But he was a man of his convictions, so he stood up and spoke out. He went to a press conference in Johannesburg there were black people there who thought he should go home. He didn’t say, “I’m not going because of apartheid.” He wanted to go, he wanted to see what was happening. This again is the man who is bucking the orthodoxy, who is pushing back at that time. He was also dealing with the fact that, from the side of the black community, there were people on both sides of the ocean, in America and South Africa, who thought it was a mistake for a black man to even go to South Africa to play tennis. But the thing that hits me about that particular stand is that he wanted to go to a South Africa that wasn’t welcoming or inviting. He wanted to challenge the fact that they were segregated. He felt he wanted to go there as a tennis player and, first of all, integrate the tennis tournaments there.
So, Ashe understood that he had to face reality - he felt on the one hand that he could admire McEnroe or Jimmy Connors, but he also knew if he acted like McEnroe, he would face major consequences. You know, if you make waves, if you upset the applecart, you can be thrown out of school or off the baseball team or out of the American Tennis Association. So, that’s the world Arthur Ashe grew up in, and that’s the world I grew up in as an African American - that here we are in America, you should become part of the American melting pot, but don’t make waves, don’t make waves. He was saying you’ve got to be above that. Because if you do react, you’ll basically be saying, ‘I can be just as ugly as you.’” Think about Branch Rickey saying to Jackie Robinson, “I want to bring you, you young Negro baseball player from the Negro Leagues into Major League Baseball - but when you’ve got people taunting you or yelling at you or calling you racial epithets, you can’t react. Codirected with Rex Miller, this ninety-four-minute nonfiction biopic chronicles athlete-activist Arthur Ashe, who broke ethnic boundaries in the so-called “sport of kings” and fought for social justice off the tennis court.īecause this is America, man! Think about it. Edgar Hoover’s relentless surveillance of and vendetta against Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The Harlem-raised talent’s outstanding filmography also includes Sammy Davis Jr: I’ve Gotta Be Me, ACORN and the Firestorm, and 2020’s MLK/FBI, a chilling expose of J. Pollard, who also received an Emmy for 2009’s By the People: The Election of Barack Obama, began his prolific producing and directing career making two episodes of the prestigious PBS civil rights series, Eyes on the Prize. At the forefront of this nonfiction motion picture movement is Sam Pollard, who co-won two Emmys for 2006’s Lee-directed When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and was Academy Award–nominated along with Lee for 1997’s 4 Little Girls. These filmmakers include Raoul Peck, Stanley Nelson, Ava DuVernay, and Spike Lee. Right now a vanguard of black documentarians is spearheading a cinematic reimagining and retelling of the African American experience.
0 kommentar(er)
