Michael Ray Charles was born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985. In college, he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving into painting, his preferred medium. Charles also received an MFA degree from the University of Houston in 1993.
His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Caricatures of Black experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth. “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed.
His paintings are not about people, they are about images. They are about the negative stereotypes that Blacks still buy into – the minstrel and the mammy-’ and how they are updated, and (hidden in new images). These images are about the racial stereotypes that white people created and perpetuate, rather than knowing Blacks as (elaborate) individual human beings. Charles says ‘that the negative images about Blacks are hiding throughout American culture, just below the surface, on TV sitcoms and cartoons of every vintage and in advertising and sports.’ He didn’t invent them, and he is not singlehandedly perpetuating them. The images that Michael Ray Charles paints are not to confuse people, he is not creating these stereotypes. He is trying to seek and create an understanding’ among all people.
Michael Ray Charles takes old tired images, and, like a surgeon, tries to expose the cancer within them, and like a doctor, the artist’s intent is to heal us by showing us our scabs. Michael Ray Charles is trying to express to the world for all people to understand that blacks are human beings, and don’t deserve being pigeonholed through images which play and still play a major role in society today.
Michael Ray Charles is filmed on location at his home and studio in Austin, Texas. Through his studies of advertising, the minstrel tradition, and blackface, Charles seeks to deconstruct and subvert images of blackness through painting. “I’ve been called a sellout. People question my blackness. A lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype,” he says. “I think there’s a fine line between perpetuating something and questioning something. And I like to get as close to it as possible.” Pointing out items from his collection of memorabilia, Charles traces the transformation of stereotypes in his work.
Today, Charles continues to exhibit in national and international venues. His work remains the subject of books, magazines, and newspaper articles and is included in many public and private collection. Currently, Charles is a Professor of Art in the department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. He and his family reside in Austin, Texas.
Source: The Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Artcyclopedia.com, PBS, Ask Art and Art Net
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate in 1999. The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from Black popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central, Los Angeles near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall. In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary Black citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s.
Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically Black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of Blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged.
“I persist, trying to make pictures that inscribe Black existential realities without sacrificing a sense of majesty. I’m driven by a desire to meaningfully provoke others’ curiosity, to paint without cynicism. I still believe in mastery; in the service of imagination it can exceed the limitations of circumstance.”
— Kerry James Marshall
Source: PBS, Greg Kucera Galley, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Christies.com and Wikipedia
Stick It To The Man
What else is there to say…To read the profile of this brother please visit his site at www.myspace.com/jasirix
Lena Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her talent and artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success: “I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”
In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub in New York City and when she signed with MGM, she was among a handful of black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical “Stormy Weather.” Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her most famous tune.
Stormy Weather Movie Poster is from the private collection of Mr. Gordon Bussey
On screen, on recordings and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in such songs as “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” In 1942′s “Panama Hattie,” her first movie with MGM, she sang Cole Porter‘s “Just One of Those Things,” winning critical acclaim.
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of “Jamaica” in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.” Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs.”
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.
“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out. … It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black “Cabin in the Sky,” in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included the Red Skelton comedy “I Dood It,” “Thousands Cheer” and “Swing Fever,” all in 1943; “Broadway Rhythm” in 1944; and “Ziegfeld Follies” in 1946.
Bronze Venus is from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
One of the most glaring exclusions, though, was the MGM remake of “Show Boat.” Horne, who had appeared in the role of Julie in a “Show Boat” scene in a 1946 movie about Jerome Kern, seemed a logical choice for the 1951 movie, but the part went to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not sing.
Cabin In The Sky is from the collection of Separate Cinema
“Metro’s cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses,” film historian John Kobal wrote.
“She was a very angry woman,” film critic-author-documentarian Richard Schickel, who worked with Horne on her 1965 autobiography, said Monday.
“It’s something that shaped her life to a very high degree. She was a woman who had a very powerful desire to lead her own life, to not be cautious and to speak out. And she was a woman, also, who felt in her career that she had been held back by the issue of race. So she had a lot of anger and disappointment about that. I’m talking particularly about her movie career.”
Early in her career, Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt,” she once said.
Later, she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of “Stormy Weather” to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.
Broadway Window Card from the collection of The Museum of UnCut Funk
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was “ageless … tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her.”
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in black society. Her daughter,Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book “The Hornes: An American Family” that among their relatives was Frank Horne, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
She was largely raised by her grandparents as her mother, Edna Horne, pursued a career in show business. Lena Horne dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabledHarlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white. She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle‘s orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in 1940.
A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to “pass” in a white world with her light complexion.Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM. But she refused to go along with the studio’s efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.
“I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become,” Horne once said. “I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with singer-actor-activist Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and, in 1963, joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry. She appeared in her last movie in 1978, playing Glinda the Good in “The Wiz,” directed by her son-in-law, Sidney Lumet.
Horne had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography “Stormy Weather,” author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she had married a white man, she replied: “To get even with him.”
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.
“I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters,” she said. “It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live.”
And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.
“I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she said, “because being black made me understand.”
Contributor: The Associated Press
The Museum of UnCut Funk: Rest in peace Ms. Lena you will be missed but your spirit will live on.
“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.
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 9th 1991. He was only 52. He was survived by his wife Sherilyn and four children.
Source: Wikipedia, IMDB, Answers.com and Racks and Razors
