Kool Cats And Hip Chicks Blog

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

Thalmus Rasulala was born Jack Chowder on November 15th, 1939. One of the many Black actors from the 1970’s and beyond who never got his rightful due, Thalmus will always be at the top of my list of great performers. He amassed a wealth of television, film, directing and other credits, including winning a Theatre World Award for his role in the Broadway production of “Hello Dolly” with Pearl Bailey and an all Black cast.

Thalmus was a man among men, known for his roles from the height of the 1970’s Blaxploitation explosion. In 1972, he portrayed Dr. Gordon Thomas in Blacula, a widely successful film that mixed horror and gore with the excitement of blaxploitation.

In 1972, he also played Sidney Lord James, the lead character in Cool Breeze, a remake of The Asphalt Jungle with an all Black cast. In this film, James is an ex-convict who plans to steal $3 million worth of jewels, sell them, and use the money to start a bank to back Black businesses. He is assisted by two pals, his half-brother and a preacher who also works as a thief. The operation is ultimately backed by a man who cheats on his wheelchair-bound wife with a sexy woman.

In 1973, Thalmus starred in one of the best classic pimp movies ever, Willie Dynamite. In this movie Thalmus played Robert Daniels, the D.A.

The Slams is a violent prison drama from 1973, in which an imprisoned criminal finds himself flooded with offers to spring him if he reveals the secret location of the $1.5 million he stole from the mob before he went to jail. Thalmus is credited as the Assistant Director on this flick.

In 1975, Thalmus played the role of Charlie the grocery store owner in Cornbread, Earl and Me. Cornbread, a Black kid who strives to escape his ghetto surroundings. He does so by becoming a high school basketball star–and the idol of the other youngsters in his community. On the verge of starting college on a scholarship, Cornbread is mistakenly killed by a police officer.

In 1975, Thalmus also starred opposite Pam Grier in Friday Foster. Thalmus plays Blake Tarr, the richest Black man in America. Grier plays Friday Foster, a freelance photographer with an insatiable thirst for adventure. In her assignment to photograph Tarr, Friday unearths a conspiracy to assassinate him.

In 1975, Thalmus starred again with Pam Grier and Fred Williamson in Bucktown. This film is about a man named Duke Johnson, played by Williamson, who moves to a small and racially divided southern town where his nightclub owning brother was murdered after he refused to pay crooked white cops for “protection.” When he is threatened himself, he calls in some of his buddies, one of whom is played by Thalmus named Roy, to help him. When the friends decide to take over the town, Johnson becomes a one-man army on a mission to oust the baddies.

In 1975, Thalmus starred with Dean Martin in Mr. Ricco. In this obscure drama, Martin, a San Francisco lawyer defends Black militant Frankie Steele, played by Thamlus, who is on trial for murdering a cop.

He was also a special guest on the 1975 episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’ hosted by Richard Pryor. They did a great ‘Exorcist’ parody with Thalmus as Father Merrin and Pryor as Father Karras. The priests dished out some intense discipline to Regan (played by Laraine Newman) when she started bad mouthing their mammas.

In 1976, Thalmus’ went on to land a role in Alex Haley’s Roots as Kunta Kinte’s father Omro. In 1977, he played Dr. Alvarez in Killer On Board with Patty Duke, George Hamilton and Jane Seymour.

Other notable film and television credits include:

1974 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman – Ned

1976 – 1977 – Played Bill Thomas (Mabel King’s ex) on several episodes of ‘What’s Happening?

1976 – Adios Amigo – Noah

1978 – The President’s Mistress – Lt. Gordon

1979 – The Bermuda Triangle – Coast Guard Officer

1981 – The Sophisticated Gents – Snake

1884 – The Jerk Too – Crossroads

1986 – The Defiant Ones - Fred

1986 – The Boss’ Wife – Barney

1988 – Steven Segal’s Above the Law – Deputy Supt. Crowder

1989 – The Preppie Murder

1989 – Trekkies probably recognize him as Capt. Donald Varley on the ‘Contagion’ episode of ‘The Next Generation.

1990 – Lambada – Wesley Wilson

1991 – He was the police commissioner in New Jack City, and played Jack Chowder

His final film role was in 1992 as General Afir in Mom and Dad Save the World, which was released posthumously

Thalmus Rashlala died of a massive heart attack in Albuquerque NM on October 9^th 1991. He was only 52. He was survived by his wife Sherilyn and four children.

Source: Wikipedia, IMDB, Answers.com and Racks and Razors

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Bob Balser began his career in 1955 as a layout artist at Norman Wright Productions. A year later he was Layout Production Supervisor on the title sequence of Michael Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days.

In 1958 Bob was the Title Designer for The Brain Eaters. Bob was the Animated Director on The Yellow Submarine, a 1968 animated featured based on The Beatles.

From 1971-1973 Bob was Supervising Director on Rankin-Bass’s Jackson Five series. The next season he opened Pegbar Productions in Barcelona, Spain, and continued his Jackson Five work. Over the next two decades he did nearly a dozen other series for European TV, in addition to contract work for US television.

In 1974, he directed Little Boa Peep, By Hoot or by Crook, Big Beef at the OK Corral and The Badge and the Beautiful. In 1989, he directed the TV series The Pink Panther and Friends, and in 1994 he directed the series Les Tres Bessones (The Triplets).

Below is original Jack Davis art from The Jackson Five series, shared by Robert Balser from his collection.

B93NRRBAC89



The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes John E. DeCoste aka Terry Carter. Terry was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 16, 1928, the only child of William and Mercedes DeCoste. Terry’s mother was a native of the Dominican Republic. His father was American born, of Argentine and African-American descent. Terry’s parents taught him Spanish as well as English as a child. Growing up in a bilingual, bicultural household, in a predominantly Italian, Williamsburg neighborhood, next door to a Jewish synagogue, was an early influence in developing Terry’s appreciation for cultural diversity.



Terry remembers walking his first picket line at age 8, at his father’s side, in a demonstration to support demands for better conditions for recipients of “home relief”, as the welfare program of the day was called. At the age of 9, Terry acted for the very first time: in the role of the 15th century Portuguese explorer “Vasco da Gama” in a historical play about the discovery of America, in auditorium of his elementary school, P.S. 88 in Brooklyn.

When Terry graduated Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1946, he enlisted in the merchant marine to see the world. As a crew member on the SS Marine Marlin, he sailed to Germany and walked among the utter devastation that was once the proud port of Bremerhaven. The merchant ship took on as passengers displaced persons, and former prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors and transported them from Germany and other European ports to Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. After six months as a seaman, Terry took a job as a mail clerk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

As part of the museum’s program, the museum film department exhibited a seemingly endless film festival of avant-garde independent and foreign films. Terry tried to see every one of them. The year that he spent at the museum altered his life course: he became an ardent devotee of the arts and an avid film buff. He made acquaintances with many young painters and writers, some of whom later became famous.

After that year, Terry went off to Northeastern University in Boston to study pre-law. While there, he worked weekends as a “piano player” with a jazz combo, drawing on his experience of classical piano study from age 8 through 15. They played at night clubs, and for weddings and bar mitzvahs. In the 1950s, while studying law at St. John’s University Law School in New York, he met the well-known theatre actors Howard Da Silva and Morris Carnovsky. They convinced him to consider the pursuit of a career as an actor.

Realizing that drama training would help him in the courtroom, he studied law by day and acting by night. His first drama teacher was Howard Da Silva, who offered him a scholarship at Actors Mobile Theatre, Da Silva’s acting school. Terry took classes in Method Acting. It wasn’t long before he lost interest in the prospects of a law career: After his second year at law school, he dropped out and began to study acting full-time. As a young teenager, Terry had already taken on the nickname “Terry”, after the adventurous young hero of the popular newspaper cartoon Terry & the Pirates by Milton Caniff. Terry kept on using the name through high school. When he got into show business, he got tired of the white people asking him how come he had a foreign-sounding last name, since most African Americans they knew had Anglo-Saxon surnames such as Wilson, Jones or Jackson. So, Terry switched from “DeCoste” to the more English-sounding “Carter” for his professional name, as did many actors of that era who had foreign-sounding names (e.g. Kirk Douglas, John Garfield and Jack Benny), and has used it ever since. 

Terry’s acting career started in 1952 with a leading role in Edward Chodorov’s Decision, at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in Greenwich Village. He became a member of the theatre group and the following year, in Les Pine’s play, Monday’s Heroes, he played the part of a teenager in a Jewish family, with no special makeup. It was an early experiment in non-traditional casting. Terry studied with Herbert Berghof, Uta Hagen and Stella Adler in those years. Terry landed his first Broadway role in 1954, as the male lead opposite Eartha Kitt, in the play Mrs. Patterson. The company toured major cities before opening on Broadway at the National Theater, for a run of several months. Later, he played the part of “Howard” in the revival of E.Y. Harburg’s Finian’s Rainbow (1955) at the City Center Theater.

In 1956, Terry was one of the first black actors on equal-footing as a regular on a TV sitcom series, portraying “Private Sugarman” on Phil Silvers’ Sgt. Bilko (aka You’ll Never get Rich aka The Phil Silvers Show). The series lasted four years, and was the model for subsequent comedy series about the military, such as Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy. In 1957, Terry played the title role in “Bob Thomas of the Philadelphia Inquirer”, part of The Big Story series which focused on the outstanding achievements of journalists. A non-smoker, Terry had to learn to smoke in order to play key scenes in the teleplay.

The series sponsor was Pall Mall cigarettes, and the show was broadcast live, so it was crucial that Terry smoke convincingly. He carried it off, but he has never smoked another cigarette since. 

In 1962, Terry returned to Europe for an extended stay. He lived some months in Paris and then spent a year in Denmark before moving onto Rome. In Rome, he learned to speak fluent Italian. Terry fell in love with his language tutor, the Italo-Yugoslavian Anna Scratuglia. In the fall of 1963, Terry returned to the United States. In 1964, he asked Anna to join him in New York. They married and later had two children: a son, Miguel, and a daughter, Melinda, both of whom were raised speaking Italian as well as English.

In 1965, walking up Broadway one day, Terry ran into a producer friend who suggested that he do a screen test for the position of TV newscaster. Although he had no journalistic background, he drew upon his 13 years of experience as an actor and landed the job: Terry Carter became world’s first black TV anchor newscaster, for WBZ-TV Eyewitness News in Boston, the Westinghouse flagship station, for the next 3 years. In addition to covering crime stories and “hard” news, Terry became Boston TV’s first opening night drama and movie critic. Even though Terry was now a TV newscaster, he still maintained his relationship with the William Morris Agency.

While summering in Rome in 1967, Terry was sent by the Morris Agency to meet Italian producer Dino deLaurentiis and avant-garde art film director Tinto Brass, who asked him to star in his movie, Nerosubianco (aka Black on White or Attraction), set in London. Since he was still a TV newscaster, Terry had to request a 13-week leave of absence from his news anchor job, in order to work in the film. Although it was an unprecedented request for Westinghouse, he got it. Before long, he realized that his first love was acting. Once his three-year newsroom contract was up, he packed his bags and he and his wife moved to Hollywood, in search of greener pastures.

His first important role on arriving in Hollywood in 1968 was as a detective named “Jaffie”, in the made-for-TV movie Company of Killers, in which he worked alongside Van Johnson and Ray Milland. From 1968-71, singer Diahann Carroll became the first Black female to star in her own TV sitcom series, Julia. Terry had a recurring role as Julia’s boyfriend “Bert”.

 In December 1969, only 5 months after Neil Armstrong takes his first step onto the Moon, Terry played the role of “Mike Carter”, the first Black astronaut to the Moon, in The Bold Ones: The New Doctors. Many of the scenes were filmed in the actual Apollo Spacecraft.

During the 1970’s Terry starred in several Blaxploitation films, including the 1974 film Foxy Brown with Pam Grier. He also starred in Abby 1974, and Brother on the run 1973. In 1975, Terry founded Meta-4 Productions, Inc., a small Los Angeles production company, through which he produced and directed more than one hundred industrial and educational films and videos for public broadcasting and for virtually every agency of the federal government. Terry also formed the Council for Positive Images, Inc., (CPI) a non-profit organization of which he is still president, in 1979, dedicated to enhancing intercultural and interethnic understanding through audiovisual communication. Under the Council’s auspices, he has produced and directed award-winning dramatic and documentary programs for PBS, focusing on cultural and historical topics.

In 1978, McCloud’s creator Glen Larson and producer Leslie Stevens were asked to make a major film for television in response to the success of the Star Wars trilogy of George Lucas. Star Wars special effects specialist John Dykstra and his team were brought in to start on the models for what would become the most expensive film ever made for television: Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World. The cast was a mix of young, still relatively unknown actors like Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict, combined with legends as Bonanza’s Lorne Greene, Ray Milland, Lew Ayres and Alfred Hyde-White.

Terry, who’d just worked with creator Glen Larson and producer Leslie Steven on McCloud for 7 years, was selected for the part of “Lt. Boomer”. As chance would have it, Terry broke his ankle roller skating with his daughter a shortly before Galactica started filming. The part of “Lt. Boomer” was then re-cast and given to young actor Herb Jefferson, Jr. But the 7 years on McCloud must have made an impression on its producers, because Terry was later offered another part in the series: that of “Colonel Tigh”, the right hand of “Commander Adama”. Still a warrior rather then a diplomat, “Tigh” was often at odds with “Adama” on his decisions. It was a part Terry found even more challenging and satisfying to play Since Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a Star World cost an enormous amount of money to make it was quickly decided to turn it into a TV series. A combination of multiple last-minute script revisions, the costs of $1 million per episode and a bad TV time slot made the network decide to cancel the show after just one season.

Terry made a reprise in 1999 and played the part of now “President Tigh” in Richard Hatch’ trailer Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming, an attempt to revive the original series. In 1980, Terry was elected to the Board of Governors of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, where he served two terms. In 1983,

Terry was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He served on the Documentary Committee and the Foreign Films Committee for the Oscars. That same year, Northeastern University awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications. In 1985, Terry received a Los Angeles Emmy Award for K*I*D*S, a TV miniseries he created, produced and directed. K*I*D*S was the story of a multi-racial group of teenagers struggling to cope with some of the adult-sized conflicts confronting youth in America today. In 1987-88, Terry produced and directed JazzMasters, a series of video portraits of twelve great jazz artists for TV2 Denmark. The series featured interviews and performances of Chet Baker, Kenny Drew, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Carmen McRae, James Moody, Niels-Henning, Wayne Shorter, Clark Terry, and Randy Weston. In 1988, Terry produced and directed the award-winning, Emmy-nominated TV musical documentary A Duke Named Ellington about the life and work of pianist, composer, bandleader and jazz legend Duke Ellington. Making this documentary required Terry to spend a lot of time in Copenhagen, Denmark, where Duke’s son Mercer lived.

In 1991, Terry was sent to China by the USIA (United States Information Agency), on a cultural lecture tour. He visited then-British Hong Kong, and Beijing, Chengdu, Chong Ching, Guang Zhou and Shen Yang, meeting Chinese filmmakers and students, and lecturing on his experience as a filmmaker in the U.S. In 1992, Terry started research and development on what is to become a 90-minute documentary for PBS about African-American anthropologist, dancer, and choreographer Katherine Dunham, whose show-stopping performances greatly influenced the evolution of American dance theatre. Terry’s biopic Katherine Dunham: Dancing with Life is about Ms. Dunham’s extraordinary life and work. In 1998, Terry appeared in the Swedish international thriller movie and TV miniseries Hamilton, in which he played “Texas Slim” head of the CIA.

Filmography: Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming (1999)

Trailer - Hamilton (1998)

Battlestar Galactica: Saga of a World (1978)

Abby (1974)

Benji (1974)

Foxy Brown (1974)

Brother on the Run (1973)

Nerosublanco (1969)

Parrish (1961)

Source: Wikipedia, IMBD and Terry Carter.net

Actress and producer Sheila Elaine Frazier was born on November 13, 1948 in the Bronx, New York to Dorothy Dennis and Eugene Cole Frazier. Frazier grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City until the age of ten, when she moved with her mother to Englewood, New Jersey.

There, her neighbors included stars and future stars like Clyde McPhatter, Van McCoy, The Isley Brothers and Dolly and Jackie McClean. Frazier attended P.S. 97 in New York City and Liberty School in New Jersey. At Englewood’s Dwight Morrow High School, her classmates were Margaret Travolta and Hazel Smith.

Inspired by Susan Hayward’s performance in the film, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Frazier longed to be an actress, but was hampered by a speech impediment. Graduating in 1966, Frazier moved to New York City where she served in various clerical positions with Allied Stores, Boutique magazine and the United Negro College Fund.

Recruited by the noted Negro Ensemble Company photographer Bert Andrews, Frazier became acquainted with the New York arts community. She studied acting at HB (Herbert Berkoff) Studios in New York under the direction of Bill Hickey and Uta Hagen. Then, actor Richard Roundtree encouraged her to take actinglessons from Gilbert Moses at the Negro Ensemble Company which led to additional training with Dick Anthony Williams at the New Federal Theatre. Frazier, then working for a real estate company, had done some industrial films and commercials before Roundtree helped her get anauditionwith Gordon Parks, who was casting for a new film, Super Fly. In the film, Frazier plays the sultry girlfriend, “Georgia,” of the hustler, “Priest,” portrayed by Ron O’Neal. The tremendous box office success of Super Fly and her instant street recognition surprised Frazier, as she was and still is admired as an iconic beauty in the black community. She appeared in Super Fly T.N.T., the sequel to Super Fly and other black genre films of the 1970s including Three The Hard Way with Jim Brown and The Super Cops.

Frazier appeared in a number of film but by 1980, Frazier was hosting a community affairs show on KNXT-TV in Los Angeles. In 1982, she was hired as a story editor by Richard Pryor’s Indigo Productions. She was coordinating producer for Essence magazine’s television series in 1985 and produced BET’s Live from L.A. with Tonya Hart. Frazier worked with the talent on BET’s Screen Scene from 1992 to 1999 and headed up the Talent Department for BET for thirteen years.

As founding director of Frazier Multimedia Group in 2003, Frazier provides talent grooming and field production. Her 2008 documentary film on African American intergenerational wisdom transmission is entitled You Don’t Get Old by Being A Fool.

Frazier lives in Los Angeles. She is married to John Atchison and has two sons. Her oldest son is music producer, Derek McKeith.

New York Times Interview 2007

Sheila Frazier is a star of the 1972 film “Super Fly.” She discussed how her acting career came about with the column’s author, Devan Sipher.

Did you plan to be an actress from a young age?

Sheila Frazier I always loved acting, but I grew up as a stutterer. I never enjoyed standing up in front of people saying anything, because I could barely speak. In elementary school, a teacher said he would help me. He made me get up and recite a story I wrote in front of sixth-grade assembly. He made an announcement: “I don’t want any laughter. Sheila’s a stutterer. I don’t want any laughter.” It was the most painful thing I ever went through in my life. I didn’t want to go to college. The idea of having to speak publicly in any classroom just horrified me.

[At 17, she left her home in Englewood, N.J., and moved to New York, where she lived with her godmother and worked as a secretary.]

How did you end up in movies?

S.F. One day I was on the train going home, and this guy approached me saying: “Have you ever thought about modeling? I would really like to take some photographs of you.”

And you trusted him?

S.F. I was naïve. Something struck me as legitimate. I went to his studio, and his boss was a well-known photographer, Bert Andrews. Bert chronicled black theater on Broadway and became a lifelong friend of mine. We took pictures, and I did some runway modeling. But I never liked it. Also did some print work. Never really liked that either. Too much focus of attention on me. As a stutterer, it becomes difficult if there is that intensive focus on you. Then I met Richard Roundtree. He had just come off the road doing “The Great White Hope.” I said I always wanted to act, but I had this stutter.

[Mr. Roundtree suggested she audition to study at the Negro Ensemble Company.]

S.F. I prepared this monologue. I remember standing there. I was petrified. I was talking to myself like “What are you doing?” But I remembered Richard said to focus on the piece. When I started the piece a part of me stood outside of myself, and I didn’t stutter. I didn’t stutter once. It amazed me. I realized there’s something in the brain you can switch off. You can choose to be somebody else. I chose not to be a stutterer.

Five months after being with the Negro Ensemble Company I read that Gordon Parks Jr. was directing his first film, called “Super Fly.” I ran into Richard and asked if he could help me get an audition.

[And he did.]

S.F. All these great stars I had seen on television and in movies were there. I remember thinking they’re not even going to look at me. Richard said, “Sheila, when you walk in there, you have to have the attitude that no one else can do the job but you.” I put my feet up on the director’s desk and said, “You can send everyone else home, because no one else can do this job but me.”

As a religious woman, how did you handle working in the film industry?

S.F. When I first came to Hollywood I kept that very private. I thought if anyone saw me reading the Bible on the set they would tease me. I didn’t want to be teased.

I was working on a film with Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, and I was in the makeup trailer and I was reading my Bible. The makeup artist came in, and I tried to hide it. She said “Why are you hiding it?” She taught me never to hide it. But I wasn’t there preaching. I wasn’t trying to influence anyone on what was right or wrong for their lives. This is just where I got strength.

 
Film Credits:

“Super Fly” (1972)

“Super Fly T.N.T.” (1973)

“Three the Hard Way” (1974)

“California Suite” (1978)

“The Hitter” (1979)

“Two of a Kind” (1983)

“All About You” (2001)

“The Last Stand” (2006)

Television Guest Appearances:

“Starsky and Hutch” (1977)

“King” (1978) television mini-series

“Lou Grant” (1981)

“Dallas” (1982)

“The Love Boat” (1982)

“Gimme a Break!”(1985)

“Magnum, P.I.” (1985)

“Cagney & Lacey” (1986)

“227″ (1988)

“The West Wing” (1999)

“The District” (2000)

“Navy NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service” (2004)

My Son - An interview with Kam Williams

DeSuperfly’s girlfriend in the 1972 film is none other than the beautiful and talented Sheila Frazier.  She came out recently to NYC’s Sweet Rhythm with her son Derek McKeith, to help congratulate him and spread the word about his new release.

In an interview with Kam Williams she spoke of her son saying, “Talk about talent! I’m really proud of Derek. He’s a music performer, writer and producer. He has a band with a unique sound. Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to see him perform I can only think, ‘Wow, he’s better than I could have ever been.’ It seems that his audiences think so, too.”

Sources: The New York Times, Bean Soup Times and Ask.com

Naomi Sims: Entrepreneur; Writer; Fashion Model

Naomi Sims, one of the top Black businesswomen in the United States, began her career as the first Black supermodel. According to Essence magazine, “Never had a model so dark-skinned received so much exposure, praise, and professional prestige.” After just five years, however, Sims decided to give up modeling to start her own wig business. Sims continued to expand her business interests in the 1980s, launching her own perfume and a line of prestige cosmetics. As founder and CEO of the Naomi Sims Collection, she oversaw a multimillion-dollar range of wigs, skin care products, and cosmetics specifically designed for Black women.

Naomi Sims was born on March 30, 1949, in Oxford, Mississippi. Later, she moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she attended Westinghouse High School. Other than that, information about Sims’s childhood is contradictory. However, all sources agree that after graduating from Westinghouse, Sims moved to New York to live with her sister Betty, a flight attendant who later also became a model. Sims had won a small scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she studied merchandising and textile design. At the same time, she earned another small scholarship to study psychology at New York University, where she took classes in the evenings. Despite the scholarships and her sister’s help, Sims soon realized that she needed a job, and a counselor at the Fashion Institute suggested that she try modeling.

At 5’10″, with dark skin, Sims had not been considered particularly attractive as a teenager. “Black wasn’t beautiful then,” she said in Black Enterprise. “The darker your skin, the less good-looking you were considered; and I was too tall, and too skinny.” In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, however, the idea that only light-skinned women were attractive was being called into question.

Still, when Sims approached modeling agencies in New York, she was told outright that there was no work for Black models. Alternatively, Sims told Mademoiselle that the agencies made “very insipid excuses–’too many of my type’–and there were no other Black women and certainly not anybody of my type!”

Undeterred, Sims tried a different approach. She contacted a well-known fashion photographer, persuading him to meet with her; to her surprise, he agreed. Immediately spotting Sims’s potential, the photographer sent her to meet his wife, a fashion editor at the New York Times. In 1967, after her very first modeling session, Sims found herself on the cover of the Times’; Sunday magazine.

It was a huge break, but when Sims returned to the modeling agencies, she found that nothing had changed; they still insisted there was no work for Black models. Finally, she approached former top model Wilhelmina Cooper, who was just starting her own agency. A born businesswoman, Sims made Cooper an offer she could not refuse: Sims would mail out copies of the Times layout to 100 different advertising agencies, along with Cooper’s phone number. If anyone was interested, Cooper had just earned a modeling commission; if not, she had wasted no time or energy on the project. To Cooper’s amazement, the response to the mailing was immediate and overwhelming, and a few days later, Sims was officially on her books.

Became First Black Supermodel

After that brief period of discouragement, Sims saw her modeling career take off at blinding speed. Within a week of joining Wilhelmina Cooper, she was hired for a national television commercial for AT&T. Later that year, she appeared on the cover of Life magazine, which ran an article about new Black models. In 1969 and 1970, she was voted top model of the year by International Mannequins. Just two years after beginning her modeling career, Sims had appeared in virtually every fashion magazine in the world.

While Sims’s skin color was newsworthy, her walk received just as much attention. According to the Kansas City Star, “Her walk became her hallmark. It wasn’t like the glide or bounce of many models. Her serpentine movements of the arms, torso, and legs were beautiful to watch and as subtly controlled as a dancer’s.”

“When she put on a garment, something just m-a-arvelous happened,” fashion designer Halston, one of the first to hire Sims, was quoted as saying in Black Enterprise. Even Cooper, who had been slow to see Sims’s potential, was quoted in Black Enterprise: “She could make any garment–even a sackcloth–look like sensational haute couture.”

Gave Up Modeling for Business

In 1973, Sims married Michael Alistair Findlay, a Scotsman who ran an art gallery in New York; the couple later had one son, Pip. The same year, Sims decided to give up modeling, though she was just 24 and potentially had a long career in front of her. “Modeling was never my ultimate goal,” she was quoted as saying in Black Business Leaders. “I started to model to supplement my income to go to college….but the idea of starting my own business had always appealed to me, and I was fortunate that my first career led to my second.”

Sims’s second career was a business selling wigs specifically designed for Black women. The idea came directly out of Sims’s struggle with her own hair while she was modeling, when she was under pressure to look different in every picture. “I was sort of driven to distraction in terms of how to vary my hairstyle,” she told Black Enterprise.

One easy solution would be to wear a wig, but Sims was dissatisfied with the wigs available at the time, which had smooth, straight fibers that looked nothing like Black hair. So she decided to start experimenting in her kitchen. “I got hold of a current best-selling fiber for white women, wet the fiber down, put it in my oven at a very low temperature, and baked it for maybe five or ten minutes,” she explained in Black Enterprise. The result was a curlier, coarser fiber–and a new business idea. “I thought it might be possible to market this type of product.”

After approaching several wig manufacturers, she finally inked a deal with Metropa Company, a small import-export firm that sold a line of wigs for Black women. The company agreed to put up some money, and make its research laboratories available to Sims. “Those were scary days in the beginning,” Sims was quoted as saying in Black Enterprise. “It had to be a fiber that wouldn’t get too frizzy, wouldn’t get too straight, and wouldn’t lose its curl.”

Developed New Wig Fiber

After experimenting with different techniques, the company developed a lightweight wig fiber that looked like straightened Black hair, and did not have to be set. The fiber was patented and trademarked under the name Presselle, and the first line of the Naomi Sims Collection went into production.

For the first three years, Sims designed all the wig styles herself. “Basically, we duplicated the styles that were popular–what Black women in the street were wearing, and combined that with my fashion sense,” Sims told Black Enterprise. She also wrote and designed the advertisements, and traveled around the country promoting her wigs.

Initially, store buyers were skeptical about the need for Sims’s product, not understanding the difference between Black hair and Caucasian hair. Customers could certainly tell the difference, however: in the first year, sales of Sims’s wigs reached $5 million. By 1979, when the Naomi Sims Collection was spun off into a separate division, it was generating the majority of Metropa’s sales.

Wrote Books for Black Women

During this time, Sims also launched a career as an author. Her first book, All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, was published in 1976. As well as beauty tips, the book included information on nutrition, disease prevention, common health problems, fashion, and etiquette. “I had originally planned to call this book The Beautiful Black Woman, but as my thinking and reading plunged me into all areas of our Black female ethic, I soon realized that this approach was too one-dimensional,” Sims wrote in the book’s preface. The book sold well, and three years later was in its tenth printing.

In 1979, Sims published her second book, How to Be a Top Model. Three years later, she published two more books: All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, and All About Success for the Black Woman. In All About Success, Sims was able to draw on her own experience as an entrepreneur, offering advice about landing a job, dealing with corporate politics, and juggling a career, marriage, and motherhood. In a review of the book for Black Enterprise, Phil W. Petrie wrote, “I am going to ignore the reference to gender in the title of this book and give it to my sons.”

Launched Second Company

Meanwhile, beginning in the early 1980s, Sims gradually expanded her business interests to include perfume, skin care products, and cosmetics for Black women. Her signature fragrance, Naomi, was launched in 1981. Four years later, she founded her own company, Naomi Sims Beauty Products Ltd.

In 1987, the company introduced a line of skin-care products, with Sims as the spokesmodel. “One of the things people notice about me is the quality of my skin,” Sims told Anne-Marie Shiro of the New York Times. “We decided I was the best person to advertise my products.” Black Enterprise’s Alfred Edmond Jr. concurred, “Her look–clean, simple, and elegant–conveys sophistication, class and power.” Edmond continued, “It’s the look the company is selling–and the public is buying.” Shortly afterward, Sims added cosmetics to the mix. By 1989, Naomi Sims Beauty Products was grossing $5 million, and its products were distributed not only across the United States, but also in Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.

From the beginning, all of Sims’s products have been marketed as prestige items, at prestige prices. When Naomi Sims wigs were first introduced, they were considered expensive at $20 to $30; and when Naomi perfume was launched in 1981, it cost $100 an ounce. The pricing policy was deliberate, Sims told Black Enterprise: “When I started my business I insisted that my wigs not be put on sale… [because] it would cheapen the image. I know as a Black consumer that we will go out of our way to pursue the best products –no matter what the cost, we buy quality.”

By the late 1980s, however, Sims’s firm was being challenged by larger, white-owned firms, who wanted a share of the Black cosmetics market. In 2001, the competition for the dollars of Black women remained intense; nearly all the major cosmetics companies now offer products aimed at Black women. According to an article on the website women.com, “In the past, the global beauty market was called ‘ethnic’ and was catered to by Black-owned makeup companies like…Naomi Sims. Recent competition has sounded a wake-up call for these old brands.”

While Sims’s accomplishments as an entrepreneur are truly impressive, she has been criticized by some feminists, who accused her of making money from women’s fears about their own attractiveness. Sims brushed off these criticisms, however: “I am sure I have my share of Black female critics and enemies,” she was quoted as saying in Black Business Leaders. “It doesn’t matter. I adore women and I know I am a woman’s woman….I would be nowhere if it weren’t for Black women.”

Naomi Sims honored at Oprah’s Legends Ball.

Career

Fashion model, 1967-73; Naomi Sims Collection, founder and CEO, 1973-; author: All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, 1976; How to Be a Top Model, 1979; All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, 1982; All About Success for the Black Woman, 1982; Naomi Sims Beauty Products, founder and chairman, 1985-.

Awards

Model of the Year Award, 1969, 1970; Women of Achievement, Ladies Home Journal, 1970; New York City Board of Education Award, 1970; Key to Cleveland, 1971; Women of Achievement, American Cancer Society, 1972; International Best Dressed List, 1971-3, 1976, 1977; Modeling Hall of Fame, International Mannequins, 1977.

Works

Selected writings

• All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, 1976.
• How to Be a Top Model, 1979.
• All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, 1982.
• All About Success for the Black Woman, 1982.

Further Reading

Books

• African American Business Leaders, Greenwood Press, 1994.
• All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, by Naomi Sims, Doubleday, 1976.

Periodicals

• Black Enterprise, March 1989, p. 42; July 1979, p. 41.
• Fortune, Nov. 9, 1987, p. 162.
• Mademoiselle, August 1974, p. 296.
• New York Times, May 15, 1987, p. A20.

Sources: Fashion Illustration, Wikipedia and Flickr

Frankie The Artist: Frankie Crocker, the New York radio personality imbued the R&B format with a wide-reaching musical palette that includes music from just about every genre.

Born in Buffalo, NY, Crocker began his radio career at Williamsville, NY, station WUFO, while studying Pre law. His other stints include other N.Y. radio stations WWRL and Top 40 station WMCA. Becoming a program director at WBLS-FM and WLIB-AM in the early 1970s, Crocker began to shape an innovative and influential radio format that would become known as progressive R&B while garnering the top spot in the ratings. His timing was perfect as a new kind of R&B station was beginning to spring up on the FM dial around the country.

Crocker’s format emphasized less jive talk, a cross blend of jazz, pop/rock, sophisticated soul, funk, and R&B. The sound is similar to the sound of the smooth jazz stations of the late ’90′s.

The Venus Flytrap character on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinatti bears a slight resemblance to Crocker’s sound and flamboyant style. The term urban contemporary was coined by the late New York DJ Frankie Crocker in the mid 1970s.

Frankie the Actor: In addition to radio, Crocker was one of VH1′s original VJs and hosted both NBC’s Friday Night Videos and Solid Gold. As his formidable reputation grew, Crocker was offered different opportunities. He appeared in the movies Cleopatra Jones, Five on the Black Hand Side, Darktown Strutters, Jimi Hendrix, Death Drug, Taking Heat and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

He released two disco oriented albums on Casablanca Records as Frankie Crocker’s Heart and Soul Orchestra — The Heart and Soul Orchestra, Love in C Minor, and  Disco Suite Symphony No. 1 in Rhythm and Excellence.

Later he hosted NBC TV’s Friday Night Videos, was one of the first video DJs on cable channel VH1, had his own syndicated radio show, Classic Soul Countdown.

The Intro on the Ike & Tina Turner Heart and Soul series was done by  DJ Frankie Crocker And MC Eddie Burkes.

FrankieFrankie Crocker, Dead Road, Central Park, circa 1979

Malcolm Pinckney / New York City Parks Photo Archive

In the late 1970s, the Dead Road (located to the west of the Central Park Bandshell) became the venue for spontaneous disco roller dancing.

The legendary Frankie Crocker, WBLS disc jockey and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, is captured at this “scene.”

To this day, the locale draws large weekend crowds, including many foreign tourists eager to see the latest moves of hip New Yorkers.

Sources: FrankieCocker.net, Wikipedia, Soul Patrol, Power House Radio, You Tube.

Michael Jackson left this earth too soon and so unexpectedly and tragically.

The Museum of UnCut Funk is working through profound sadness over his passing by honoring him in this blog with a quick look at his career as a comic book character.

Considering how fast nowadays comic books – perhaps fueled by a need-for-sales-and-publicity desperation – have embraced Barack Obama and thrown him into the Marvel Universe, the Image Universe and even stuck him back in the barbarian age, you might have thought they would have equally embraced someone who was as globally popular as Michael Jackson. Particularly given the fact that as Michael Dean wrote in The Comics Journal #270, Michael Jackson almost bought Marvel Comics.

You’d be wrong. Michael Jackson’s comic book appearances were few and far between. While he appeared many times in MAD and CRACKED Magazines, they really do not count, as they are “magazines” and not comic books.

He made a pre-plastic surgery appearance in Marvel Comics’ Spoof #3 (1973), as part of The Jackson 5. The story was co-written by Steve Gerber and Bruce Carlin and illustrated by Henry Scarpelli. This was similar to MAD and CRACKED and even Marvel’s Crazy, but Spoof was in comic book not magazine format.

Michael Jackson and his brothers were also drawn as part of the audience shown attending the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali fight in this 1978 DC comic.

A few years later the self-proclaimed King of Pop appeared in Longshot #2 (October, 1985) by Ann Nocenti and Art Adams.

In July,1987 Eclipse Comics published Captain EO (actually known as Eclipse 3-D Special #18), a 3-D comic book, based on the Michael Jackson Disneyland ride.

And then in 1991, Revolutionary Comics released Rock And Roll Comics #36, a bio-comic of Michael Jackson.

The Museum of UnCut Funk salutes Michael Jackson and all the contributions he’s made to music and the world.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

She Was Ahead Of Her Time

This tireless fighter for the poor made history in Congress and at the Democratic National Convention.

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, 1924. As a young girl, she was sent to Barbados to stay with her grandmother and attend the British school system, which she later credited with giving her a “good education.”

She returned to New York, where she attended Girls H.S. and Brooklyn College. She was an excellent student, graduating with honors, but she, like so many other Blacks, was unable to find work equal to her educational background. She took a job at a day-care center in Harlem. It was there that her life-long mission of helping children began. She attended Columbia University at night and received her master’s degree.

In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, and began to get involved in local politics.

In 1964, she ran for and won a seat in the state assembly. She fought to get funding for day-care centers and schools. She had spent much of her time with poor people and children, and was especially sensitive to their needs.

Four years later, she made history by running for and winning a seat in Congress. She was the first Black woman to do so. Her famous motto was: “Shirley Chisholm - Unbought and Unbossed.”

Chisholm hired an all-female staff and began focusing on women’s issues. She helped create the National Organization for Women. “Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt,” she said.

In 1972, Chisholm made history again as the first Black woman to run for president. Virginia Woodhull was the first woman to run, doing so in 1872.

As she announced her candidacy, Chisholm said, “I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States. I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.”

But Chisholm didn’t have enough political support, not even that of the male-dominated Black Caucus. Her supporters were young voters, Blacks and feminists.

The voting age had just been turned back to 18 from 21 and there were millions of young, first-time voters.

Chisholm won 151 delegates, but lost the nomination to Sen. George McGovern. She knew all along that her chances for winning were slim. “I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo,” she said.

The focus of her campaign was to make way for change. She would open the door for other Black candidates, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Barack Obama, who is now our 44th president. Chisholm’s campaign, which championed the concerns of Blacks, Latinos, gays, the poor, the young and women, would serve as a model for Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Chisholm served for ten more years and retired in 1982 after seven terms in Congress.

Chisholm became a much sought after speaker and political mentor. She received hundreds of honorary degrees and awards for a lifetime of service.

Shirley Chisholm died on New Year’s Day, 2005, at her home in Florida. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said, “I want history to remember me not just as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a Black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”

On March 3, 2009, the 40th anniversary of her swearing in as a member of the House of Representatives, her portrait was unveiled at the Capital.

Source: Jasmin K. William

Above is a short called “Trek Turner”, a remix of the cartoon version featuring Lieutenant Uhura from the Star Trek animated series, dubbed over with Nichelle Nichols’ dialogue from the 1974 blaxploitation film “Truck Turner”. Below is Nichols delivering the same dialogue in “Truck Turner”. Animated or live action, that’s one Bad Ass Bitch!

Nichelle Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois, near Chicago. Her father was both the town mayor of Robbins and its chief magistrate. She has studied in Chicago as well as New York and Los Angeles. During her time in New York, Nichelle appeared at the famous Blue Angel and Playboy Clubs as a singer. She also appeared in the role of Carmen for a Chicago stock company production of “Carmen Jones.”

She has twice been nominated for the Sara Siddon Award as best actress and is an accomplished dancer and singer. Her first Siddon nomination was for her portrayal of Hazel Sharp in “Kicks and Co.,” and the second for her performance in “The Blacks.”

Nichelle toured the United States, Canada and Europe as a singer with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton bands. On the West Coast, she appeared in “Roar of the Grease Paint, Smell of the Crowd,” “For My People,” and garnered high praise for her performance in the James Baldwin play, “Blues for Mr. Charlie.”

Prior to being cast as Lt. Uhura in Star Trek, Nichelle had starred on Gene Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant.

Nichelle started as Lt. Uhura on Star Trek in 1966. At the end of Star Trek’s first season, Nichelle was thinking seriously of leaving the show, but a chance and moving meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr. changed her mind. He told her she couldn’t give up…she was a vital role model for young Black women in America. Needless to say, Nichelle stayed with the show and has appeared in first six Star Trek movies.

She also provided the voice for Lt. Uhura on the Star Trek animated series in 1974-75.

Prior to starring in Star Trek, Nichelle appeared in films like, “Mister Buddwing,” “Made in Paris,” “Porgy and Bess,” and “Doctor, You’ve Got to be Kidding!” After the cancellation of Star Trek, Nichols played Dorinda in “Truck Turner” in 1974.

Turning her sights toward her music, Nichelle released a single, “Shoop Shoop,” on 20th Century Records and often sings at her convention appearances. She has also released an album, “Dark Side of the Moon,” which includes the song she wrote in tribute to Gene Roddenberry, “Gene.” Nichelle sang the song at Roddenberry’s memorial service.

Always interested in space travel, Nichelle flew aboard the C-141 Astronomy Observatory, which analyzed the atmospheres of Mars and Saturn, on an eight hour, high altitude mission. She was also special guest at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena on July 17, 1976 to view the Viking probe’s soft landing on Mars. Along with the other cast members from the original Star Trek, Nichelle attended the christening of the first space shuttle, Enterprise, at Cape Canaveral. Nichelle also spends much time recruiting minorities for NASA. Those recruited include Dr. Mae Jemison, the first American female astronaut and United States Air Force Col. Guion Bluford, the first Black astronaut, as well as Dr. Judith Resnik and Dr. Ronald McNair, who both flew successful missions during the space shuttle program before their deaths in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.

A few years ago, Nichelle toured in a one-woman play where she portrayed many famous black female singers of the 20th century. Some of her hobbies are oil painting, designing her own clothes, reading science fiction and sculpting. She has also acted as spokesperson for her favorite charity, “The Kwanzaa Foundation.” Her biography, “Beyond Uhura,” was published in 1994.

Nichelle has two projects in production, David and The Bitter Earth, scheduled to be released in late 2009.

 
It All Started With The Comic Strip…

The Friday Foster comic strip debuted on January 18, 1970 and ran until 1974. Friday Foster was the first mainstream syndicated comic strip to feature a Black woman in the lead role. Prior to this, other than a handful of broadly stereotyped caricatures from the industry’s very early days and a few series aimed solely at Black newspapers, no American comic strip had ever borne the name of a Black lead character.

Friday Foster was a former fashion model who became an assistant to a world-famous photographer, and the strip was about her comings and goings in the modeling and magazine / publishing worlds.

The strip was created by writer Jim Lawrence, illustrated by artist Jorje Longeron, and syndicated by The Chicago Tribune Syndicate to twenty-five newspapers across the country.

Which Then Became A Comic Book…

In 1972, Dell created a one-of-a-kind Friday Foster comic book edition, as no further comics were issued for this character. In the comic, Friday Foster is an assistant to world famous fashion photographer Shawn North.

Then Came The Movie…and Pam Grier

In 1975, Friday Foster was made into a feature film. The film was written and directed by Arthur Marks and starred Pam Grier in the lead role. Yaphet Kotto and Eartha Kitt also co-starred.

The Plot:

Friday Foster is a magazine photographer who refuses to heed her boss’s admonitions against becoming involved in the stories to which she is assigned. After witnessing an assassination attempt on the nation’s wealthiest Black and then seeing her best friend murdered, Friday finds herself targeted for death. She teams up with private detective Colt Hawkins  to investigate, and soon, the two are hot on the trail of plot to eliminate the country’s Black political leadership.

In addition to the standard blaxploitation plot elements, the film also dealt with the themes of the power and importance of Black political unity and the potential threat posed not only by the perceived white power structure, but also by those Blacks willing to betray that goal in search of reward from that establishment.

Tagline: Wham! Bam! Here comes Pam!

The Friday Foster Comic Book, Comic Strips and Movie Poster are a part of The Museum Of UnCut Funk Collection.

And Now Finally There Is The Doll…

In 2009, Robert Tonner created a doll collection based on the Friday Foster comic character. The collection includes five different versions of Friday Foster, marking the first time that Robert Tonner has explored the style of the 1970s in a primary fashion doll collection.

Keepin’ It Real

The Original Shock Jock

l’ll tell it to the hot; I’ll tell it to the cold; I’ll tell it to the young; I’ll tell it to the old. I don’t want no laughin’, I don’t want no cryin’, and most of all, no signifyin’-Petey Greene.

As radio deejay, television personality and activist, Ralph Waldo Petey Greene Jr. (1931-1984) was a vital force for two decades in the Black community of Washington, D.C. known as Chocolate City or the other Washington. Petey spoke out about social injustices and spoke up for racial pride during a period of unprecedented change in America.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., his childhood @23rd and L Streets NW was one of depression era-poverty. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Maggie Ant Pig Floyd, and attended Stevens Elementary School. But as a teen he started breaking the law and drinking and doing drugs. Arrests and reformatory time quickly followed. While still a teenager, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and later served in the Korean War. Upon his return home, he began drinking heavily. In 1960, a conviction for armed robbery landed him in jail.

In Virginias Lorton Prison, Peteys life began to change for the better. He honed his disc jockey (a.k.a. deejay, a.k.a. dj) skills in Lortons work program. His grandmother sent him records to play in prison, but died while he was still incarcerated. Petey was allowed to address his fellow prisoners over the P.A. system in morning and night shifts of 20 minutes apiece. He found that he was good at deejaying and sensed that this was something he could pursue upon his release.

Once out of Lorton, he headed for a rededicated existence back in the Washington he knew as his home. Dewey Hughes, the program director for radio station WOL-AM, took a chance on Petey. Dewey had first met Petey in Lorton as a fellow inmate of Deweys brother, and put Petey-who had already done a stand-up act at venues around the city-on the air. Rapping with Petey Greene became a lightning rod for the community. WOL reached metropolitan listeners not only in Washington, D.C. but also in Maryland and Virginia.

Dewey continued managing Petey for years before (in 1980) buying WOL, which then became the foundation for Radio One, Inc. (now the U.S. seventh-largest radio broadcasting company, and the largest primarily for Black and urban listeners).

Petey did not only advocate from the airwaves. Never to sit on the sidelines again after his prison time, Petey was a fully engaged and visible citizen, exhorting his community to think and to act for a Cool City; as in, getting proper job training (through the Washington Concentrated Employment Program) and education (If you cant read, you cant do anything, he would say) and registering to vote.

Almost immediately upon his release from prison, he co-founded the volunteer-driven Efforts for Ex-Convicts, formed to provide shelter, counseling, and job support for D.C. ex-cons during the first few months of their release; for example, he would encourage those with convictions for stealing or shoplifting to channel that expertise into legitimate work as store detectives. Petey also addressed youth groups and school assemblies to discourage children and teens from starting down the path to incarceration. He also worked as a YMCA job counselor, and kept at his stand-up act as well.

With his Ph.D. in poverty, he would encourage community attention be specifically paid to the needs of the poor and the old; he was not afraid to name names and provide addresses for his listeners to agitate for change.

Petey had grown up just a few blocks from the White House, and in March 1978 he finally got to visit his neighbors when he attended a dinner (for the President of Yugoslavia) as the guest of an invitee. While there, he took the opportunity to speak with President Jimmy Carter and he claimed steal a spoon. From the jail house to the White House, he noted.

Concurrent with his radio career, television was another natural outlet for Petey. He co-hosted the local show Where Its At, which addressed employment issues and opportunities. Subsequently, his public access program Petey Greenes Washington (also later the name of his radio show) aired in the city for years, providing an expanded forum for his community outreach, commentary, and humor. Adjust the color of your television was his intro to the program. Among the thousands of listeners and/or viewers whom he made an impact on were future radio and television personalities.

One of them was a Washington, D.C. disc jockey named Howard Stern, who caused a stir with his guest appearances on Petey’s television show. In one (with longtime colleague Robin Quivers in the studio audience), Howard told Petey, I’ve learned more from your show I listen to your show and I go on and use your material. Petey mused, They might not like us, but they don’t change the dial.

In paving the way for other deejays, some might say that Petey was an original shock jock, but his own history and commitment to his community combined to make him more of a trailblazer in talk radio. Petey won two local Emmy Awards in the 1970s.

In his later years, Petey turned to religion more than he had prior and was finally able to quit drinking. He died of cancer in January 1984. Scores of D.C. residents, at least 10,000, and some estimates were double that amount paid their respects in below-freezing temperatures later that month at a memorial service, which was the largest gathering for a non-government official in D.C. history.

The nonprofit United Planning Organization (formed to provide human services to the people of D.C.), where Petey worked as an employee and community advocate/consultant beginning in the late 1960s, later named its Congress Heights office (in southeastern D.C.) the Ralph Waldo Petey Greene Community Service Center. The Center still stands today, at 2907 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE.

Peteys life story, as he told it to Lurma Rackley in the early 1980s, was published in 2003 as Laugh If You Like, Ain’t a Damn Thing Funny.

He was portrayed by Don Cheadle in the 2007 film Talk To Me, which is based on his life.

PBS recently broadcasted the documentary Adjust Your Color: The Truth of Petey Greene. The documentary was written and directed by Loren Mendell and narrated by Don Cheadle.

Source: Emanuel Levy

Palestine native Ralph Bakshi was raised in Brooklyn, New York. A talented artist, Bakshi worked at the Terrytoons animation studio, directed episodes of Deputy Dawg and James Hound and worked on the Hekyll and Jekyll and Mighty Mouse cartoons. In 1965, he put together The Mighty Heroes “superhero” TV cartoon series, featuring some of the most ridiculous superguys in history: Tornado Man, Cuckooman, Ropeman, Strongman, and Diaper Baby. Bakshi’s also worked on the Spiderman series.

Bakski is best known, however, for his work on several animated films that featured Black characters. In 1972, Bakshi produced his first theatrical animated feature, a down-and-dirty X-rated adaptation of Robert Crumb’s “underground” comic strip Fritz the Cat. While Crumb hated the finished product, Fritz proved to be a success on the midnight-movie market.

Bakshi’s next feature, Heavy Traffic, was even more outrageous than Fritz; many cartoon aficionados consider this nihilistic, highly scatological tale of a young New York artist’s drawing-board fantasies to be Bakshi’s finest work.

His next was Coonskin (1975), a savage attack on Hollywood racial stereotypes — so savage, in fact, that the film was picketed by CORE and Bakshi was accused of being a racist himself.

Next came Hey, Good Lookin’, a nostalgic glance at 1950s street gangs, which was completed in 1975, but held back from release until 1982.

Coonskin

A multi-layered satire of race relations in America. America is represented as a volumuous white women in the film.

Sampson (Barry White) and the Preacherman (Charles Gordone) rush to help their friend, Randy (Philip Michael Thomas) escape from prison, but are stopped by a roadblock and wind up in a shootout with the police. While waiting for them, Randy unwillingly listens to fellow escapee Pappy (Scatman Crothers), as he begins to tell Randy a story about “three guys [I used to know] just like you and your friends”. Pappy’s story is told in animation set against live-action background photos and footage.

Brother Rabbit, Preacher Fox and Brother Bear

Brother Rabbit (voice of Thomas), Brother Bear (voice of White), and Preacher Fox (voice of Gordone) decide to pack up and leave their southern settings after the bank mortgages their home and sells it to a man who turns it into a brothel. Arriving in Harlem, Rabbit, Bear, and Fox find that it isn’t all that it’s made out to be.

They encounter a con man named Simple Savior, a phony revolutionary leader who purports to be the “cousin” of Black Jesus, and that he gives his followers “the strength to kill whites“. In a flashy stage performance in his “church”, Savior acts out being brutalized by symbols of black oppression—represented by images of John Wayne, Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, before asking his parishioners for “donations”. When Rabbit attempts to stir up anti-revolutionary sentiment, Savior tries to have him killed. After Rabbit saves his life via reverse psychology, he and Bear kill Savior. This allows Rabbit to take over Savior’s racket, putting him in line to become the head of all organized crime in Harlem. But first, he has to get rid of a few other opponents. Savior’s former partners tell Rabbit that if he can’t kill his opponents, then they’ll kill him instead.

Rabbit first goes up against Madigan, a virulently racist and homophobic white police officer and bagman for the Mafia, who demonstrates his contempt for Blacks in various ways, including a refusal to bathe before an anticipated encounter with them (he believes they’re not worth it). When Madigan finds out that Rabbit has been taking his payoffs, he and his cohorts, Ruby and Bobby, are led to a nightclub called “The Cottontail”. A Black stripper distracts him while an LSD sugar cube is dropped into his drink. Madigan, while under the influence of his spiked drink, is then maneuvered into a sexual liaison with a stereotypically effeminate gay man, and then shoved into women’s clothing representative of the mammy archetype, adorned in blackface, and finally shoved out the back of the club where he discovers that Ruby and Bobby are dead. Then, while recovering from his delirium of being drugged, shoots his gun around randomly, and is shot to death by the police after shooting one of them.

Rabbit’s final targets are the Godfather (voice of an uncredited Al Lewis) and the Mafia, who live in the subway. The contract for killing Rabbit is given to Sonny (voice of Richard Paul). Showing up outside Rabbit’s nightclub in blackface and clothing representative of minstrel show stereotypes, Sonny winds up shot multiple times by Rabbit before dying in an explosion caused by a car crash. His body is cremated and taken back home, where his mother weeps over his ashes. Bear becomes torn between staying with Rabbit, or starting a new, crime-free life. Bear decides to look for Fox in order to seek his advice. Upon arriving at Fox’s newly acquired brothel, Bear is “married” to a girl he, Fox, and Rabbit met during the fight with Savior’s men. Under the advisement of Fox, Bear becomes a boxer for the Mafia. During one of Bear’s fights, Rabbit sets up a melting imitation of himself made out of tar. As the Mafiosos take turns stabbing at the “tar rabbit”, they become stuck together. Rabbit, Bear, Fox and the opponent boxer rush out of the boxing arena as it blows up. The live-action story ends with Randy and Pappy escaping while being shot at by various white cops, but managing to make it out alive.

The New York Times Review

Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic helmer Ralph Bakshi subsequently directed the über-controversial animated feature Coonskin (aka Streetfight, 1975). Bakshi opens and closes the film with a live-action tale that stars Scatman Crothers, Miami Vice’s Philip Michael Thomas, Charles Gordone, and Barry White; it recounts the adventures of three Black men who escape from prison and are later gathered up. In between, an animated tale has animal characters with stereotypically black traits — Brother Rabbit (voiced by Thomas), Brother Fox (voiced by Gordone), and Brother Bear (voiced by White) — entering a white-dominated ghetto environment and diverging into different paths; one becomes a crime overlord, the second sells the first out to La Cosa Nostra, and the third establishes himself as a media-exploited sports icon. Completely misread as a racist work upon release, the film actually entails Bakshi’s satirical excoriation of bigotry via the tongue-in-cheek use of Black urban stereotypes. The director laces the film with profane ghetto dialogue and street slang; though animated, this is not a picture for children. Variety wrote of the work, “Beyond Bakshi’s cinematic style, his stories seem haunted by a worldliness that is torn between cynicism and tortured humanism. There is heart in his plots, so superficial putdown is totally absent. What is present [is] the evidently sincere empathy of a social surgeon.” The legendary Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather, Cloud Nine) produced. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Acting Credits

Barry White - Samson

Barry White - Brother Bear

Charles Gordone - Preacher

Charles Gordone - Brother Fox

Scatman Crothers - Old Man Bone

Scatman Crothers - Pappy

Philip Michael Thomas - Randy

Philip Michael Thomas - Brother Rabbit

Production Credits

Director - Ralph Bakshi

Screenplay - Ralph Bakshi

Producer - Albert S. Ruddy

Stills - Ralph Bakshi

Director of Photography - William A. Fraker

Stills - Johnnie Vita

Editor - Donald W. Ernst

Animation Photography - Ted C. Bemiller

Music - Chico Hamilton

Assistant Director - James Roden