterone. More business followed from Ciba, Pfizer, Merck and others. There was just one obstacle: Syntex, the Mexican company that now dominated the hormone business. Syntex controlled the supply of the Mexican yam, or barbasco, root. Julian needed an extract from the root to make his intermediates cheaply, but Syntex refused to sell him any. It was a setback that threatened the company. PETER WALTON: Having put it all on the line with these major pharmaceutical companies, he had to deliver the goods, had to. NARRATOR: To get around Syntex, Julian would have to build his own $300,000 barbasco processing plant in Mexico. PETER WALTON: Dr. Julian didn't have the necessary capital himself. The conventional...normal banking sources were off limits to people of color, period. NARRATOR: Using personal savings and money from friends and private investors, Julian was able to build the plant. But then, another roadblock: the Mexican government, closely tied to Syntex, refused him a permit to harvest the barbasco root. His expensive Mexican factory was useless. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And there we stood, with our beautiful plant, our beautifully lighted water tower with Laboratorios de Julian de Mexico emblazoned on it, a mausoleum. I sat in a hotel in Mexico City wondering whether I should shoot my brains out. PETER WALTON: There was enormous pressure on Dr. Julian, because the financial stakes were huge, were huge. He had everything invested, between Franklin Park and Mexico, and so this was a pressure, pressure time. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : And then a strange thing happened. There was a knock on the door, and in came a man named Abraham Zlotnik, a man that I had helped out of Hitler's Germany. Abe said he was sure the yam grew in Guatemala, and he volunteered to make an expedition for me. I told him I was broke, ruined. I didn't know when I could pay him back. But he said, "You've already paid me back." NARRATOR: Zlotnik was as good as his word. His expedition found the barbasco root in Guatemala. Julian now had the raw material he needed to achieve his goal: making steroid drugs available to all who needed them. JAMES LETTON: He always talked about being able to lower the cost of some of these anti-inflammatory agents, these steroids, so that the common man could buy them. NARRATOR: Even if it meant lower profits for Julian Laboratories. One year his chemists found a way to quadruple the yield on a product on which they were barely breaking even. JAMES LETTON: I thought, personally, that that was a good opportunity to recover some profits from the low yields of the previous year. Instead, he dropped the price of this stuff from $4,000 a kilo down to about $400 a kilo. And I couldn't understand why he would do that. HELEN PRINTY: He wanted to make money, but he also wanted things to be available for people. NARRATOR: Much of Julian's own money was still tied up in his idle Mexican plant. To make good on that investment he would have to resolve some unfinished business with an old rival. V/O MAN (Senate Hearing Dramatization) : Would Dr. Percy Julian come forward? NARRATOR: Julian believed Syntex had used its influence with the Mexican government to keep his factory from opening. After other American companies made similar charges, the Senate held public hearings in 1956. Julian was the star witness. HOLLABAUGH (Senate Hearing Dramatization) : Was there any company in Mexico objecting to your getting a permit? PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : It became very evident that the Syntex Company was objecting to the permit. In fact, Dr. Somlo told me he would fight to the last to keep me and anyone else out of Mexico. NARRATOR: As a result of the "wonder drug" hearings, the Justice Department took action against Syntex. Julian was finally able to open his Mexican plant, but the mounting pressures of running a business left him little time to savor the hard-won victory. Every month there were shipments to make and severe financial penalties for missed deadlines. PETER WALTON: We lived, for the most part, in a highly stressed, very competitive environment—a small company, limited resources, and dealing with a huge industry. EARL DAILEY (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : There were many occasions where 2, 3:00 in the morning would come, and you'd still be in the laboratory, working. PETER WALTON: When I complained about the lack of sleep, Dr. Julian advised me that sleep could be dangerous for my health. I could die in my sleep, and "while you're contemplating that, go back out to the plant and continue to work. We have a shipment to get out." JAMES LETTON: But there was an unusual sense of loyalty that made people work and want to see him and the company successful. How else could you get a crew to work 24 hours a day? This sort of thing. NARRATOR: And successful it was. Julian Laboratories would eventually make its founder a millionaire, one of the wealthiest black businessmen in America. For his chemists, the reward was an opportunity hard to find anywhere else: a chance to work in their chosen field. JAMES LETTON: When I was looking for a job, some people made excuses, and then there were some that just said, "We don't hire you people." TOM WEST (Julian Laboratories Chemist) : They told me that I was too well qualified to take a job. I felt that they were saying, "Come back maybe another time. Come back when you're white." NARRATOR: Scores of chemists, unwelcome elsewhere, would use their years with Julian as a springboard to careers in industry and academia. PETER WALTON: I'm proud to say that our laboratories in Franklin Park employed more black chemists than any other facility in America. On the other hand, for such a small organization to have such a significant role in true integration is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in America. NARRATOR: Outside Julian's lab, America was still a nation divided by race, and Julian was constantly reminded of it, even at meetings of the American Chemical Society. EDWARD MEYER (Glidden Chemist) : When we went to the meeting he said, "Ed, grab me by the arm, when we go in, so people will know that we're together." Because he was afraid they'd...being a black man, they'd throw him out. NARRATOR: Neither wealth nor fame could insulate Julian from bigotry. But with success came the chance to do something about it. Increasingly, he set aside his science to fight for racial equality. He joined the NAACP and the Urban League in their battle against discrimination in jobs and housing. He led a national fundraising campaign to support civil rights lawyers. And in speech after speech, he preached that education and the pursuit of excellence, the hallmarks of his own life, were the keys to black advancement. But many younger African Americans were impatient with traditional tactics and rejected the sermons of Julian's generation. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Our children and our grandchildren saw all of this and suffered for their oft-times "Uncle Tom" parents who seemed to be doing nothing about it. Finally, their pent up agony exploded on us. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I would say, "Explain this to me: how is it that this is all going to change?" He would say, "Well, it will. There are lawyers, and they are going to fight for change. And if you set an example, things will change." Well, I don't have forever. NARRATOR: In the1960s, Julian's son drove to Nashville to join the effort to desegregate the city's lunch counters. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: On the one hand, he was very proud, but on the other, he was very scared. One time he said to me, "You know, this is not a game. These people are playing for real." And my response was, "So are we." NARRATOR: The '60s were an awakening for Julian. He came to see that the nation could not afford to wait for the old ways to work. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : For more than a century, since the end of slavery, we have watched the denial of elemental liberty to millions of black people in our southland. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: I think he saw that things were moving so fast, that if the country didn't change, there was going to be serious, serious trouble. NARRATOR: By the late 1960s, Julian had come to support the more confrontational tactics of his son's generation. PERCY JULIAN, JR.: My father wrote, later, it wasn't going to be enough just to be a model citizen, to be educated, to do all the things that anybody could possibly expect of you, because none of that would ever change the fact that you still couldn't go and eat in a restaurant that didn't want to serve you. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : Branded, first, unfit to spend their money for food or drink in public places along with other Americans; denied the ballot and confined to ghettoes that stifled hope and ambition, victims of murder of the mind, heart and spirit: this is the story of the American Negro. NARRATOR: Percy Julian's own story now entered its final chapter. Born in 1899, he was now in his 70s and a proud grandfather. KATHERINE JULIAN, M.D. (Percy Julian's Granddaughter) : I definitely was aware that my grandfather was special. I remember playing with a doll that had been sent to him by a woman, and the story was told me why it had been sent. She had such bad arthritis that she couldn't use her hands. And after using cortisone, she was able to knit this doll and sent it to him. And I remember holding the doll and playing with the doll, and realizing that he had helped her, and that that was something that was really special. NARRATOR: For his contributions to humanity, Julian received 18 honorary degrees and more than a dozen civic and scientific awards. BERNHARD WITKOP: There was hardly any college that didn't try to honor itself by naming Percy Julian as an honorary Ph.D., because that was the time when people tried to make up for past injustice. NARRATOR: Julian's longtime friend Bernhard Witkop envisioned a higher honor. He secretly began a campaign to elect Julian to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. It was an uphill battle. BERNHARD WITKOP: We had, sometimes, prejudicial talk in the Academy, by old timers. Some were very famous people and Nobel laureates who couldn't get used to the new situation. NARRATOR: Witkop persisted, and in 1973, Julian received an unexpected phone call from the Academy's home secretary. BERNHARD WITKOP: He said, "Sir, may I inform you that you have just been elected a member of the National Academy. Congratulations." NARRATOR: Julian was only the second African American to be elected. It was the crowning recognition of 40 years of chemical research. NED HEINDEL: If you look at Percy Julian's career, you can say, if this man had not been black, he could have been a chaired professor at any Ivy or Big Ten institution. The breadth of his understanding of chemistry, and his fire in the belly to produce so many results in such a short period of time, this is Nobel Laureate stuff. NARRATOR: Looking back in the autobiography he would never finish, Julian offered his own assessment of his life in science. PERCY JULIAN (Dramatization) : I feel that my own good country robbed me of the chance for some of the great experiences that I would have liked to live through. Instead, I took a job where I could get one and tried to make the best of it. I have been, perhaps, a good chemist, but not the chemist that I dreamed of being. NARRATOR: In April 1975, a week after his 76th birthday, Percy Julian died of cancer. His pallbearers included the chemists who had been his friends and colleagues. Every year, the U.S. Postal Service issues a commemorative stamp to honor an African American leader. In 1993, the choice was Percy Julian. HELEN PRINTY: As a human being, I think that he was a source of inspiration to many, many, many people. NARRATOR: In 1999, the American Chemical Society recognized Julian's synthesis of the glaucoma drug physostigmine as one of the top 25 achievements in the history of American chemistry. The plaque is housed in the new Percy Julian Science Center at DePauw. GREGORY ROBINSON: For him to have accomplished what he did, with the resources that he had, is still amazing. NARRATOR: Across the world today, millions of people benefit from steroid medications based on the chemistry of plants. Some of these drugs are still made from soybeans, using chemical steps much like those Percy Julian pioneered. GREGORY PETSKO: Here was a man who not only had to overcome the disadvantages of his race, but who, throughout his entire life, was in a situation that was never ideal for doing the big things he was trying to do. Looking over his life, one has a sense that here is a man of great determination. And it's a determination not just to succeed, but a determination to make a difference, to make a contribution. JAMES ANDERSON: His story is really a contradictory one; it's two stories. It is a story of great accomplishments, of heroic efforts and overcoming tremendous odds. But it's also a story of talent squandered, of potential stifled. It's a story about this country. It's a story about who we are and what we stand for, and the challenges that have been there, and the challenges that are still with us. url https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/forgotten-genius/ teachers materials https://web.archive.org/web/20070302111834/http://www.teachersdomain.org/exhibits/pj07-ex/index.html

1) The seventy-fourth of the Cento series. A cento is a poem made by an author from the lines of another author's work. In the series I place my cento and a link to the other authors poem. 2)Inkblot-splatter Inktober Collage Dates IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR : Where the wild things are a late review , Fantasy demands tv series , Candidates for USA president 2024 , Sun Goku was a great fighter , Amazement or Fear to computer programs , Camerawork in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet , The Deliverance review from Movies That Move We URL https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/12/10/13/2024-rmnewsletter.html

my pleasure and good luck fellow writer:)

@Milton tomorrow , why didn't you share the link? and will it be recorded and viewable lateR? https://events.nyu.edu/event/341197-imagining-africa-in-the-comics-an-event-wit

@ShereseX777 have you listed the book in aalbc? Submitting Your Book to be Listed on AALBC lovely cover

@JWriter I tried the link, it didn't work, did you put the book in aalbc? Submitting Your Book to be Listed on AALBC

topics The seventy-third of the Cento series. A cento is a poem made by an author from the lines of another author's work. In the series I place my cento and a link to the other authors poem. Book Review: The Gardins of Edin by Rosey Lee Dates: astronomy, Astrology IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR : Ask Eddie - film noir aug 22nd 2024 , Will 23andme if private provide genetic data privately , Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras by Odie Henderson , Nvidia , Second Kiss by Milton J. Davis , Baby Reindeer , Parallel from Movies That Move We https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/11/10/06/2024-rmnewsletter.html

You have the sequel ready

After contacting nearly every HBCU, historical black college or university, I learned that only one from the set I contacted has an academic press. Xavier University of Louisiana They do one or two books per year and they are non profit. I will go for it. LEARN MORE OF MY JOURNEY, maybe the wiki list all the historical black colleges but I can't be sure. https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2762&type=status

@ProfD and we all know the answer, shame so many in the usa in all sectors are ashamed of themselves

strong answer @Troy yeah you have not been alone in critiquing the management of the internet space though i will defend this umanaged space, and say it challenges people to manage themselves more

@Pioneer1 thank you for your reply, no answer is right or wrong, just exist. i am not proselytizing to anything. No I am not a fan of eric adams but I am not opposed to anyone supporting him. @Troy First, I do not care for Clarence thomas or eric adams. So I am not about to say the following as a supporter or detractor to either considering the original content of this post.... Thomas didn't overturn Roe vs Wade, the supreme court did. and roe vs wade was never a law, it was a legal decision made in the supreme court which meant the supreme court could at any moment... overturn it. The month after the decision the supreme court could had overturned roe vs wade, this is why laws are more valuable than court decisions... To me the governing question of value is why so many people didn't admit why roe vs wade could never be made into a law in the first place then or now.

No one seems interested that the usa government is about to break up google? I see no talk from anyone, interesting ARTICLES How the DOJ wants to break up Google’s search monopoly Story by Lauren Feiner https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/how-the-doj-wants-to-break-up-google-s-search-monopoly/ar-AA1rYFHa?ocid=BingNewsSerp After winning a fight to get Google’s search business declared an unlawful monopoly, the Department of Justice has released its initial proposal for how it’s thinking about limiting Google’s dominance — including breaking up the company. The government is asking Judge Amit Mehta for four different types of remedies to Google’s anticompetitive power in search engines. They include behavioral remedies, or changes to business practices, as well as structural remedies, which would break up Google. And they’re focused particularly on futureproofing the search industry for the rise of generative AI. While AI might not be a substitute for search engines, the DOJ warns, it “will likely become an important feature of the evolving search industry.” And it aims to prevent Google from using its power in the industry to regain unfair control. The DOJ also has a particular focus on futureproofing the solutions The government sees four areas where it can constrain Google’s power. In these, it’s asking Judge Mehta to limit the kinds of contracts Google can negotiate, require rules for nondiscrimination and interoperability, and change the structure of its business. “Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the government says. Google, for its part, calls the government’s proposals “radical” and believes they’re “signaling requests that go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.” What does that mean for Google’s competitors and the average user? Let’s take a look. Search distribution and revenue sharing Google’s search engine comes preloaded on many phones and is the default on most major web browsers, often because of revenue sharing deals that pay for that placement. The DOJ argued in court that consumers are highly unlikely to switch to a competitor, and Google’s commercial partners also have little incentive to do so while they’re getting paid. So, the DOJ says “undoing” Google’s impact on distribution is the “starting point for addressing Google’s unlawful conduct.” The government says it’s considering restrictions on the contracts Google can strike with phone makers and browser companies, particularly agreements to make Google Search a default or have it preinstalled. Google doesn’t just strike deals with other companies, though — it promotes its search engine and AI business with an array of other Google products, including Chrome, Android, and the Play Store. The DOJ argues this limits the available channels and incentives for rivals to compete. It didn’t offer too many details about how to fix this but said it’s considering both behavioral and structural remedies — in other words, a breakup. And finally, a group of states that filed a related lawsuit want to address a final problem: users not realizing they’ve got other options. They’re considering ways Google could support education campaigns that inform people about competing search engines. Accumulation and use of data At trial, the government argued that Google creates a self-reinforcing cycle of dominance through users’ query data. Essentially, the more queries a search engine gets, the more information it has about what constitutes a useful answer, and the better the search engine becomes. Because Google’s rivals don’t have the same access to distribution channels that Google does, the DOJ argued, Google is able to siphon away most of these queries, making it much more difficult for rivals to improve their products and effectively compete. The government says it wants to try to “offset” that advantage, potentially by forcing Google to make certain information and aspects of its product available to rivals. That could include things like data, indexes, and models used in “AI-assisted search features” and ranking signals Google uses in search. “... genuine privacy concerns must be distinguished from pretextual arguments to maintain market position or deny scale to rivals” The DOJ says it’s “mindful of potential user privacy concerns” that making Google share data would raise. “However, genuine privacy concerns must be distinguished from pretextual arguments to maintain market position or deny scale to rivals.” Privacy tradeoffs are a common defense from big tech firms against opening up their ecosystems, but the government is making clear that it doesn’t think they’re a be-all and end-all. It’s considering prohibiting Google from using data that “cannot be effectively shared with others on the basis of privacy concerns.” Generation and display of search results The government is also concerned with “new and developing features of general search,” particularly generative AI. In this field, it argues much of Google’s power stems from scraping data from sites with “little-to-no bargaining power against Google’s monopoly.” These sites may not want their work used to train AI models, but they “cannot risk retaliation or exclusion from Google” by blocking its crawlers altogether. As a result, the DOJ is considering requiring that Google let sites opt in to search engine inclusion while opting out of inclusion in its AI tools. Advertising scale and monetization In addition to the general search market, Mehta found that Google has monopoly power in the market for general search text ads: the sponsored text links that appear when you enter a query. (This is different from the market at issue in Google’s second legal battle with the DOJ, which dealt with the tools used to serve ads on publishers’ sites across the internet.) Mehta found that Google does not consider rivals’ prices in figuring out its own for this product — something he says only a monopolist with no meaningful competition could do. To fix this, the government says it’s considering remedies that would “create more competition and lower the barriers to entry, which currently require rivals to enter multiple markets at scale.” That could include addressing Google’s use of AI to protect its monopoly power in this market, it says. It’s also looking at licensing or syndicating Google’s ad feed separately from its search results and requiring certain kinds of information Google should provide to advertisers about their performance. more reading https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

is your book on edelweiss for download? @Vince_Poet

The Gardins of Edin by @Rosey Lee Review by @richardmurray edited by @Troy Book Review of The Gardins of Edin by Rosey Lee (aalbc.com) Video Interview with transcript https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2761&type=status

@Pioneer1 @Troy ok, i comprehend the questions nature very easily, but it clearly is structured poorly in that some are confused by it , thank you for your reply for those that may not know the question is

congrat to your friend:)

you read it , i am still on the wishing pool

topics The seventy-second of the Cento series. A cento is a poem made by an author from the lines of another author's work. In the series I place my cento and a link to the other authors poem. Tutorials May the 4th Mona Catburger Dogfries Dates- astrology astronomy IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR : France side Anime plus Manga ; Kolchak Night Stalker Night Strangler ; Eric Adams ; Blondelocs - workout queen ; KWL with Tikiri Herath ; Tolkien's Arthur ; George Carlin on Race Edition URL https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/11/09/29/2024-rmnewsletter-4.html

That is why i asked, I searched all the awards on the award page, none of them are remotely old, all are from the 1970s are later. if you find out it is a hoax, please tell me, i will write a retraction The oldest institutions post war between the states are the black protestant churches + HBCU's and in the black church's case, trophies or awards for writing are discouraged as they lack the christian humility, and then for the HBCU's most started by white churches or with black church folk, the diploma is the award.. hmmmm I checked the hbcu list and nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historically_black_colleges_and_universities

I don't know how legitimate this is, but if someone is willing or looking for a showcase for their book, check it out At the International Impact Book Awards, a prestigious platform that welcomes submissions from self-published authors, traditional publishing houses, and innovative publishers, we take pride in the fact that winning isn’t just an international achievement, it’s a testament to the quality and significance of your work. Winning signals to readers and media professionals that your book stands out in a crowded literary landscape. We firmly believe that every book deserves the opportunity to be recognized and assessed based on criteria such as content, quality, writing style, and presentation. https://internationalimpactbookawards.com/book-awards-entry-form/

will share

book link https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/black-caesars-and-foxy-cleopatras TRANSCRIPT 0:00 [Music] 0:25 good evening my name is Susan Spurlock I'm the executive director of Ford Hall 0:31 Forum at suffk University and I'd like to welcome you to this evening's program 0:37 both for those of he here at suffk University and those who are watching the program on YouTube which has been 0:44 live streamed by gbh Forum Network I'm delighted to welcome you to an evening 0:50 with OD Henderson the chief film critic for the Boston Globe upon the 0:55 publication of his book Black Caesars and fox 1:00 cleopatras the history of black exploitation Cinema black Caesars is a spirited 1:08 history and definitive account of black exploitation Cinema the freewheeling 1:14 often Shameless and wildly influential genre from a distinctive voice in film 1:22 history and criticism OD grew up watching black exploitation films which he loved 1:30 without irony but with plenty of self-awareness and humor black exploitation was a major 1:38 Trend but it was never simple the films mix self-empowerment with 1:45 exploitation base stereotypes stereotypes with essential 1:50 representation that spoke to the lives of black 1:56 people and the fantasies of black viewers the time is right for a 2:03 reappraisal understanding these films in the context of the time and exploring their lasting influence and OD knew that 2:11 the time is right the time is tonight to our YouTube audience welcome 2:18 we are so happy that you are joining us we look forward to you joining the 2:23 conversation and putting your comments and questions in the chat which is been 2:28 monitored and we would love to get to your questions and comments uh when we get to that point um in the program I'd 2:36 like to uh recognize the evening's co-sponsors suffk University's uh 2:42 communication journalism and media Department our office of diversity access and inclusion our Student Center 2:50 for diversity and inclusion suffk University's black Alumni network gbh 2:57 Forum Network and I'm very proud to say that this is a program of suffk University's Ram inclusion week which is 3:04 a series of programs taking place all this week in honor of Black History 3:10 Month I'd like to thank the LOL Institute for their generous funding which makes programs like uh this 3:16 evening's possible the evening's moderator is Candace McDuffy who is a nationally 3:23 acclaimed senior writer at the root who focuses on the intersection of race 3:29 gender and entertainment her work has been featured on digital platforms such as Rolling 3:36 Stone MTV Forbes paper spin 3:43 Newsweek Entertainment Weekly glamour Vibe title Marie Claire Essence the 3:52 Boston Globe NPR I can go on and on um and Candace is also the author of 3:59 of a highly acclaimed book 50 rappers who changed the 4:04 world it is now my pleasure to introduce our esteemed guest who's 4:11 joining us in the Fort Hall Forum Podium this evening Odie Henderson 4:18 [Music] 4:25 Odie thank you um I'm going to read a couple of a brief sele from the 4:30 book uh let's see how this 4:36 goes some may ask why this book is being why this book is giving what many 4:42 consider a disreputable uh series of films the 4:48 spotlight indeed black sploitation did at times depict unsavory or stereotypical portrayals of black people 4:54 sometimes crossing the line of what was acceptable yeah looking at these films 4:59 with contemporary eyes requires adjusting one's mindset to engage with them in the context of the time in which 5:05 they were made however that does not mean that once's outrage is unwarranted 5:11 if it is still the outcome just keep in mind that said outrage is not a new 5:18 phenomenon as early as September 20th 1972 a mere month after the release of 5:24 Superfly the Associated Press ran an article entitled cores Hollywood to end 5:30 black exploitation movies core the Congress of racial equality is represented in the AP 5:37 article by its chairman Roy Enis at a press conference he demanded that Hollywood should not release any black 5:43 movies unless they had the core seal of approval core will take any action to 5:49 stop these films from being produced and is said at a press conference as Paramount Pictures found out at a 5:55 screening of konkin these actions included violence keep in mind this 6:01 article ran before coffee the Mac Foxy Brown and many other well-known black station films have been released let 6:07 alone made the article cited comeback Charleston Blue and shaft two of the tamest instances of black exploitation 6:15 hell Charleston Blu rated PG inis did mention Superfly as a 6:20 catalyst which makes sense as that's the film that the term black mutation was coined for but more credibly he would 6:28 have uh come sorry but more credibility would have come from a mention of the 6:33 legend of nword Charlie which opened in March of 1972 and had that slur in its 6:38 title we are sick and tired of these bad films being made said Andis destroying 6:43 the black image and producing the wrong kind of symbol for black youth but even his outrage wasn't new 6:51 black intellectualist had taken sweet sweetback's badass song Behind The Woodshed the year before there's no 6:56 mention of that movie in the AP article instead said the reporter listed the command the demands core was attempting 7:02 to impose on Hollywood in said these demands were not censorship but they damn well sounded like it in fact core 7:10 was attempting to do the Hollywood what the Hayes cod had done 40 years prior core wanted a Studios to submit all 7:16 scripts involving black characters to their board which had the right to reject them outright and forc changes to 7:23 be made or films not to be made Court also wanted to pre-edit any movie before it came out just in case something got 7:30 through that they missed not even the hay codes Chief sensor Joe Breen had the 7:35 ability to edit a movie that was already made so inis was clearly Chasing Rainbows here by 7:42 itself core would not have made much of a difference but Junius Griffin the soon to be fired head of the Hollywood 7:49 Beverly Hills NAACP yes Beverly Hills had an NAACP and the corer of black 7:56 exploitation was also on board with stopping these fils from being made he complained that kids should not see 8:01 these films but he made no mention that perhaps this was a parental responsibility not Hollywoods 8:08 additionally Reverend Jesse Jackson said that these movies were a major Target of his push initiative as well these forces 8:15 came together to form the Coalition against black exploitation we want to show the movie 8:20 industry how to make class a black film said inis a man with zero filmmaking 8:26 knowledge whatsoever the one good idea he did have was for a portion of successful black movies profits to go 8:32 toward scholarships for teaching black people how to make films this would have certainly made a difference and allowed 8:38 some form of balancing skilles to occur shockingly Hollywood didn't tell these 8:43 folks to kiss its white ass smacking the crack in November 1972 another AP 8:49 article appeared this one with the title minority groups to screen films his per 8:54 first paragraph read at least at least 10% of the 9:00 audience of all feature film screenings at Major motion picture studios will be minority group members who offer 9:06 criticism of the movies relevancy and credibility the Coalition against black rotation now known as the cab would 9:14 attend all screenings not just of Black theme films and rate them on a 1,00 9:20 point scale the Studios have never allowed themselves to be censored the spokesperson for the cab erroneously 9:26 stated see the haast code for that all we want is to give recommendations to be 9:31 heard the article further stated that talks between the studios and the cab were ongoing with more concessions 9:38 possibly granted both sides agreed there was no way in hell anybody but the studio where the filmmakers is going to 9:44 edit a movie protesting movies was still an option however in response to the 9:50 Cab's demands white film critic Steven Farber wrote a February 1973 article in 9:55 film comic magazine called censorship in California while he agreed that the Civic groups have the right to protest 10:02 the fact that these movies employ so few blacks behind the camera he expressed concern about what the cab considered 10:09 respectable he was no fan of the film innocent company kept holding up Marty Ritz Sounder calling it sanctimonious 10:18 and reminding the readers that unlike Superfly Melinda shf Sweetback or Charleston Blue sounded wasn't directed 10:25 by a black guy it was however written by the black guy wrote Melinda leld theii 10:31 far furly further stresses according to the protest groups the fact that black audiences flock to 10:38 shaft And Superfly is only a symptom of racial oppression in other words black audiences didn't know it was really good 10:44 for them the determination of moralities black or white should never be 10:50 underestimated personally this author agrees with farbor on that point the respectability Negroes who tell blacks 10:57 they need to act in the way to approve they approve and to be accepted 11:02 by the majority are a major thorn in my side so many images and black exportation are scandalous but the cab 11:09 and other more recent people like proven hypocrite Bill Cosby lecturing and 11:16 guilting black people into their version of Conformity is more offensive than any image on the screen plus it's not like 11:23 today where everything under the sun is available at the fingertips of those who probably shouldn't have access to it due 11:29 to their age in the blast ration era one had to either physically go to a theater 11:34 or wait until the movie showed up on TV in a Cho the bits format the cab gave no 11:40 responsibility to parents in terms of policing the habits of their kids it's the same old argument who protect the 11:46 children that shouldn't be a movie's job this author was too young to 11:52 remember anything about the cab growing up but he does remember two talk show appearances by the late Roy inis that 11:58 ended violently in the first in his knocked over Reverend Al Sharpton on repugnant talk show host Martin dowy 12:05 Jr's show in the second he contributed to the near Riot that resulted in 12:10 Heraldo rera getting his nose broken by a chair on his equally repugnant talk show in both of those instances in 12:17 looked like black space Asian character so much for respectability you can't 12:23 beat him join [Music] them there's 12:30 me while that's up there let me read you 12:35 this every genre has it Citizen Cane that is the greatest movie in its Cannon 12:41 Superfly fits the bill for black exploitation it screenplay by Philip Fenty is tightly constructed with 12:47 Hustler characters breathing life into that one final score Trope commun commonly found in heist movies it is 12:54 very well acted with few exceptions the reviews are better than most of the films that preceded and succeeded it the 13:01 soundtrack became a best-selling classic soul album and his fashion sense inspired by Nate ad Adams costume 13:08 choices and the actor's own closets started a trend so widespread that 13:13 influenced this book's author's mother who dressed him in a rust color Superfly coat and hat Ensemble when he was 3 13:19 years old he looked 13:25 fabulous one final thing 13:32 so when did black exploitation officially begin there are several possible answers to that question as 13:38 we'll soon see the term itself was coined after Superfly by Junius Griffin the head of the NAACP in Los Angeles but 13:45 was used to describe the entire set of movies released by that point this is well before many blast ration movies 13:51 have been released the era had yet to produce Pam gria tetrology or any of the films featuring the trio of machismo 13:58 known as Brown Williamson Kelly Black Hill hadn't even bitten anybody yet the 14:03 Mac hadn't unleashed the power of the player's ball nor had Dolomite uttered one wrong that leaves a few options 14:12 since sha the shaft marked the entry point what about sweet sweetback's badass song Love van pee had a fit every 14:19 time anyone referred to his film as quote a blast rotation move end quote technically he's correct for if we were 14:26 to operate solely on Logistics utation did not exist until Junius Griffith coined it in 14:32 1972 that's far from a satisfactory or definitive answer arguments abound for 14:38 the true heir of black station's origin story I think the better question to ask is what was the film that most influen 14:45 black exploitation shaft and cotton comes to Harlem set the standards for cops detectives in the genre coughing 14:51 and clear Patrick Jones uh ushered in the era of badass black heroins bucking 14:57 the preacher expanded the market for black westerns that would fall under the 15:02 black station Banner but many of the films that came in the latter half of the era tried to emulate the grit and 15:08 salaciousness of sweet sweetback's badass song while I believe that van pee's movie is the era's most 15:14 influential film I'd like to make the case that the blueprint for black ration was drawn three years earlier by uptight 15:21 Jules daon and Ruby D's 1968 take on Liam M fl's novel The 15:27 Informer in the black station documentary is that black enough for you director Elvis Mitchell makes a brief 15:33 reference to the film uptight the the brief reference that ties uptight to the black station era 15:39 which made me even more confident in my own theorizing the film features so many of the elements that are associated with 15:45 black exploitation and it does some of them better than the films that succeeded it the script by daon D and 15:51 her co-star Julian Mayfield handled a black militant angle with a rare similitude I can never say that word 15:58 unmatched by any film before or since Mayfield and future black vitation Legends Ramy St Jack and Max Julian play 16:05 this plotline with such realism that the viewer can feel the tension anger and the violence boiling over on screen upus 16:13 other ingredients at the black station Cannon for starters the scor is by Booker T Jones who plays it with his 16:19 band the MGs though it's not the first score by a black composer the work of Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington preceded 16:26 it is the first one to lean into the traing of Soul music Booker T and the MGs were were 16:32 artists on Stacks the same label that employed Chef's composer Isaac Hayes the 16:38 soundtrack's well most well-known composition time is tight is a play on the film's titular adjective in a rare 16:45 vocal performance Jones sings the film's hauntingly beautiful theme song Johnny I love you over John and Faith hu's 16:51 animated opening credits amid their images the hu pay homage to photos by Gordon Parks we've got a soul song over 16:59 a funky opening credits add to that the location of uptight Cleveland Ohio one 17:04 of the northern cities to have a quote Hood in this case it's called the Huff as Harlem Detroit Chicago and Oakland 17:12 would be in Black rotation films the Huff is another character in this film it's in the scene of BR police brutality 17:18 and uprisings and serves as the final resting place for more than one of the film's protagonists D and shot on location this 17:26 is aie Davis the D for comes to Har in keeping with the source material 1935 17:32 is the Informer which when directed John Ford's first Oscar uh uptight as two 17:37 characters coincidentally mirror the types of heroes normally found in Black spit there's tank Mayfield the 17:45 conflicted man pulled into a situation he needs to overcome to get out of the game and there's Johnny Julian his 17:51 militant best friend and the subject of Johnny I love you a man of action willing to use violence to achieve his 17:58 goal yet it still has a soft spot for his mother Julian will play A variation on both of these tropes in the mac and 18:05 his mother in that film and this one is paid by why I need a more there's even a white sidekick SL Ally and uptight 18:12 though this film handles him quite differently than black sploitation films would do later here he's the lawyer and 18:18 friend of BG St Jack and one of his best performances revolutionaries group's leader once Johnny returns to oops 18:26 telling my time's up but almost done once Johnny returns to town and the 18:33 group starts planning more acts of Disobedience B dismisses the white guy effectively kicking him out of the 18:38 picture thank you for your service he basically says but it's Black Folk Business now let's that forget there's 18:44 Lori a main squeeze for tank played by D unlike many Blas vitation women before 18:50 Pam Greer her role is more than just a side piece she and John are the only characters tank ever loved and when he 18:57 becomes an inform for the police against BG's group The Fallout from his betrayal reverberates through their face their 19:03 Fates there's also a scene recreated more comically in 1974 as Claudine where 19:09 Lori is confronted by her welfare worker at home Rosy Brown the soon to be ly Byron Jones at liberation of lbby Jones 19:16 plays Daisy a self-proclaimed n-word and F-word though the film throws these 19:21 slurs around Daisy has given more agency than most homosexual characters of the era Brown's flamboyance is not a done 19:28 it's quite convincing as a specific type of gay man however he's still villainous 19:34 and ultimately weak willed something that would characterize several gay characters in Black spectation the one 19:40 thing that uptight truly has over the black station films I believe in influenc was his sense of urgency and 19:45 his Unapologetic black rage made just a few months after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr the film uses that 19:53 event as the backdrop for its plot dason opens the film with several minutes of new new real footage of Dr King's 19:59 funeral and procession his voice is heard in speeches as shots of the Huff appear the character of tank can't 20:05 perform the task BG and Johnny wanted to do because he's gotten drunk over MLK's 20:10 death with the Watts Uprising and other more recent rebellions freshen the minds of the audience and the filmmakers 20:17 uptight is able to convey that time in history when the wounds are still fresh even sweet sweetback's badass song the 20:25 film that comes closest to that level of rage is working from more of a distance which makes the film feel less raw than 20:31 it does in D this movie regardless it's worth contemplating whether uptight is 20:36 truly the first black expectation film or merely the genre's first and most important 20:46 [Applause] architect thank you thank you very much 20:52 OD um please have a seat uh Candace will you join us um here here yeah and while 20:59 Candace is approaching um I want to OD I I love your sense of humor you are 21:06 hilarious you are brilliant thank you you are shy I've gotten to I'm a nervous 21:12 wreck don't be nervous um I've gotten to know OD a little bit uh during the time 21:17 we've been preparing for this program it's been a a true pleasure um and it's also been a pleasure reading the book uh 21:24 OD provided Advanced copies of the book to both Candace and me before was published in late January um it's a 21:31 beautiful book um and thank you so much for writing this important book Thank 21:36 you and we have copies of the book available for sale and there'll be a book signing after this evening's 21:42 program so I'm going to turn it over to you Candace congratulations on the book um I 21:49 had the privilege of reading it uh as Susan said and it is so rich with detail 21:55 and such historical knowledge um um one of the lines that stood out to me in the book was you said that black 22:01 exploitation was in my blood growing up um and we can clearly see it here and the outfit you know what I'm saying got 22:07 the r jacket on channeling your superfly I'm three years old in that 22:12 picture can you talk about the impact black exploitation had on you um growing 22:18 up so I I was one of six kids of that little era generation they were three 22:24 boys and three girls I was the fourth one um and my older cousins female 22:30 cousins would go to see Foxy Brown oh Pam Greer movies and they would take us 22:36 sometimes we weren't supposed to go to these movies I'm clearly too young to see Foxy Brown but they would feel they 22:42 would come out of the theater they want to play Pam Greer but they wanted to act like Pam Greer and it was a Sensi of 22:47 empowerment in that and I saw them and I saw the power they felt from Pam Greer 22:53 being the hero of a movie for Star artist and also justest that she was just such a badass for me it wasn't just 22:59 Pam Greer My First Crush but it was also Jim Kelly I saw a double feature of into 23:05 the dragon and U Black Belt Jones so this is around the same time I remember which one I saw first but Jim Kelly and 23:11 his enormous afro I mean just like the power behind and he was doing martial arts and he and Bruce Lee were kicking 23:18 behind and I was jealous of his afro because mine always looked bad and I 23:23 just felt like I was a be a kid that got beat up every day uh I learned how to 23:28 fight back and watching these movies made me feel like a sense of power that I could be like Jim Kelly I could be 23:35 like Jim Kelly and then I'm going go outside and the bully just still who my behind but that sense of power I I saw 23:40 that I didn't see that on television because there were no black empowered people in fact The Jeffersons the first 23:48 time I saw a black person I wanted to be on television because George was rich he was a you know a bigot and all that but 23:55 he was rich and so I saw that I didn't want to be you know JJ I mean that was my 24:00 [Music] existence when we talk about representation in terms of black exploitation it kind of ju deposes what 24:07 we see black people portrayed as um historically From Slavery to Jim Crow to 24:12 reconstruction we have these stereotypes that are very dehumanizing yes um so can you talk about how that racism trickled 24:20 down to Hollywood how black exploitation fought against it well keep in mind that 24:26 before Sydney he came on a scene 1950 in a movie called No Way Out which I highly 24:31 recommend it's a Noir it's I've never seen him more Angry in a movie that he 24:37 didn't direct uh and it was his first film before that you had mamy you had 24:42 what what Donald ble called Tom's Coons mad mamies and Bucks the stereotypes of black people you saw in films you had 24:49 Willie best you had you know man Mor and these other people and then Sydney came along and he brought some nobility to it 24:55 but then they just kept he couldn't do many things he couldn't play Denzel's character in Training Day because he was 25:02 basically representing all of us until 1972 buck in the preacher so with these 25:08 movies blast movies the thing that I think started making people enjoy them 25:14 was that as melv man people was pointed outet seatback no one thought his character was going to survive till the 25:20 end of the movie because if you were rebellious even Sydney you died you 25:25 never got away with any kind of crime or you never got it one over on the man and so these movies presented that they also 25:32 presented the neighborhood as I said aie Davis shot K comes to Harlem in Harlem and that was one of the first times you 25:37 saw Harlem on the screen in all its beauty and all its you know this repair but if you lived in Harlem or if you 25:44 lived in a hood like I did that wasn't too far from Harlem um you saw that on the screen and you felt seen you felt 25:51 represented you know there were drug dealers in my neighborhood there were pimps in my neighborhood there were sex 25:57 workers in my neighborhood they also were cops like coffinet and Gravedigger Jones in my neighborhood and nurses like 26:03 coffee and people who wanted to just make a living a black living but you never got to see that and so these 26:09 movies for better and For Worse put that on the screen and you know representation is power even if 26:14 sometimes is it's a double-edged sword so going to the movie as a little boy and seeing my neighborhood on the 26:21 screen was in an incredible feeling to a kid well exploitation um came right 26:28 after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and also Incorporated the Black Power movement and these themes of black 26:34 socioeconomic struggle um can you talk about whether it's from cotton Crums to 26:40 Harlem or Shaft or Superfly what makes these movies classic black exploitation 26:46 films well shaft shaft Coming Out of Time Square at the beginning of the movie It's kind of the epitome of the 26:53 attitude of black vitation you have a cool theme song you have a sve hero 26:58 coming out of the The Vines as they called them in the 70s their clothes his attitude walking down the street the 27:04 fact that he is the hero of the film the smartest person you know a bad mother shut your mouth in the movie they tell 27:09 you in the opening credits that you were not going to see you know a downtrodden brother mhm and that played on once that 27:17 happened you couldn't you really couldn't knock off a black character 27:23 Black Caesar famously since it was remake of Little Caesar Larry Cohen had Fred Williams's character killed at the 27:29 end because that's what happens at the end of L Caesar and the audience rebelled so much that Larry Cohen 27:35 literally went into the projection booth and cut the ending off the movie so whenever it went to every other place in 27:40 the world after its Premiere Fred Williams's character didn't die you couldn't kill these characters anymore 27:46 because you know black people always the the sacrificial lamb Dirty Harry you know do you feel lucky punk he's poting 27:51 the gun in a black person you know that's a far cry from Pam Greer pulling the gun out of her afro and shooting 27:56 somebody very far you know very very far and I think what what uptight does right 28:02 and what a lot of these black tiue movies does does do right is the militant aspect of it you know shafia Ben Buford and his militant little group 28:09 they didn't really want to say the Black Panthers unless you have something like the Mac which actually had the Black Panther involvement you got kind of a 28:15 watered down version of militancy but at least it was there yeah so I mean that's 28:21 better than nothing I mean I know it's crumbs and what have you but we're talking 1972 you can't talk about black 28:27 sploitation without talking about the backlash these films received um and one 28:33 of the most controversial if not the most controversial film was 1972 Superfly starring Ron um O'Neal so I 28:40 didn't know this before I started reading your book but the NAACP the southern Christian leadership conference 28:45 in the National Urban League joined to form the Coalition against black exploitation and core did too core was 28:51 part of it and push all of every every black group with an 28:56 acronym ever they're all in there um so we're going to play a clip actually of Superfly but before we do um they 29:03 released NAACP and corisa statement about the movie it said the movie 29:08 epitomizes without any hint of Retribution the absolute worst images of blacks it's an Insidious film which 29:15 portrays the black community at its worst Superfly glorifies the use of cocaine cast out upon the capability of 29:21 law enforcement officials and cast blacks in roles which glorify dope pushers pimps and GR theft that's not 29:29 not true but you guys will see it and you oh let's let them make the decision 29:34 and then I have a comment about them actually saying something about the cops we'll come back to 29:50 that this dude is bad and he ain't just fly he's Super Fly 29:58 yeah Super Fly when it comes to women they come to him but it's still not 30:05 enough he wants a big score a million in cash yeah the big one this is a chance 30:13 and I want to take it now before I have to kill 30:19 somebody before somebody ises me what kind of money are we talking 30:26 about that much I want his out 30:31 [Music] 30:46 working backward now that I took all this chance for nothing and I go back to being nothing working some J job for 30:53 Chum chains day after day look that's all I'm supposed to do the they going to have to kill me cuz that ain't enough a 30:59 I clean bad machine super cool super mean dealing good for the man Super Fly 31:05 here I stand secret stash heavy bread badest [ __ ] in the bed I'm your 31:11 pusher man can a Superfly Harlem dude beat the 31:19 system he's got a plan to Stick It To The Man He's super Hood super high super 31:28 dude Super [Music] 31:50 Fly yesterday in Chicago um The Music Box Theater showed it and I pointed out 31:57 that that um Curtis Mayfield said this movie is in essence a commercial for 32:03 cocaine in fact there literally is a commercial volane in the middle of the movie This Montage of people enjoying their product so what Curtis Mayfield 32:10 does and why I said this was the Citizen Cane of black exploitation is because what this movie has that most other 32:16 bation movies doesn't have is the complexity there's a moral it forces you to make a choice if you are for young 32:24 blood priest he is basically going to plot is he's going to sell 30 keys of cocaine so he can make a cool million 32:31 dollar 972 money and retire from the game it's the same old kind of high story I want one last score before I get 32:37 out the issue is though that he's selling this to black people in the hood 32:43 mostly so if you are for him you are basically buying into his capitalist 32:49 migraine Nightmare and if you're against him you're basically are on the side of the white cops that want a piece of the 32:56 action and are actually holding him down to making him think he has to do this and the movie does not make a decision 33:02 it is shockingly immoral however Curtis Mayfield whose soundtrack made more money than Superfly the movie did by the 33:09 way on the soundtrack Curtis Mayfield is telling you something else there's a narration a counter narration going on 33:16 that he worked into the music and into the lyrics and so on where basically you're seeing all this cool stuff the 33:23 younger priest is doing but Curtis is reminding you that Freddy is dead and you want to be a junkie wow remember 33:29 Freddy's remember Freddy's Dead and push your man the little song where you see him singing is a boast the only person 33:36 that gets off gets ahead is The Pusher in that song he's basically telling you 33:41 he owns you so Curtis is working both sides of the street here but what he's 33:48 doing is he's offering you or warning you about what was going to happen this 33:54 this is not going to have happy ending but the movie is all cool and you know great fashion and Ron O'Neal Who said he 34:01 was so upset about people blaming him for this movie he said they blamed for everything but Nixon's 34:08 election he made a sequel to the superfly called Superfly TNT which is written by Alex Haley and is Robert Gom 34:16 Benson's debut and it's a God awful film um he basically turned Superfly into 34:22 some black African militant but people that had gone to see the original Superfly wanted to see him you know 34:29 having sex with women and snor and cope meanwhile he's preaching to you and you know in in Africa no one wanted to see 34:35 that so it was an incredibly large flop so that was that was the downside he he 34:40 tried to he was blamed for so much the Coalition really went after him that he 34:46 tried to make a a you know a corrective and it didn't make any money and and that kind of cost him a lot of his 34:52 career for a while you know he's Whitley's dad on a different world remember oh that's right so he his 34:59 career didn't die he just would show up every so often and you know he was Whitley's dad I always like to point 35:05 that out to remind people on the flip side of this we have 1974 Foxy Brown starring Pam Guru so you 35:12 have Superfly being so controversial this bad portrayal of black people then you have Foxy Brown which is credited as 35:18 one of the first films that really showcase women protagonist doing action in movies so we're going to play a clip 35:25 of that now and then we'll get into it 35:34 okay when Foxy Brown comes to town when all the brothers gather around cuz she 35:40 can really shake them down Fox fo Pam Greer that one chick hit squad who 35:48 creamed you as coffee is back to do a job on the mob as Foxy Brown you tell me 35:55 who you want done and I'll do do the hell out of it a chick with Drive who don't take no 36:04 Jive that woman she's crazy there's no telling what she'll 36:09 do she's sweet brown sugar with A Touch of Spice if you see a man anywhere send 36:15 him in because I do need a man and murder if you don't treat a nice sounds 36:21 like a public menace show do Foxy's got guts no ifs ands or butts I better warn 36:29 you I got a black belt in karate and I got my black belt in bar 36:34 stools she won't Burge when she carries a grudge I want justice for all of them 36:41 whose lives are bought and sold so that a few big shots can climb up on their 36:46 backs sister I think what you're asking for is [Music] 36:51 Revenge so there ain't no hope for dudes who deal dope I swear where baby I don't 36:57 know what you're talking about we're going to kill ourselves a couple of 37:05 [Music] [ __ ] have no fear Pam Greer is here as 37:17 Foxy Foxy [Music] 37:25 Brown so this is supposed to be a sequel to coffeee so coffee was the movie that basically put Pam Greer on the map she 37:31 had done some films before this and coffee was the first time you had a black protagonist a female black 37:39 protagonist because black station at this point been mostly male the women in these movies didn't do anything but 37:44 either have sex with the heroin the hero or bringing some information or die where Pam Greer now she is the lead and 37:52 and she's not coffee is one of the most violent of all the black station movie she's one of the meanest protagonists in 37:59 in Black vitation so they wanted to give her this power and Foxy Brown was the sequel but the interesting thing about 38:05 coffee and Foxy Brown is that Superfly was technically a a pro drug movie I 38:10 guess if you want to call it that whereas coffee her the whole plot is Pam GRE is going out on the street and 38:16 killing drug dealers because they hooked her the sister on drugs so they had a very strong anying drug message which is 38:22 also new for black exploitation so not only do you have a powerful black woman 38:27 you also have this anti drug message that carries forth in Foxy Brown and and then Pam Greer the little trivia note 38:33 the next movie She Made after Foxy Brown Friday Foster the first black comic book 38:39 character isn't blade it's F it's Friday Foster Friday Foster was drawn in the 38:45 Chicago Tribune in the 70s and they made a movie so their first black comic adaptation is technically Friday Foster 38:51 so Pam Greer got to do that not only was she's the first really hero female hero 38:57 of almost any type you had Angie Dickinson before that in a similar expectation type film but it wasn't 39:03 common until Pam Greer showed up and then all of a sudden every woman had to be beaten the hell out of everybody in 39:10 movies instead of just being a victim so she kind of changed that and brought 39:15 that to Black exitation and she never lost a fight the last movie She Made 39:20 before this she was eaten by a mountain lion and the mountain lion was the last 39:27 thing to beat Pam gri in the movie after coffee nobody would take you know she 39:33 had to survive to the end of the movie she had the be the baddest person in the picture and then you also had Cleopatra 39:39 Jones the year before so the cleopatras they made two clear pck Jones movies 39:44 Tamara Dobson who once held the record for the tallest woman in film action movies she was 6'2 and according to Cle 39:51 Pat Jones all of it was Dynamite that same year know he had C P 39:56 Patrick Jones and coffee that was that double Wham me of these statuesque black women who were CIA a agents or 40:03 Vigilantes you know taking names and so that changed the blast vation trajectory 40:10 you really just couldn't have a a woman character even Dolomite you know lady Reed's character has some agency in that 40:17 so we get to the late 1970s and the early 1980s and black exploitation kind of just dies out and can you talk about 40:24 it you talk about it in the book in the epilogue about the demise of the genre but can you address that here was it the 40:29 backlash in terms of representation or were just people tired of them altogether well there's I had a 40:35 different Theory when I started writing the book I had a different Theory than the one I came to in the end I thought 40:40 it was this television because television was free back then and there were more black people on TV that was kind of the issue they weren't black 40:46 people on television so these movies were you know big because you had to go to the theater to see this but they 40:52 started putting on sord and son and and Jefferson's and shaft had a TV series 40:57 which lasted seven episodes God help us uh and there were other Positive Black 41:03 characters or at least black characters more on the screen and then jaws and Star Wars came out movies of no black 41:10 people in them whatsoever and Hollywood started thinking well black people are going to go see a movie with no black people in it you know we should make 41:17 more of those which is kind of ridiculous considering that black people were doing this before and then Elvis Mitchell's idea 41:23 was that the whiz killed black sploitation because the whiz cost $30 million and it didn't make its money 41:30 back although I don't know anybody that doesn't love the whz that's my age in black and there's a lot of us apparently 41:36 not enough to make the $30 million that would cost back and you know how Hollywood is you know you're a woman you're black you're gay you make a movie 41:42 and it's a flop you don't get another chance to make a movie to kind of fix that you're a white guy you get whatever 41:48 you want so I think that combination but I think the whiz they threw all this money at it was the biggest the most 41:55 expensive Black Moon movie you know lady s the blues cost money Motown was behind that and it was a hit it was you know D 42:02 Russ got nominated for an oscar but the it didn't cost $30 million and so when that happened they 42:09 basically black people disappeared unless you're a Richard prior or Eddie Murphy or if you were like a rapper at 42:15 the beginning of rap you know like Beat Street and break into electric Baloo you weren't on the screen think 42:21 about it you know until she's got to have it there was that whole black way new wav in ' 86 and going forward before 42:29 that how many movies outside of the ones I just mentioned that had rappers in them that were more like lowbudget the 42:35 next era of lowbudget underground Cinema for black people did you see uh multiple 42:41 black people in the movie you know Eddie Murphy didn't make a movie for black people until Coming to America so that they basically they were 42:49 punishing us because they figured that we would go see whatever mhm just like 42:56 before mhm I think that's kind of what did it in but uh also I think people 43:01 were getting a little tired of something the movies were losing quality whenever something is underground and it becomes mainstream it gets destroyed and I think 43:08 that's what really happened the movies they started making copies very very inferior copies of things you know Eddie 43:14 Murphy says and Dolomite is my name you know these movies have no titties no funny and no Kung Fu I love that 43:20 line and he's right they started making all these preaching movies like a piece of the action and black people didn't 43:25 want to see that they got preaching on Sunday at church so I think it was a combination of things but the bottom 43:31 line is financially Hollywood did not think that we were you know viable do we 43:38 have time for one more question um as a veteran film critic what is your opinion 43:44 on current black filmmakers finding new ways to tell black stories well I'm all 43:49 for it but I'm afraid because I've been down this road the older you get the more you realize that life is you start 43:55 living life over are thinking you're crazy you know I believe through Julie Dash and all these things they're saying 44:00 this is the new world day for black people I think black directors and producers and people have more power 44:06 than they did in 1973 but at the same time it seems hard Ian Spike Lee has to fight to get a 44:12 movie made I mean it's [ __ ] Le there are things I am enjoying I me I love movies 44:18 that that take a different approach like they clone Tyrone which is kind of a horror and uh black station hybrid but 44:25 actually had a message that was a very serious message underneath it and some of the you know par parotic things like 44:31 black dynamite and stuff going on and then you have something like Jordan Peele who it just has gets a blank check 44:37 I mean I just love that he can just make whatever he wants and I find that to be fascinating he brings black people in 44:43 and gives them training people of color in and allows them to be trained to do it Melvin man pees did the same thing 44:50 with with Sweet Sweetback he had to say it was a porn because the union didn't have any minorities in it and y wouldn't 44:56 work porn that was the way he got a multi culty C uh crew you can't bring 45:02 anybody you can't learn if no one's going willing to give you a job and so I I'm happy that more black and brown 45:09 creatives are bringing in or black and brown creatives and telling different types of stories and and promoting 45:15 different types of stories and I have hope but I'm just still I'm jaded I'm burn I've been burnt too many times too 45:22 many times so it's kind of like I'm cautiously optimistic to use that term 45:27 but I'm like talk to me again in 5 years where where will we be and on that Noe You' like to open it 45:34 up to questions from the audience so as well as those watching on 45:47 YouTube oh I've not read the book but I'm 45:53 interested in the music aspect of it because was uh the music in all these films uh it seems to me was music and uh 46:01 was ceiling and floor and so I'd really like to hear more of your talking about it as content as you know the scene um 46:09 because it's so interesting and I just brought back a lot listening to uh Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mayfield doesn't 46:17 get enough credit for this so I'm going to give him his credit I'm giv him a flow sorry Curtis is no longer with us 46:22 but he without Superfly the soundtrack album which served as a 46:29 marketing melv people started this he did sweet s back and album with every when a fire on it and he used the album 46:36 as marketing so sweet seatack was not just an album was also marketing Superfly the same way although Curtis 46:42 could sing Melvin couldn't And Superfly like I said the album made more money than the movie but the album came out 46:49 before the movie and that's what got people to go without Superfly without Curtis and making Claudine and spar 46:56 and and uh let's do it again and all these other short eyes all the soundtracks that he did there'd be no 47:01 Saturday Night Fever soundtrack there'd be no Grease soundtrack there'd be no Flash Dance soundtrack and by the way 47:07 Flash Dance is the movie that made Hollywood believe every single film has to have an album but Curtis and Melvin 47:14 started that and Motown became the label of black citation because they knew even if the movie was a flop they could get a 47:21 hit song out of it they could get a Hit album out of it cuz you know we buy records and you know my my parents had I 47:28 still have my parents shaft album that they bought in 1971 I have it and so 47:33 that that musical element was always one of the big things about I have a list of 47:39 top 10 black expectation songs in the back of the book I'm sure it's controversial but um I had to include 47:44 that because you can't talk about these movies without talking about their music sometimes that was the best thing in the movie but we don't get the credit as 47:52 usual uh we don't get the credit for you know as as cev little says in blaze and Sal they bet they w't give me credit so 47:59 they didn't give Curtis credit for that but he did and black station films served as music Movie music as marketing 48:06 before any white film did I have sha too but I'm from Memphis 48:11 ah so that makes sense another question um we have one 48:17 from YouTube Someone wants to know what your favorite film is oh my favorite black sitation movie that's hard I mean 48:25 I I I guess I would have to say shaft only because when I was a kid I wanted to be shaft I wanted to girl when I 48:31 leave come out of the station on Time Square and granted it doesn't look like it does 1971 but I remember it I 48:37 Remember the Time Square that was of the era of black vitation the Funtime Square 48:42 uh whenever I come out of the station I hear shaft like shaft was like the epitome of 48:49 cool for me when I was writing the book I went to Sha's house which is at 55 Jane Street in the village and I just 48:56 wanted to soak up this environment I wanted to be as cool as Rich round the man he just passed away round Tre just 49:02 passed away and I I think that may my favorite movie but I have other movies I love coffee I love Foxy Brown I love 49:09 Sugar Hill a horror movie with Marky Bay a seeking revenge on the man through 49:15 Voodoo with Mother Jefferson as the voodoo priestess zarak cly by the way research 49:22 her she is one of the great black um 49:28 like playright she was what she did so much for black actors and for black theater by the time she got to the 49:34 Jefferson and we all knew who she was she was in her 80s she was known for her elocution she taught you know how to 49:41 speak people how to speak that's why she has such a crazy proper voice in a Jeff even though she's always using it as 49:47 she's drunk but she was one of the most fascinating people that I kind of discovered when I was researching the 49:53 books I only knew her his mother Jefferson I never noticed she had an entire 50-year history in the black 49:59 theater before that any more 50:08 questions oh sorry thoughts on gangster rappers who are now part of the uh TV 50:15 and film industry IC tea IC tea this is funny everything is tied together um 50:23 they remade Superfly not the W in 2018 in 1990 they made Superfly it was called 50:29 The Return of Superfly and it had the black dud from Days of Our Lives played priest and Curtis Mayfield and IC tea 50:36 did the score for that movie and so you know rappers Foxy Brown Biggie Smalls 50:43 yeah you know these names they came from rap you know and then also rap a lot of 50:48 they sampled a lot of black station music you know James Brown's music and then for Black Caesar is one of the most 50:55 sample you know cuts for rap um so I I mean it TI it all it's all tied together 51:01 I mean it's they kind of and then again between black new wave and Blas rtation 51:07 there was Crush Grove and the disorderly all these movies where the rappers got 51:13 on the screen and I was a teenager at the time so I was just in love with these types of things so it's all of a 51:18 piece I think everything kind kind of ties together and you explore it in the book as well yeah and so gangster rap 51:24 was just another element of it's almost like the sweet sweet back or almost like signifying like the signifying monkey 51:30 Dolomite type thing it it kind of got I think away from its Origins and became 51:36 again once something becomes mainstream it is destroyed but I think that's kind of they're all of a piece they're tied 51:42 together have time for one more question we have a another question yeah this is 51:47 another YouTube question I was surprised to see that Gordon Willis was the director of Superfly um are there some of these 51:55 black explo exploitation M movies that are particularly well-made technically 52:00 well Gordon Parks that was Gordon Parks junor Gordon Parks his son directed Superfly he directed thomasine and 52:05 Bushra which is a black Bonnie and Cloud which is very very good with Max Julian and Vanetta McGee uh Gordon Parks senior 52:11 directed shaft obviously and Gordon Parks was the photographer and so was Gordon Parks Junior and some of the 52:17 movies look really good and you had Lucian Ballard who was a cinematographer 52:22 in the 30s he shot through the hard way and shot a couple of other films you have Michael Khan who became Spielberg's 52:29 editor he did four black cation movies uh he did spookly St by the door which is a great movie it was so controversial 52:37 the government pulled it from theaters because it was a recipe it taught you how to be a black revolutionary because 52:44 it was written by a black CIA agent the book was he also did the screenplay and it was so dangerous to the government 52:51 they yank the movie so there there are s several movies that are very well made and there 52:56 are several movies that look like trash but I like them anyway you like them anyway 53:06 um oh thank you um I had two questions but my first question was what was your 53:11 process like writing your book and what is the biggest takeaway you want audience to remember from reading your 53:17 book well I that's I'll ask a second question first the biggest takeaway I want is I want people to realize that 53:23 for better and for worse because I don't I mean there I take some of these movies to the Woodshed and I I criticize 53:30 several elements of them so it's not just this Love Fest of me just going on and on about how much how great they are 53:36 I think the takeaway from it is that this was an eror and just like any other era it influences the movies that were 53:43 made and you have to look at it from what was going on what was changing and 53:49 brought these movies in and also the bation technically is in dead you see so 53:54 many tropes and elements in movies of the day and Tarantino of course does it all the time but not just Tarantino I 54:00 think black filmmakers do the same thing they add little kind of um you know like little like signposts or maybe like uh 54:07 know little things that you would be able to pick up on immediately that come from black vitation so the take away from the book is I just wanted to talk 54:14 about the history of black vitation and how it shaped the little black kid me how what was the because the Coalition 54:21 against black was saying these are harmful movies and I wanted to look at that I wanted to look at what I got out 54:26 of it pro and con as far as the process of the book I seen all these movies as a 54:32 kid and as a teenager I worked in a video store so we had black citation and porn kept us 54:38 open those to that and and kung fu movies so you know we had all that that 54:44 kept the store open and so I would watch them as a teenager so I was watching him as a kid watching him as a teenager now 54:50 I'm watching him as an old man and I wanted to write down what I got out of it Pro incom because a lot of times 54:57 these movies was giving you a message about what black masculinity what black femininity was and sometimes it was a 55:04 good message and sometimes it was not a good message so that's kind of what I wanted to look at it from the 55:10 perspective of it's not just black spt's history in a way it's my history it's your history as well we have time for a 55:17 couple more questions we have another YouTube question who are some of your favorite actors and actresses who you 55:24 feel had the greatest impact Ramy St Jack doesn't get enough credit um he was 55:30 a great actor and he they made a movie uh there were several black versions of 55:36 classic movies there was a black version of the Get Carter called Hitman that's the movie where Pam GRE gets eaten by a 55:41 mountain lion there was a black version of the ashole Jungle called Cool Breeze 55:47 which has Ramis and Jack in it and thas rasala another great actor and all these actors it's funny is you would see them 55:54 on on television in the 70s and even going forward you know Everybody Hates Chris is almost like a you know a 56:01 chronopia of old black actors showing up in in roles Antonio Vargas for example 56:07 you know it shows up in those things so uh Pam Greer obviously because just because of her power and because she was 56:15 a star you know and and Fred Williamson I mean he was a really bad director but 56:21 he had presence I mean he could play a role he could play Black Caesar and then he could play a almost comic role and 56:27 take a hard ride and he had a lot more Talent than be in front of the camera 56:32 and presentence then we give him credit for now behind the camera is another story but but he directed I got to give 56:39 him credit he got a lot of his movies made he was an independent he made he directed his films he was in them and 56:47 they made money and he raised money to make those movies but I thought that he was and I was going through all these 56:52 movies again and I wrote about 84 movies in this book I really was impressed by 56:58 by him by by Fred Williamson last 57:06 question hi um so I was just thinking about uh the movie Coming to America you just mentioned it briefly before and I 57:14 was wondering because I I was thinking about how that movie was praised for um celebrating the African 57:20 Heritage um in the movie but it I remember that it was also criticized because uh from from the African 57:27 Community from some African communities because uh the misrepresentation um of 57:34 Africans in the movie so I was wondering what your opinion was about that you know Coming to America is an interesting 57:41 movie I I wouldn't say that it was in any way accurate about the African immigrant experience but what Coming to 57:47 America does that I think is genius is that Eddie Murphy Prince aing is the 57:55 outside he's coming to a black neighborhood that you would see like 58:01 she's coming to Queens and a lot of black folks myself included saw that neighborhood we we we 58:08 recognize the Jerry curls and recognize the the knockoff McDonald's you know there and my 58:16 neighborhood there was a kentaki fried chicken it was probably good too it was 58:21 damn good anyway and so what Coming to America does I 58:26 think his genius is that Eddie Murphy is like representing the white audience coming 58:33 into a neighborhood that we know very well so we're already automatically laughing and Eddie is responding to this 58:39 new world I think that kind of plays into the Immigrant experience of coming 58:45 into a new place but I don't think it does Justice to someone like a king's experience it's 58:51 a fairy tale you know but it's primarily isn't to show his he's the straight man 58:58 in Coming to America the regular black neighborhood is kind of like the the 59:03 universe that he's coming to he's an alien coming to this foreign planet that we all know and love so it's not really 59:10 the Immigrant experience it's him the the America imposing its will on 59:17 him so I would agree that that the criticism was probably very valid about this is not a representation of African 59:23 immigrants but I don't think that's the movie's intention we have time for just one 59:30 more this is also from YouTube do you believe that black actors have a responsibility to present only the 59:37 positive that that's that's a great question to close out on Norma R Jones wrote an article 1976 that asked that 59:45 exact question can black art be free as long as we are oppressed 59:50 people and I i' like I'm not going to spoil the book can tell you what her conclusion was she was writing about 59:57 Sweet Sweetback specifically and How Sweet Sweetback is a myth making kind of film but she asked that question and 1:00:04 it's a valid question but I think it's an unfair question it's a loaded question it's a very loaded question 1:00:10 because again it's always like we have to take it upon ourselves to educate you to We Can't be you know we can't be 1:00:18 complicated that's what was Sydney's problem until he started directing his own movies he had to be this noble black person that was completely faultless and 1:00:25 no such person I come from a predominantly black family let me tell you let me tell you D Ain 1:00:32 perfect so I think it's an unfair question but it's a question that we have to wrestle with I feel like it is 1:00:40 it prohibits you as an artist because you're constantly thinking I have to represent black people we're not a 1:00:46 monolith so you can't really represent all of us I can this book represents me 1:00:52 as what my opinion is but there might people who completely disagree with my opinion I am not speaking for black 1:00:57 people I'm speaking for this one black person but we always have to be the person to speak for all black people and 1:01:03 that that drives me crazy because it's not fair but it it's it's a it's it's the cross we have to 1:01:09 bear so I mean I don't I don't have my answer is no but I know that that is not 1:01:18 the answer that you know that's that's not the definitive answer that's not the answer that we can have to go with it's 1:01:23 your answer so yes we do huh it's your answer so yes we do yeah we do we do OD this has been so much fun 1:01:31 um we selling black Caesars and Foxy cleopatras after the event thank you so much for joining us um live as well as 1:01:39 on YouTube thank you so much I want to Candace I want to thank you Candace 1:01:46 has traveled from Chicago Illinois to be here tonight thank you for that uh thank 1:01:51 you so much for your beautiful moderation Candace and I have had the privilege of 1:01:57 working on a number of programs together so thank you Odie thank you for your 1:02:02 heart your humor your Brilliance um and thank you 1:02:08 for writing this book congratulations to you um and thank you to the audience our 1:02:14 YouTube audience for your wonderful questions thank you and who's Gloria Henry Gloria Hendry is an actor who was 1:02:22 in was the first black um Bond girl and living that die and it's a horrible her 1:02:29 treatment in black exploitation the movies that are not black portation she was never given a good role to Black 1:02:35 Belt Jones she has a great role in that she was an actor who deserved like Teresa Randall who deserved better who 1:02:42 needed to fire her damn agent but she was the first black bom girl okay that 1:02:47 was uh another YouTube question that I wanted to see if we could throw in um so 1:02:52 the bookstore has very very graciously uh uh put forward a 20% discount on od's 1:02:59 book um so um and we are uh setting up the uh book signing in the back so I do 1:03:06 hope you will grab a book um OD brought a Sharpie pen and he's ready to sign the 1:03:13 book so again thank you so much for coming have a good thank you so much thank you thank [Applause] 1:03:23 you [Music] 1:03:53 did

all i have to your theme is this group I started