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Film critic, scholar and novelist notes the acute joy and pain of seeing award nominees who explore African-American genius, including “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “United States vs. Billie Holiday” .
Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah made me cry. My parents actively resisted the American white supremacist system in the 1960s and 1970s. People like Fred Hampton were discussed in a way that made me feel like they were family. Whenever my dad spoke about the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panthers chief John Huggins, or “John John” as he called him, his eyes would fill with tears, and he would look away, then look at me. eyes shining from two different elements: water and some constant fire. For me, Fred Hampton has always been the prettiest. He was handsome, really – a handsome man. But he was so beautiful in his soul. My deep love for this brilliant revolutionary comes from the published images of him, the memory of his power, his deep well of love for everyone, especially black people.
And I hate. I hate the men who killed him, and I hate the system that allowed them to do it. Fred Hampton was more beautiful than me in his ability to love.
The irony is so poignant, because Fred Hampton wanted to free the poor whites from their dispossession. He would have freed the men who slaughtered him if they had let him live. He sought the path of power for all marginalized people. Breakfast programs, health care, schooling, taking gang members off the streets and reaching a new kind of consciousness: the efforts of the Black Panther Party have resulted in deep and engaged social work. And they murdered him.
They are, of course, the controllers of the system, men like Herbert Hoover, who led the effort to “eliminate a black messiah,” and the local police who did their will. Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah documents their sinister predatory assault on the dark genius. Daniel Kaluuya is excellent in his role as Fred Hampton, as is Dominique Fishback, the sister-in-law who plays Hampton’s fiancée Deborah Johnson.
With extremely skillful storytelling and powerful acting, the film centers on the man who created Hampton, FBI informant William O’Neal. LaKeith Stanfield’s heartbreaking performance makes us sympathize with the real Bill O’Neal. The overwhelming weight of white supremacist control compels this Judas to betray the people.
Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday examines the same grim control of brilliant blackness. Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, used Billie Holliday’s drug addiction as a pretext to harass, imprison and silence his powerful 1939 elegy protesting the lynching of black Americans, “Strange Fruit.”
In real life, Harry Anslinger pampered well-known drug addicted white women like Judy Garland and supported their recovery without the criminal convictions scandal. Lady Day, one of the most important singers of the twentieth century, did not receive such a grace and was treated like a slave. As Billie Holiday lay in a hospital, recovering from liver failure, Anslinger handcuffed her to her bed, stripped her room of gifts meant to comfort her, such as flowers and records, and stopped doctors to administer medical treatment until his death. She was 44 years old.
A child rape survivor who was forced to work in a brothel, Holiday maintained a fiery resistance to the terror that killed her own father, who died after a white-only Texas hospital refused to take him. heal. This ancestral memory lit up her face every time she sang her signature protest song. Daniels’ film captures that light as well as the sexual abuse and financial exploitation she has endured throughout her career.
The trauma of being a black woman in this racist patriarchy weighs heavily on me and all of my sisters. Viola Davis perfectly transmits the double burden that we carry Ma Rainey’s black background. Every look, every gesture in her performance as a great blues singer expresses the perpetual tension needed for the beautiful vocal expression of black women to emerge into the public realm.
And Chadwick Boseman. In this final performance, he does the same for black men. As Levee’s fictional character, Boseman embodies a kind of glory, the essence of the blues. His character is a genius despite the intergenerational theft of black manhood by white men who feast on black power. Directed by George C. Wolfe, Ma Rainey’s black background examines the control of the system within the music industry that would silence the beautiful blackness inherent in our brightest cultural workers.
One night in Miami brings together four of these brilliant workers of black culture: Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), on the verge of becoming Muhammad Ali; Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), just before sharing his hymn, “A Change Is Gonna Come” with the world; Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), as he prepares to make a bold move from football to theater; and Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), our “Brilliant Black Prince”, as Ossie Davis famously praised, as he plans his transition out of the Nation and into his new role of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. How do our brilliant black princes all do that? How can we bear the burden of whiteness and still struggle? How do you manage to stay so talented, exquisite, powerful and, as Ali would say, so pretty?
Despite rape, torture, wiretapping, greed, lynching, theft, plagiarism, surveillance, all kinds of deception and all the daily mockery, we remain resilient and resplendent. How? ‘Or’ What? What makes you black people so strong? In Regina King’s beautiful film, our power is our collective fortitude, our friendships, our commitment to one another. We, together, are our best resistance.
We are the power.
The historical and predatory consumption of black genius by white men suggests a certain mediocrity, that their power was assured only by their whiteness. After all, why should the theft happen any other way? You mean you can’t just write your own song?
In the last role of his life, Boseman is a black genius inhabiting the soul of all the countless nameless black geniuses, geniuses like Levee, whose inner soul strength seeks the light it deserves. Levee’s father was also a genius. Genius is Levee’s patrilineal heritage. And the suffering. Levee suffers from the cruelty of being so talented, so high and then so low.
Ma Rainey, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Billie Holiday, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke: These movies celebrate our true geniuses, but our geniuses are everywhere, all of us, all around. We are geniuses in the river, in the little hut and in the dike too.
This winter, Black Hollywood gave a gift to the nation, an opportunity to see themselves through black eyes. An opportunity to witness black excellence. More than ever, these four films should be viewed. It is because the black genius created them. If they don’t get recognized during awards season then the goalies should be ashamed.
Eisa Nefertari Ulen (she / she) is the author of Mourning crystelle (Atria) and professor of African and diasporic literature at Hunter College in New York. A Pulitzer Center Fellow, she has received awards from the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the National Association of Black Journalists.
This story first appeared in a January issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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