"Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films

2 Black Power and the New Baad Cinema

2 Black Power and the New Baad Cinema The Black Power Movement was incredible because it was an exuberant, creative burst of imagination. It spread across everything in our culture—from literature to education to politics. Nothing was unaffected. It was like an earthquake. —Kathleen Cleaver, “Interview with Asha Bandele” “Everybody knows that all the people don’t have liberty, all the people don’t have freedom, all the people don’t have justice, and all the people don’t have power. So that means none of us do. Take this country and change it! Turn it upside down and put the last first and the first last. Not only for black people but for all people.”1 “Right on, Sista Kathleen! Uh huh, preach girl.” My dear friend and colleague April and I were hanging like two excited teen girls who’d just bought the latest hot CD home. Only the sounds we were communing over came from a collection of poems, speeches, and songs that emerged out of the Black Power era. We griped about what we considered glaring omissions and applauded the inclusion of other musts on a CD entitled Black Power: Music of a Revolution. “You gotta understand, girl, this was my generation. I grew up in all this. I listened to this stuff on the street and over the radio.” April drifted back to her coming-of-age years during the late 1960s and early ’70s. While I had been a very little girl, unaware really of the cultural earthquake that was Black Power, April had been an adolescent, finding herself as black people, she describes, were finding themselves and their way. “Sista,” she passionately reminisced aloud to me, “you gotta believe me when I say Black Power what’n just this catchy political slogan for us. It was this whole energy and it was real. Even to us kids. It was in our hair, words, 36 . “baad bitches” and sassy supermamas movies, and sounds . . . everything.” She stopped and pressed the pause button on the CD player. “You know, we had this song I remember singing on the school bus: ‘We gonna fight the power. Black Power . . . ’” As my friend so eloquently conveyed, the fervor of Black Power energized late-1960s through early-1970s culture. The new political radicalism gave birth to the public expression of alternative definitions of blackness and of the wrongness of America’s racial politics through art, song, and most certainly through films that offered larger-than-life black characters winning against the “system.” Black Power! What do you want? Black Power! What do you want? Black Power!2 Race, Gender, and the Call to Black Power The cry carried echoes of Malcolm, Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and many others. At a Greenwood, Mississippi, rally on June 16, 1966, Willie Ricks and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), two of the young, charismatic leaders in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), helped to popularize “Black Power” among a new generation of black political activists, the black community generally, and the mainstream public. Carmichael explains that in the 1960s, Black Power had been an integral concept in the voter registration drives of SNCC members across the South for some time. In the days prior to the rally, members of both SNCC and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) had already decided to incorporate the Black Power slogan, marking their open departure from the nonviolent, integrationist-oriented emphases at the core of civil rights struggle strategy. However, because of the media coverage, Black Power gained national attention and became for black people an inspiring call to the fight for liberation.3 Black Power thus came to embody the shift in the energy of the black liberation movement to an urbanized sense of black rage expressed in political discourse and cultural representation. Many activists were frustrated with the perceived lack of federal effort in enforcing civil rights legislation—specifically , the 1964 and 1965 Voting Rights Acts—and the increasing disfavor of many black activists with the integration-focused program of the black moderate civil rights program.4 This was accompanied by a growing denunciation black power and the new baad cinema · 37 of nonviolence, perceived white liberal influence or control over some civil rights activists and programs, and the recognition that the nonviolent civil rights direct action had not “purged or reconstructed the black ghetto.”5 In the white and conservative black...