Stick It To The Man
What else is there to say…To read the profile of this brother please visit his site at www.myspace.com/jasirix
Comic actor Marlon Wayans‘ next screen role could turn out to be portraying a real-life comedy icon.
EW.com reports that Wayans is in talks to play Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian whose troubled life will be depicted in an upcoming biopic, “Richard Pryor: Is it Something I Said.”
Wayans is reportedly being considered for the part after fellow funnyman Eddie Murphy dropped out of negotiations early on. The film was written and will be directed by Bill Condon of “Dreamgirls,” who originally shopped it as a vehicle for Murphy.
Sources at the Entertainment Weekly that Wayans, best known for such over-the-top comedy films as the “Scary Movie” franchise and “White Chicks,” impressed producers in a 13-minute screen test in which he “transforms into Pryor.”
The Pryor project, scheduled to begin shooting in the spring, is being made by Sony Pictures and Adam Sandler’s production company. Variety.com reports that Sandler is considering playing a small role as Pryor’s first agent.
Budgeted at about $20 million, the movie will cover Pryor’s controversial life and career as a raunchy standup, beloved movie star and troubled drug addict who famously set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine.
Pryor died in 2005 at age 65 after a series of health problems, including multiple sclerosis.
Stickin’ It To The Man
In the early 1900’s the term “The Man” was used to describe a boss figure. This term later began to be applied to anyone who hassled a group of people and eventually to anyone in a position of power.
In the 1960’s “The Man” began to see widespread usage by the Black Power Movement to describe the white oppressors that the movement was fighting against. A number of newspapers from the era used the term and it quickly gained currency, both among Black activists and those who struggled in solidarity with them.
During the 1970’s the term “The Man” became a part of the vernacular of the Blaxploitation film era. “The Man” referred to the police, the mob, the politicians and anyone who was white with power. In most cases “The Man” held the key to the destruction or redemption of Black characters in these films.
There were a number of white actors and actresses who got their start in Blaxploitation films and saw their careers take off after they made their Blaxploitation film debuts. The Museum of UnCut Funk presents a new visual DocuFunk short called “The Man” that pays homage to Blaxploitation’s “other” stars.
Rosalind Cash was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 31, 1938. As a young woman, she took off with only $20 in her pocket to seek her fame and fortune in New York City. At first things were difficult: “I had a cold-water one-room apartment in Harlem sharing a kitchen I didn’t dare use because of the rats,” she told The Guardian. But Cash attended the City College of New York, and managed to ferret out the first stirrings of independent black theater in the city. She made her stage debut in 1958 in a production at the Harlem YMCA, performing in a play by Langston Hughes called Soul Gone Home.
In 1968 she landed a role in Washington, D.C., in a production of The Great White Hope, a play about the career of Black boxer Jack Johnson. The part was a choice one, but at the same time an even better opportunity opened up: a slot with the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), a pioneering organization devoted to presenting plays by Black writers and furthering the careers of Black actors and theater personnel. Cash pulled out of the Washington production, having to turn over two weeks’ salary to the theater involved, so that she could return to New York and join the NEC. She was one of the company’s founding members.
Cash emerged as a star of the company, appearing in several productions her first year, including a play called Kongi’s Harvest by the South African writer. The following year she played the lead in a production of Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies of Dark Old Men, one of the most-performed Black theatrical works of the day. Cash would reprise the role in a 1975 television version of the play. She continued to appear with the NEC through the 1970s, and also landed high-profile roles with other theatrical organizations; in 1973 she took on the role of Goneril in Shakespeare’s King Lear in a New York Shakespeare Festival production. That role, too, she would later play on national television.
Hollywood had its eye on the talented young actress, however, and the focus of Cash’s efforts gradually shifted in that direction. After a small part in 1971’s Klute, she broke through with the female lead role in the science-fiction action thriller The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. The role, in one of the first Hollywood action films to feature a Black lead character, was one that several leading Black actresses of the day had set their sights on. Cash not only won the role, but blew audiences away with her powerful performance. “Her first appearance in the film is ,” noted writer Stephen Bourne in The Independent. “Strong and aggressive, she looked ready to steal the film form under Heston’s nose…” The second half of the film, unfortunately, toned down Cash’s character. Still, she was named to the annual Top Ten Stars of Tomorrow list compiled by the industry firm Quigley Publications, the first Black named since the list had been created in 1941.
For several years, other lead roles came Cash’s way. In the Black-oriented murder mystery Melinda (1972), she had, in the words of film historian, “her best role of this period as a woman on the edge, holding on for dear life, struggling to keep a relationship with a man who hardly seemed her equal.” She also landed roles in mainstream hits like The New Centurions (1972) and Uptown Saturday Night (1974), but these came at a price. Cash was cast as a good-natured ; the role did not appeal to her, but like other serious Black actresses of the 1970s, she found that parts suited to her talents were very hard to come by.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cash turned her attention to television, winning guest slots on such series as “Starsky and Hutch,” “Police Woman,” “Kojak,” and “Hill Street Blues.” In 1977 she appeared opposite O.J. Simpson in the made-for-television movie A Killing Affair, in which Simpson played a police officer who has an affair with a white coworker. She chose her film roles carefully, appearing mostly in projects that she found significant. In Wrong Is Right (1982), she played the first Black woman to become U.S. Vice President. That year she was also featured in Sister, Sister, a film written by poet Maya Angelou that drew on her full range as an actress perhaps more than any other; she co-starred with and Irene Cara in a story of the reunion of three adult sisters. Sister, Sister earned Cash a nomination for an NAACP Image Award, as did Go Tell It On the Mountain (1986), based on a novel by James Baldwin.
Cash gradually gained greater recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning induction into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1992. Television work continued to come steadily, with appearances on The Cosby Show, thirtysomething, and other series. The onetime cold-water-flat-dweller finally found steady employment with a recurring role on the daytime soap opera General Hospital, on which she played the of an extended Black family. On October 31, 1995 Rosalind died of cancer at the age of 56 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Rosalind’s Filmography:
Klute, 1971.
The Omega Man, 1971.
The New Centurions, 1972.
Melinda, 1972.
Hickey and Boggs, 1972.
The All American Boy, 1973.
Amazing Grace, 1974.
Uptown Saturday Night, 1974.
Cornbread, Earl and Me, 1975.
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, 1975 (made for television).
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, 1976.
The Monkey Hustle, 1977.
A Killing Affair, 1977 (made for television).
The Class of Miss MacMichael, 1979.
Wrong Is Right, 1982.
Sister, Sister, 1982 (made for television).
Go Tell It On the Mountain, 1984 (made for television).
The Offspring, 1987.
Forced March, 1990.
Second Coming, 1992.
A Dangerous Affair, 1995 (made for television).
Tales from the Hood, 1995.
The Movie Posters are from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.
Born in 1927, Sidney Poitier grew up in the small village of Cat Island, Bahamas. His father, a tomato farmer, moved the family to the capital Nassau, when Poitier was eleven. It was there that he first encountered cinema. Even at a young age Sidney recognized the ability of cinema to expand one’s view of reality. At the age of sixteen, Poitier moved to New York and found a job as a dishwasher. Soon after, he began working as a janitor for the American Negro Theater in exchange for acting lessons.
While working at the American Negro Theater, Poitier was given the role of understudying Harry Belefonte in the play Days of our Youth. Filling in for Belefonte one night, Poitier made his public debut. This led to a small role in the Greek comedy Lysistrata. Though nervous and unsure of his lines, Poitier was a big hit. He continued to perform in plays until 1950, when he made his film debut in No Way Out. No Way Out, a violent tale of racial hatred, made him a hero back home in the Bahamas. The colonial government deemed it too explosive and censored it.
No Way Out American 1950
Throughout the fifties, Poitier made some of the most important and controversial movies of the time. Addressing issues of racial equality abroad, he made Cry, The Beloved Country, about apartheid in South Africa. He later took on problems closer to home in Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones. This film was about two escaped prisoners who must overcome issues of race in their struggle for freedom. For his role in The Defiant Ones, Poitier was nominated for an Academy Award. Sidney made several films during this period and some of his other great works included Go Man Go!, Edge of the City, Mark of the Hawk and Porgy and Bess.
In 1959, Poitier returned to the stage with a stirring performance of Walter Lee in Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first play by a Black playwright to show on Broadway. It was an insightful and moving reflection of Black family life, and it had great popular appeal. Poitier would reprise his role for the Hollywood adaptation in 1961. During this time Poitier starred in Paris Blues, Pressure Point, The Slender Thread, The Long Ships, The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Bedford Incident. It was not until 1963, for his role in Lilies Of The Fields, that the movie industry saluted Poitier with its greatest award. In an era where Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Prize and Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, Sidney Poitier was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.
A Raisin In The Sun 1961
Paris Blues 1961
Lilies of The Field 1963
The Bedford Incident 1965
Poitier followed up this triumph with an electrifying performance as a Black detective from the north trying to solve a murder in a southern town in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of The Night. Having concerned himself with the problems of racial inequality in many of its manifestations, Poitier tackled one of the great taboos of the time. With Patch Of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, he focused on interracial romance. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner was the first Hollywood movie about interracial romance not to end tragically. By the time of its completion in the late sixties, Poitier was one of Hollywood’s most popular stars. Poitier also starred in The Lost Man, For The Love of Ivy, To Sir With Love and Duel at Diablo.
A Patch of Blue 1965
Dual at Diablo 1966
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 1967
In The Heat of The Night 1967
For The Love of Ivy 1968
To Sir, With Love 1968
The Lost Man 1969
During the 1960’s fallout from the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Poitier became the target of criticism from segments of the Black community. Accused of being too passive in a scathing article in the New York Times, Poitier retreated to the Bahamas to reassess his life. When he re-emerged in the 70’s, he shifted his energies from acting to directing. Beginning with Buck and The Preacher, Poitier directed a series of highly entertaining films, including A Warm December, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do it Again and A Piece Of The Action. During the 1980’s he directed the hit comedy classic Stir Crazy, starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, Hanky Panky, Fast Forward and Ghost Dad starring Bill Cosby in 1990.
Buck and the Preacher 1972
A Warm December 1973
Uptown Saturday Night 1974
Let’s Do It Again 1975
A Piece Of The Action 1977
Stir Crazy 1980
Hanky Panky 1982
Fast Forward 1985
Ghost Dad 1990
After a decade away from acting, Sidney returned to the screen in 1988 for Shoot to Kill. Returning to apartheid-free South Africa nearly fifty years after Cry, The Beloved Country, Poitier played one of the great heroes for racial equality, Nelson Mandela. In the 1997 television docudrama Mandela and De Klerk, Poitier returned triumphantly to a theme he had dealt with throughout his career. After half a century in show business and fifty-five roles, Sidney Poitier’s indomitable strength and commitment shine through in everything he does: “I was saying to an audience, this is who I am; look at me”.
Below are more posters from films starring Sidney Poitier, which are a part of The Museum Of UnCut Funk collection.
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs 1970
The Organization 1971
Brother John 1971
The Wilby Conspiracy 1975
Samuel R. “Chip” Delany won four Nebula Awards by the age of 26 and is arguably the best science fiction writer in the world. After his seventh novel, Empire Star (1966), Samuel Delany began publishing short fiction professionally with The Star Pit. It appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow and was turned into a popular two-hour radio play, broadcast annually over WBAI-FM for more than a decade. Two tales, Aye, and Gomorrah and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones, won Nebula Awards as best SF short stories in 1967 and 1969. Aye, and Gomorrah contain all the significant short science fiction and fantasy Delany published between 1965 and 1988.
Samuel Delany made our Kool Cats and Hip Chicks list because he is one of the few Blacks who wrote for DC Comics during the 1970’s, scripting two issues of Wonder Woman. When asked about his writings for comics Mr. Delany said to NYC Press:
“I’ve loved comics for years, I really enjoy writing about them. Still, it’s not my genre. So I tend to wait till I’m asked. Twenty-two-odd years back, packager Byron Preiss and artist Howie Chaykin came to me, wondering if I’d be interested in doing a science fiction comic. I said, sure, it sounds like fun”.
Wonder Woman #202 is part of The Museum of UnCut Funk Collection.
Wonder Woman #203 is part of The Museum of UnCut Funk Collection.
Samuel R. Delany was born in 1942. The native New Yorker teaches English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is the Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program. In July of 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He is the nephew of the The Delany Sisters…yes The Delany Sisters…Sadie and Bessie of Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ The First 100 Years.
Juanita Moore started her acting career in the early ’50s, a time during which very few Black actresses were given roles of substance in major-studio films. Fortunately, Juanita’s roles began improving as Hollywood tentatively developed a social consciousness toward the end of the decade. In 1959, she received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Imitation of Life (1959), a glossy updating of a once-controversial Fannie Hurst novel about racial inequity.
Within the next decade Hollywood underwent several sociological upheavals, and Juanita Moore was one of the beneficiaries; she became a fixture in Blaxploitation films of the ’70s. She appeared in the following films:
Uptight 1969 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
The Skin Game 1971 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
The Mack 1973 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
Fox Style 1973
Thomasine and Bushrod 1974 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
The Zebra Killer 1974 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
Abby 1974 is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes Juanita Moore, a Blaxploitation Icon.
Lena Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her talent and artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success: “I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”
In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub in New York City and when she signed with MGM, she was among a handful of black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her most famous tune.
Stormy Weather Movie Poster is from the private collection of Mr. Gordon Bussey
On screen, on recordings and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in such songs as “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” In 1942’s “Panama Hattie,” her first movie with MGM, she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things,” winning critical acclaim.
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.
“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out. … It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky,” in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included the Red Skelton comedy “I Dood It,” “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever,” all in 1943; “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944; and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.
Bronze Venus is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
One of the most glaring exclusions, though, was the MGM remake of “Show Boat.” Horne, who had appeared in the role of Julie in a “Show Boat” scene in a 1946 movie about Jerome Kern, seemed a logical choice for the 1951 movie, but the part went to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not sing.
Cabin In The Sky is from the collection of Separate Cinema
“Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses,” film historian John Kobal wrote.
“She was a very angry woman,” film critic-author-documentarian Richard Schickel, who worked with Horne on her 1965 autobiography, said Monday.
“It’s something that shaped her life to a very high degree. She was a woman who had a very powerful desire to lead her own life, to not be cautious and to speak out. And she was a woman, also, who felt in her career that she had been held back by the issue of race. So she had a lot of anger and disappointment about that. I’m talking particularly about her movie career.”
Early in her career, Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt,” she once said.
Later, she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of “Stormy Weather” to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.
Broadway Window Card from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was “ageless … tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her.”
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in black society. Her daughter,Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book “The Hornes: An American Family” that among their relatives was Frank Horne, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
She was largely raised by her grandparents as her mother, Edna Horne, pursued a career in show business. Lena Horne dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabledHarlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white. She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle’s orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in 1940.
A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to “pass” in a white world with her light complexion.Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM. But she refused to go along with the studio’s efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.
“I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become,” Horne once said. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and, in 1963, joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry. She appeared in her last movie in 1978, playing Glinda the Good in “The Wiz,” directed by her son-in-law, Sidney Lumet.
Horne had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography “Stormy Weather,” author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she had married a white man, she replied: “To get even with him.”
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.
“I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters,” she said. “It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live.”
And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.
“I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she said, “because being black made me understand.”
Contributor: The Associated Press
The Museum of UnCut Funk: Rest in peace Ms. Lena you will be missed but your spirit will live on.
Orfeu Nefro is part of the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.
Marpessa Dawn was directed by Marcel Camus and based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, “Orfeu Negro,” as it is called in Portuguese, brings together an innocent country girl, played by Ms. Dawn, and a trolley car motorman and gifted guitarist, portrayed by Mr. Mello. They meet amid the frenzy of Rio’s carnival and are soon swaying to a provocative samba among the crowds. But Eurydice is stalked by a man in a skeleton costume. Eventually, Orpheus finds her in the morgue. In the end, bearing her body in his arms, he falls to his death from a cliff.
“Black Orpheus” became renowned for its soundtrack by the bossa nova legends Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, with songs like “Manhã de Carnaval” and “A Felicidade.” It won the Palme d’Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for best foreign film in 1960.
Gypsy Marpessa Dawn Menor was born near Pittsburgh on Jan. 3, 1934. As a teenager, she moved to England, where she had bit parts on television, and later to France, where she worked as a governess and danced and sang in nightclubs.
After her role in “Black Orpheus,” Ms. Dawn appeared in several less successful movies and on French television. She also starred in several plays, including “Chérie Noire,” a comedy that toured France, Belgium, Switzerland, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Marpessa Dawn, died on Aug. 25, 2008 at her home in Paris. She was 74. The cause was a heart attack, her daughter Dhyana Kluth said. Ms. Dawn’s death followed by 41 days that of her “Black Orpheus” co-star, Breno Mello, who played the title role.
Dorothy Height marched alongside Martin Luther King and led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, was known for her determination and grace as well as her wry humor. She remained active and outspoken well into her 90s and often received rousing ovations at events around Washington, where she was easily recognizable in the bright, colorful hats she almost always wore.
In awarding the congressional medal, President George W. Bush noted that Height had met with every U.S. president since Eisenhower, and “she’s told every president what she thinks since Dwight David Eisenhower.”
Height was born in Richmond, Va., before women could vote and when blacks had few rights. Her family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was 4. Distinguishing herself in the classroom, she was accepted to Barnard College but then turned away because the school already had reached its quota of two black women. She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University.
As a teenager, Height marched in New York’s Times Square shouting, “Stop the lynching.” After earning her degrees, she became a leader of the Harlem YWCA and the United Christian Youth Movement of North America, where she pushed to prevent lynching, desegregate the armed forces and reform the criminal justice system.
She traveled to Holland and England as a U.S. delegate to youth and church conferences, and in 1938 was one of 10 young people chosen by Eleanor Roosevelt to spend a weekend at the first lady’s Hyde Park, N.Y., home preparing for a World Youth Conference at Vassar College.
One of Height’s sayings was, “If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.” She liked to quote 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said the three effective ways to fight for justice are to “agitate, agitate, agitate.”
In the 1950s and 1960s, she was the leading woman helping King and other activists orchestrate the civil rights movement, often reminding the men heading not to underestimate their female counterparts.
Height was on the platform at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting only a few feet from King, when he gave his famous “I have a dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963.
“He spoke longer than he was supposed to speak,” Height recalled in a 1997 Associated Press interview. But after he was done, it was clear King’s speech would echo for generations, she said, “because it gripped everybody.”
She lamented that the feeling of unity created by the 1963 march had faded, that the civil rights movement of the 1990s was on the defensive and many black families still were not economically secure.
“We have come a long way, but too many people are not better off,” she said. “This is my life’s work. It is not a job.”
When Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, Height told Washington TV station WTTG that she was overwhelmed with emotion.
“People ask me, did I ever dream it would happen, and I said, ‘If you didn’t have the dream, you couldn’t have worked on it,” she said.
Height dedicated most of her adult life to the National Council of Negro Women, where she first worked under her mentor, Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the group. Height took over in 1957 and led it until 1997, fighting for women’s rights on issues such as equal pay and education. She developed programs such as “pig banks” to help poor rural families raise their own livestock, and “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” in which black and white women from the north traveled to Mississippi to meet with their Southern counterparts in an effort to ease racial tensions and bridge differences.
To celebrate Height’s 90th birthday in March 2002, friends and supporters raised $5 million to enable her organization to pay off the mortgage on its Washington headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the White House. Herman said Height “believed very strongly that we as black women deserved to be on this corridor of power.”
Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights pioneer of the 1960s, died Tuesday April 20, 2010 at age 98, Howard University Hospital confirmed.
Source: Associated Press
Without question, one of the most breathtaking beauties to emerge out of the 70’s ”Blaxploitation” era was actress Vonetta McGee. This lovely sister, born in San Francisco on January 14, 1945, possessed the complete package; looks, talent and determination which should have made her a marquee name in Hollywood. Instead, this tantalizing, tan, and talented lady found herself in in the land of Blaxploitation, where her some would considerable her talents were laid to waste.
Although the air was thick with civil and social issues, still, a beauty such as Vonetta’s would rarely go unnoticed. She was encouraged to participate in the Miss Bronze California beauty contest, where she walked away with the crown. A film career followed and Vonetta took off for Europe where she earned small roles in several low-budget movies. She returned to the States in 1969 and won a small part in the film The Lost Man, which starred Black screen icon, Sidney Poitier. The film got her some notice, but it would be three long years before she would get her first major movie role.
The Lost Man Movie Poster is a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
In 1972, Vonetta was cast in the murder mystery Melinda, playing the title character. Although her part was small (she is murdered early on in the film), it was vital, earning her rave reviews from both the New York Times and Village Voice, which both proclaimed her “the most beautiful woman in film!”
Melinda Movie Poster is a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Over the next few years, Vonetta’s resume would fill up with leading lady roles in “blaxploitation classics” such as Blacula, Shaft in Africa and Detroit 9000. She was working steadily but the roles were far from challenging. More often than not, she was cast as the supportive, understanding girlfriend, whose primary lot in life was to look cute and not get in the way of their super-macho male co-stars. Whereas Pam Grier, at the same time, was cementing herself as Hollywood’s first Black Super-Woman, Vonetta was still waiting for the meaty role which would make her a household name. Ironically, she had lost an opportunity to play a super-heroine herself when the lead role in the 1973 film Cleopatra Jones, which was written by her then boyfriend, Max (Julien of The Mack fame), went instead to super model Tamara Dobson.
Blacula, Shaft in Africa and Detroit 9000 Movie Posters are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Throughout the period, Vonetta continued to work but had yet to see an A-Budget script. In 1975, that changed when Clint Eastwood chose her to star alongside him in The Eiger Sanction, which he also directed. It was a bit of cinematic history, being that it was the first time a Black actress had been cast as the female lead in a mainstream Hollywood film opposite a white actor. Sadly, the role gave Vonetta about as much to do as her “Blaxploitation” films had, leaving her still knocking at stardom’s door by Hollywood’s standards.
More of Vonette’s Filmography in Movie Poster Art Form:
1968: Faustina
1984: Repo Man
1990: To Sleep with Anger
Contributor: Keith Brooks
The Museum of UnCut Funk is shocked and sadden at the passing of Vonetta McGee on July 9, 2010.
Some would argue that if there was one actress that threatened Pam Grier’s reign as America’s Black glamour queen of the 70’s, it was the bewitching bronze beauty Judy Pace. A former Ebony Magazine model, Judy was a modern day Queen Neferteri, with sexy bedroom eyes, pouting full lips, all gloriously displayed on a petite chestnut brown frame. In color-conscious Hollywood, Judy became one of the first dark-skinned dramatic actresses to be recognized as a sex-symbol. The Daily Variety once referred to her as The most beautiful woman in Hollywood.
Southern California born and bred, Judy was one of five kids raised in a middle-class Los Angeles environment. After graduating from high school, she attended Los Angeles City College where she majored in sociology. She was enticed away from college with an offer to join the prestigious Ebony Fashion Fair. Judy harbored no aspirations for a film career, until one pratically fell into her lap. Director William Castle (House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler ) saw her pictures in Ebony and chose her for a part in his film 13 Frightened Girls. Upon completion of the film, young Judy was now smitten with the Hollywood bug. She wanted to be taken seriously so she began taking acting classes, and performing in L.A. theater. Small parts on television and films developed, leading up to Judy’s first major role in the 1968 film Three in the Cellar.
Judy followed up her success in Three in the Attic with another groundbreaking role, this time on the small screen. After losing out to Diahann Carroll for the role of Julia, Judy won a nice consolation prize, landing a part on the popular 60’s night time soap Payton Place. Judy played Vickie Fletcher televison’s first Black female antagonist. Judy’s Vicki character was bad to the bone, manipulative, a liar, Vicki basically ruined the lives of just about everyone she touched. When Payton Placewas finally canceled in 1969, Judy was offered the lead in a new, “hip” made-for-TV film called The Young Lawyers. With a very ”60’s,” theme, Judy plays one of three young lawyers who take on cases dealing with the poor and oppressed. The film would later be turned into a weekly series, with Judy reprising her role.
Judy continued to shake things up on the big screen when in 1970, she starred in the first Hollywood produced and financed film directed by a Black, Cotton Comes to Harlem. Directed by actor Ossie Davis, Cotton Comes to Harlem was derived from the writings of Black novelist Chester Himes. Given a main stream budget, the film became the first Black action block buster paving the way for what would later be deemed Hollywood’s blaxploitation film era of the early 1970’s. In many ways Cotton Comes to Harlem was very stereotypical in its depiction of Blacks. However it succeds because it is able to give off that certain “coolness” and vibe which are indicative of the Black experience in America. The film is centered on charlatan black leader Rev. Deke O’Malley (played by Calvin Lockhart), who plans to steal the money of poor Blacks with a bogus back to Africa movement. With an all-star cast that included Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Redd Foxx, Clevon Little and Lockhart, Judy more then held her own. Playing Iris, O’Malley’s sexy, hot-tempered girlfriend, Judy nearly steals the movie as she vamps, seduces, and even commits murder for the man she loves.
Cotton Come to Harlem Movie Poster is from the The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Cotton Comes to Harlem appeared to be the vehicle that would launch Judy into superstardom, but in reality, it would be her last major role. The blaxploitation era she helped to usher in created roles for Black male actors, but very few films gave Black women, with the exception of Pam Grier, much to do. Hollywood completely missed the message of Cotton Comes to Harlem by assuming that Black audiences wanted shoot-em-up action flicks with Black super-heroes. In a nutshell, Black audiences wanted the same thing white audiences wanted, good movies.
Movie Poster art from Judy Pace Filmography:
1970: Three In The Cellar
1973: Cool Breeze
1972: Frogs
1973: The Slams
Cool Breeze and The Slams Movie Posters are from The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Contributor: Keith Brooks
“She’s the Godmother of them all…The Baddest One-Chick Hit Squad that ever hit town!” So promised the 1973 promotional poster for the American International Pictures release of Coffy; whose star was a luscious afro-sporting, gun toting, buxom Nubian princess named Pam Grier.
The definitive sex symbol of the 1970’s, Pam single-handedly changed the image of females in film; from helpless victim to that of independent tough heroine. She was Wonder Woman without the red,white and blue tights. She was a female warrioress, who didn’t need to butch it up, when it was time to get mean (a la the shaved head Demi Moore in G.I. Jane), or take enough steroids to outflex Arnold (ya hear me Terminator’s Linda Hamilton). Pam was a bad ass avenging angel, who always exuded femininity, confidence and sexuality.
Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Pam was the daughter of U.S. Air Force mechanic Clarence Grier and his nurse wife Gwendolyn. As a child, Pam lived the typical nomadic existence of a military brat. The family finally settled down in Denver, Colorado, where Pam graduated from high school. She later attended college as a pre-med student. Not a rich girl, Pam entered several local beauty contests to earn extra money for tuition. It was during one of the pageants, that she was spotted by a Hollywood film agent who felt she had the natural beauty to make it as an actress. Reluctant initially, Pam eventually gave in to the lure of potential stardom and moved to Los Angeles, California. Working as a switchboard operator to pay the bills, Pam enrolled at UCLA, where she began studying acting.
In 1970, Pam made her screen debut in the Russ Meyer bizarre cult classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. That film would however, lead to bigger roles in a series of exploitive B-Movies such as The Big Doll House, Women in Cages (both released in 1971), Hit Man(1972) and The Twilight People (1973). The films were pure camp, with plenty of naked bodies on display, Pam’s delicious curves being one of them. After three years in Hollywood, Pam Grier was nowhere near a marquee name, however she was beginning to make waves. While the movies she was featured in were Z-grade at best, her performances in these films made them at least watchable. It would be her next film, Coffy, which would carry her from wannabe to the Queen of American International Pictures (AIP).
Big Doll House, Women in Chains, Hitman and Twilight People Movie Posters are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Coffy was a jagged-edged, low-budget film about a nurse, who after witnessing her sister becomes strung out on drugs, metamorphoses into a single-minded vigilante bent on waging a one-woman war against the city’s drug lords. Coffy is not afraid to use any and all means necessary, including her voluptuous body, to extract her bloody vengeance on the mobsters, crooked cops and dirty politicians behind the endless flow of narcotics on the streets. Many Hollywood film critics quickly wrote Coffy off as cheap, exploitative B-movie fare. However, what they failed to factor into the equation was the effect this unexpected keg of dynamite named Pam Grier would have on her audiences. Despite the paper thin plot, Pam danced through the role of Coffy with such conviction and fire, that you find it impossible to not only enjoy her performance, but believe it as well. In the hands of a lesser actress, the film’s shallowness would have been exploited in droves. However, Pam had the grittiness, sex appeal and toughness of mind to ensure that in a forgettable film, she was definitely not a forgettable actress.
“Coffy” is from The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Pam continued down her path to stardom, recreating her Super Soul Sister role several times in films such as Foxy Brown and The Arena which were both released in 1974, followed by Sheba Baby, Bucktown and Friday Foster the following year. Unfortunately, the quality of the films continued to be taken from the so-called blaxploitation fountain that flowed freely out of Hollywood. Still, it was hard to deny her obvious feminine charms and appeal. New York Magazine went so far as to dub her “Sex Goddess of the Seventies!” While Pam continued to build up a strong (predominately male) audience; her radical film image had not yet attracted a female following. In fact, Pam became the object of criticism from some feminists, as well as from the Black community. Women in the seventies, particularly Black women, had a hard time accepting and identifying with Pam’s gun toting, blouse dropping, sharp tongue super-heroines. The Black media also found it difficult to anoint the brazen Ms. Grier as the successor to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. Instead of viewing her as a maverick, a glamour queen of the times, Blacks turned their back on Pam box office success, viewing her not as a trendsetter and pioneer, but as a cinematic freak show performer.
Foxy Brown, The Arena, Sheba Baby, Bucktown and Friday Foster Movie Posters are a part of The Museum of UnCut Funk collection
Pam’s image problems stemmed from the fact that she was walking on untested ground for Black women (and in many ways, women in general). In the history of American film, there had never been a Black woman portrayed with so much raw sexuality and fiery independence. Pam’s characters had male lovers, but they were never defined by them, nor controlled by them. Pam’s Coffy and Foxy Brown characters did not stay behind while their men (Jim Brown or Fred Williamson) stomped on the bad guys, nor were they the kind who would be just whisked up in a man’s arms and taken to bed. Pam’s Friday Foster and Sheba Baby characters were just as adept at butt kicking as any macho man on screen. And as far as the bedroom was concerned, she always had the final sayso on who entered it and when. Interestingly, among Pam’s few female admirers at the time, was Gloria Steinem, publisher of the ultra-feminist Ms. Magazine, who saw Pam for what she was, a strong independent woman; going so far as to label her “Super Sass!”
As the decade closed, American International Pictures, the house that Pam built, dropped her like a bad habit. Formerly one of the busiest actresses in Hollywood, Pam’s career became tepid at best. Her career would get a critical boost in the 1980’s for her mesmerizing performance as a psychotic hooker in 1981’s Fort Apache The Bronx. Unfortunately, roles such as that were few and far between for Pam. By the nineties, her career had practically come to a halt; it would take a maverick director, with a fetish for 70’s cult movies to bring the black queen of action films back to relevance. Quentin Tarantino had set Hollywood on fire with two violent, twisted, yet masterfully intriguing films; Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Combining the stylish film noir of the 1940’s and 50’s with the uninhibited, gore of 60’s-70’s grindhouse, Tarantino had injected Hollywood with much needed creativity and originality. His next masterpiece would be the resurrection of the blaxploitation film, and to do this, Tarantino knew he needed an actress bigger than life. He needed Pam Grier.
Jackie Brown was tailor made for the comeback of the former Queen of AIP. Playing a struggling airline stewardess who gets caught in the violent world of drug trafficking, Pam’s Jackie is a survivor, able to give as good as she gets. The film wasn’t the critical success of Tarantino’s other films, but it did bring in a hefty $70 million worldwide. Pam Grier was back, and roles, worthy of this fiery, independent actress soon begin to flow in. Pam would go on to star in the films Jawbreaker (1999) and Snow Day (2000), and even got her own short-lived television show, Linc’s in 1998. In 2004, she became a cast member on the highly successful Showtime series The L Word.
For Pam Grier, the more than thirty year struggle to find that elusive glass slipper seems over. Today, her old films are enjoying a huge cult following among men, as well as attracting a new generation of female viewers who can now identify and appreciate her strong, independent characters. While recognition as a powerful actress, role model, sex symbol and pioneer was more often then not, a frustrating journey; Pam, like the super-hero she always portrayed, eventually won in the end.
Contributor: Keith Brooks
Until recently, there were few Black actors in a ever shrinking white-dominated society who were not faced with difficult choices and obstacles. The Bahamas-born Calvin Lockhart, who has died in 2007 was no exception. The handsome, charismatic Lockhart, who had classical acting training and who spoke French, German, Italian and Spanish, was mainly forced to take roles that he disliked.
At the start of the 1970s, more than two decades after the birth of the modern civil rights movement, Black Americans wanted a more positive media image of themselves. However, hollywood had other intentions so Blacks had to settle for broad comedies and slick thrillers, labelled “blaxploitation”. These films became more formulaic as the 1970s progressed – most of them were either “private detective takes on the mob” or “dealer becomes king of the pimps”.
Nevertheless, whatever the quality of the blaxploitation movies, they were directed by Black directors and starred Black actors, playing characters not seen from a white perspective. Lockhart appeared in one of the first Black – as distinct from noir – thrillers, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), directed by Ossie Davis. He was the swindler-cum-preacher Reverend Deke O’Malley, who has conned $87,000 from the “good folks” for his phony Back to Africa movement.
Lockhart played suave gangsters called Silky Slim and Biggie Smalls respectively in Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let’s Do It Again (1975). At least, Melinda (1972), directed by Hugh Robertson, the first Black editor to be nominated for an Oscar, gave Lockhart the chance to play a super-hero, an egotistic disc jockey who has to take on the mobsters who had murdered his girlfriend.
In the same year, Lockhart was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he appeared in several plays, notably Buzz Goodbody’s production of Titus Andronicus in which, as Aaron the Moor, he asks “is Black so base a hue?” and launches into a defence of his colour.
Lockhart had already spent almost five years in England (1965-1970), where he had appeared in TV dramas, such as the Wednesday Play and five British films in 1968: A Dandy in Aspic, The Mercenaries, Only When I Larf, Nobody Runs Forever and Joanna. In the last, directed by Mike Sarne, which also featured Donald Sutherland as a dying English aristocrat, Lockhart, as a nightclub owner was one of the first actors to dent a cinematic taboo with a Black-white love scene with the heroine, Genevieve Waite.
Sarne then cast him as the effete Irving Amadeus in the disastrous Myra Breckinridge (1970), and he played a pimp in John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970), before returning to the US to star in Halls of Anger, (also 1970). The setting of this was an all-Black blackboard jungle which, because of the national integration plan, has to accept 60 white students who suffer the kind of racism that usually affects black people. However, Lockhart, cast as a teacher, solves all the school’s problems by his liberal approach. Despite the theme he disliked making the film and walked off the set more than once.
Lockhart, born Bert Cooper, the youngest of eight children, had left the Bahamas aged 19 to study engineering at New York, but became involved in a YMCA theatre group, and studied with the legendary drama coach Uta Hagen. He made his Broadway debut, taking over from Billy Dee Williams, in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, in the role of the sailor who gets the white girl (Joan Plowright) pregnant.
During his second stay in England, Lockhart was given one of his best film roles in The Beast Must Die (1974) as the millionaire owner of a country estate where he has gathered a number of people, one of whom he hopes to reveal as a werewolf. It was enjoyable, camp nonsense, but it did feature a rich, successful Black man, whose colour is never mentioned, a rare phenomenon in films of the early 1970s. Another potentially interesting part was in The Baron (1977), where Lockhart played a struggling Black film-maker who turns to the underworld to raise money. However, the film descended into many of the cliches of blaxploitation gangster movies.
A couple of years later, Lockhart suffered a heart attack brought on by the news that his son from a former marriage (he was married four times) had lost the use of his legs from jumping under a train. But he returned to work, albeit in a minor capacity. He was in seven episodes as Jonathan Lake in TV’s Dynasty (1985-86), was the head of a Jamaican voodoo-gang in Predator 2 (1990), and had small roles in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks (1992).
In 1979, Calvin met Jennifer Miles in New York, and they had a son in 1981. They married in 2006: she survives him, as do his other two sons and a daughter.
Contributor: Ronald Bergan
* Cotton Comes to Harlem, Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do it Again, The Beast Must Die and Melinda Movie Posters are a part of the Collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk.
Mr. Hooks told Ebony magazine soon after he became the association’s executive director in 1977. “The civil rights movement is not dead. “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
Yet under his leadership the N.A.A.C.P. faced a growing white backlash against school busing and affirmative action programs intended to redress past discrimination. And it repeatedly tangled with the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush to preserve the gains that minorities had made in the 1960s and ’70s. When Mr. Bush selected a conservative black federal judge, Clarence Thomas, to serve on the Supreme Court, the N.A.A.C.P. ultimately opposed the nomination.
“I’ve had the misfortune of serving eight years under Reagan and three under Bush,” Mr. Hooks said in 1992, the year he stepped down as executive director. “It makes a great deal of difference about your expectations. We’ve had to get rid of a lot of programs we had hoped for, so we could fight to save what we already had.”
Mr. Hooks shifted much of the N.A.A.C.P.’s focus to increasing educational and job opportunities for blacks as recession gave way to economic recovery in the Reagan years. But the association had been weakened under the weight of declining membership and shaky finances.
It had also developed an image problem, as that of an outmoded and increasingly irrelevant civil rights group. For some who had watched the N.A.A.C.P. over the years, Mr. Hooks came to symbolize an older generation of leaders who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who had fought for the passage of landmark civil rights legislation but who had become unwilling or unable to adapt to modern times and changed political circumstances.
Mr. Hooks rejected that notion, maintaining that he had succeeded in advancing a just cause, to improve the lot of African-Americans. “I have fought the good fight,” he said in his valedictory to the N.A.A.C.P. in 1992. “I have kept the faith.”
Mr. Hooks had a varied career. He was a lawyer, a businessman and a Baptist minister, heading two separate churches. He was also a gifted orator, mixing quotations from Shakespeare and Keats with the cadence and idioms of the Mississippi Delta.
“There is a beauty in it and a power in it,” Mr. Hooks once said of black preachers’ speaking style.
Mr. Hooks was the first black to be appointed to the criminal court bench in his native Tennessee, and he was the first African-American to be named to the five-member Federal Communications Commission.
“Most people do one or two things in their lifetimes,” Julian Bond, a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., said of Mr. Hooks. “He’s just done an awful lot.”
Benjamin Lawson Hooks was born Jan. 31, 1925, in Memphis, the fifth of seven children of Robert and Bessie Hooks. His father’s photography business gave the family a stable middle-class grounding, allowing Mr. Hooks to attend LeMoyne College in Memphis. Mr. Hooks died on April 25, 2010.
Source: Associated Press
Sista ToFunky met Alex Hafner in January of this year and to my delight Alex is one of the Koolest Cats I ever met. We spent some time getting to know each other and we shared our love for FUNK and all things FUNKY. Alex, who is from Germany, is a DJ and has a wealth of knowledge of R&B, Funk, Soul, Techno and more.
Alex Hafner grew up in Neu Ulm, in southern Germany, where he began working as a DJ at the tender age of 15. At that time he mostly played punk and EBM (Electronic Body Music), until he was exposed to hip hop, at 17. Knowing that most hip hop samples come from funk, soul, and jazz, Alex began listening to the original works—and a love affair began. While he continued to spin electronic music, especially trip hop, Alex always came back to his old favorites for, as he is quick to remind everyone: “Jazz is the teacher, and Funk is the preacher.”
Although he currently has a day job as a pharmaceutical representative, Alex continues to spin music and plan events for groups and individuals—such as his ongoing “Funk My Soul” event series— through his company: www.ah-eventmanagement.de.
The Museum of UnCut Funk is delighted to have Alex Hafner as a friend and a true fan of Blaxploitation film, music and all things FUNKY. To all members and fans of The Museum of UnCut Funk, when in Germany please check out Alex as he spins his tracks.
The Museum of UnCut Funk celebrates the movie poster art of John Solie. John’s legendary skill for depicting “dead-on likenesses” of famous people has kept him in demand by major Hollywood movie studios, television networks, book publishers and magazine editors. He has created over two hundred movie posters and painted Blaxploitation movie stars such as Trina Parks, Billy Dee Williams, Jeanne Bell, Richard Roundtree and Jimmy Cliff for movies such as DarkTown Strutters, Blast, TNT Jackson, the Shaft sequals and The Harder They Come.
John’s work spans much farther than Hollywood. As a talented sculptor as well as illustrator and portrait artist, John was commissioned by CBS Television Network to create a bronze sculpture of “the most trusted man in America,” Mr. Walter Cronkite, which is on display in the lobby of the CBS Building in New York.
Solie is a proud member of the NASA Art Team and has paintings on display at the Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center.
The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes John Solie and his many achievements and his contributions to one of the most exciting times in Black film history.
D’Urville Martin was an actor, director and producer who was considered one of the hardest working men during the Blaxploitation film era.
D’Urville was born on February 11, 1939 in New York City. He first began acting in the mid 1960’s. His first film was Black Like Me. He landed a TV role as Lionel Jefferson in the first two episodes of the television series, The Jeffersons in 1975, before the role was re-cast with actor Mike Evans.
He went on to become a prominent figure in Blaxploitation films. D’Urville acted in several movies with legendary Blaxploitation icon Fred “The Hammer” Williamson. He was especially memorable as Williamson’s reluctant partner Toby in the Nigger Charley pictures.
He played the old childhood friend Reverend Rufus in Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem. D’Urville popped up in two flicks by director William Girdler, playing the villainous pilot in Sheba Baby and a flamboyant pimp in The Zebra Killer.
Martin directed the Rudy Ray Moore comedy Dolemite where he also plays Willie Green, and directed and produced Disco 9000. D’Urville was the associate producer on the film The Final Comedown (aka Blast).
He appeared in guest roles on Dr. Kildare, Daniel Boone, The Monkeys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, All in the Family, Love, American Style, and Ironside.
D’Urville Martin led a hard partying lifestyle, which directly caused his unfortunate and untimely death from a heart attack at age 45 on May 28, 1984.
Sources: Wikipedia, Ask.com, IMDB and Carol Speed Wed Den
Roxie Roker may best be remembered for playing outspoken Helen Willis for ten years on the popular television sitcom The Jeffersons. Along with her TV husband Franklin Cover, they comprised the first interracial married couple on network television. In addition to television, Roxie had also found success on stage and in the occasional feature film.
Born on August 28, 1929 in Miami and raised in Brooklyn, Roxie is the alumni of Howard University and with a drama degree Roxie flew to England to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon. In the 1960s, Roker supported herself with a secretarial job at NBC’s New York office while trying to find acting jobs. Roxie launched her drama career off-Broadway in productions such as Jean Genet’s The Blacks.
During the 1960’s, Roxie hosted a local community television show, but that wasn’t close enough to acting, so she quit to practice her craft full time. With the Negro Ensemble Company she appeared in Ododo and Rosalie Pritchet. In 1974, she earned an Obie and a Tony nomination for The River Niger. In 1975, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Norman Lear cast Roker in The Jeffersons.
Roxie occasionally guest-starred on other series and appeared in television movies. Her feature-film appearances were rare. In 1974, she made her debut in Claudine as Mrs. Winston. In the ’90s, Roker resumed her stage career, appearing in a theatrical version of The Jeffersons and then touring opposite Mary Martin and Carol Channing in Legends. Roxie’s son, Lenny Kravitz is a rock musician and record producer and Roxie’s cousin The Today Show weatherman and TV producer Al Roker.
Roxie Roker died on December 2, 1995 in Los Angeles of breast cancer.
Sources: IMBD, Wikipedia, Ask.com
