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‘The Bus’: Haskell Wexler’s ground-breaking documentary of the March on Washington, 1963

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” when up-to 300,000 people took part in one of America’s largest rallies for human rights, showing their support for President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.

The event took place on August 28th, 1963, and the participants ended their march in front on the Lincoln Memorial, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.

Delegations traveled from all over the United States, to show their support. Haskell Wexler, one of cinema’s most important and influential cinematographers (American Graffiti, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)  traveled with the San Francisco delegation, filming, interviewing, and documenting the political and historical significance of this event.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.08.2013
06:17 pm
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Take This Hammer: James Baldwin tours black San Francisco in 1963

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In the spring of 1963, San Francisco poet, documentarian, and media activist Richard Moore accompanied and filmed author James Baldwin and Youth For Service Executive Director Orville Luster on a tour through the black-majority Bayview/Hunter’s Point and Fillmore districts of San Francisco. They sought to portray the real experience of African-Americans in what was considered America’s most liberal city.

That outing would result in Take This Hammer, and the footage of it was shot at a crucial time in Baldwin’s life. After 15 years in exile in Paris, the Harlem-born writer was back in the States at the peak of his renown and with political fire in his eyes. His turbulent novels from the ‘50s—especially Go Tell It on the Mountain and Another Country—had stunned the literary world with their exposure of racism and deeply developed queer characters.

During the same spring in which Take This Hammer was shot, Baldwin published the rather incredible essay Down at the Cross, and ended up on the cover of Time. That summer, he’d end his tour of the American South at the March on Washington with a quarter-million of his fellow Americans, with many other celebrities.

Baldwin’s observations certainly set The City’s white lib establishment into fits: “There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone’s got to tell it like it is. And that’s where it’s at.” Unfortunately, as seen in documents like Kevin Epps’s 2001 doc Straight Outta Hunter’s Point, not much has changed in SF over the generations…
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Baldwin, Brando, Belafonte, Poitier, Mankiewicz and Heston talk Civil Rights, 1963

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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04.19.2011
02:34 am
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Baldwin, Brando, Belafonte, Poitier, Mankiewicz and Heston talk Civil Rights, 1963

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On August 28 1963, the same day Martin Luther King delivered his landmark “I have a dream” speech, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, writer James Baldwin, director Joseph Mankiewicz, and actors Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, and Sidney Poitier, sat down in a CBS studio to discuss Civil Rights in America. It was an historic moment, one that would be difficult to imagine happening today, amongst Hollywood’s glitterai - especially when Mankiewicz let’s the cat out of the bag:

“Freedom, true freedom is not given by governments; it is taken by the people.”

 

 
Via Open Culture
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.04.2011
06:14 pm
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