Tag: Film and TV History

Rustin the Liberal Biopic Versus Rustin the Labor Activist / by Dustin Guastella

Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in Rustin | Netflix, 2023

Reposted from Jacobin

Netflix’s new feel-good Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin, claims the civil rights hero has been forgotten because of his sexuality. But it was his fiery and provocative class politics that makes him both controversial and prophetic today.

Rustin, directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is largely a retelling of the mythic story of the civil rights movement but now with the addition of a new character — Bayard Rustin, played capably by Colman Domingo. Here once again is Martin Luther King Jr (Aml Ameen) as the savior and singular embodiment of the movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is presented as the apotheosis and catalyst for the triumph of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But in order to seamlessly fit Rustin into this familiar narrative, the filmmakers depict him as the long forgotten sidekick of Dr King. In one of Rustin’s final scenes, MLK looks back wistfully at Bayard just after he finishes his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Voila! Bayard has been redeemed and the mythic narrative of the civil rights movement is preserved.

Anyone even passingly familiar with Rustin’s life and work should find this version offensive. Not because it fudges some historical details (it’s a movie), but because it’s an insult to Rustin’s actual contribution while shoving his political vision completely out of frame. In this way, Rustin does more to help us forget what Bayard actually stood for — especially his cutting critique of the failures of the Left — than it does to honor the man and his contribution.

Neglected History

That Rustin has been forgotten in the canonical story of civil rights is a kind of starting point for the film’s premise. The director seems to think he’s letting us in on a secret. For, according to his telling, Rustin was tragically forgotten because he was gay. And only because of that. Rustin is thus reduced entirely to a tragically persecuted, but tirelessly dedicated, martyr for the cause. The way we are meant to repent for our historical neglect of this great figure is to properly remember Rustin as a gay man first and foremost. Only then can we place him in his rightful place among the pantheon of civil rights greats.

It’s not that Rustin’s sexuality was irrelevant to his public life; indeed it was a major and integral part of who he was and a major part of why Bayard was so often pushed into the background. But there is something peculiar about how the film makes Rustin’s sexuality so central, with the filmmakers even going as far as to create an entirely fictional relationship for Rustin just to demonstrate this.

Elias Taylor (played by Johnny Ramey), the only purely fictional character in the film, is a gay black Christian but also one who is married with a baby on the way. But Rustin’s real life relationship with the young socialist Tom Kahn — who does appear in the film, played by Gus Halper — was far more interesting. It was this duo, Rustin and Kahn, who would work together on the pivotal essay From Protest to Politics, probably Rustin’s chief strategic statement on civil rights after the March on Washington. Khan’s actual role in the film, though, like so many other important characters, is reduced to the status of faithful henchman and perhaps a onetime lover. Why? Because to develop Kahn’s character a bit more — a white socialist — would complicate the film’s message.

It would signal to the viewer that maybe the real ongoing historical neglect of Rustin was, in fact, political in nature; that Rustin’s views — on race, economics, and political strategy — were no less a reason for his official erasure from canonical civil rights history. In a cruel twist, it seems, Rustin’s sexuality has been weaponized yet again. In Rustin’s lifetime, it was used as an excuse to forget him — in his death it’s employed now to make us forget what he stood for.

And these ideas, as we will see, are arguably more intolerable to liberal audiences today, than they were even during his lifetime.

The Cult of Youth

Rustin’s relationship with A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) is another partnership badly butchered by the film. If you didn’t know better you would assume that Martin Luther King Jr was Rustin’s best friend and confidant. Randolph, the father of the civil rights movement and Bayard’s beloved mentor, is portrayed as a doddering old adviser. You get the sense that this guy mattered personally for Rustin, and historically for the movement — but not that he mattered all that much. It’s a depiction that hardly honors Randolph and the remarkable relationship he and Bayard had. And it is one that conveniently privileges younger characters at the expense of the wizened chief.

In one scene Bayard plans his march in a room full of beautiful and stylish young people. A host of intersectional personalities then present foolish ideas in turn, taken straight from the contemporary nonprofit playbook. Yet in this film these kids are depicted, instead, as inspired strategists. In the scene, Rustin swoons as one of them insinuates that not only should the heads of major civil rights organizations speak but so too should the young activists themselves. It’s a perfect demonstration of the Cult of Youth that has captured the liberal mindset for half a century or so. And a cheap way to flatter the sensibilities of the Millennial and Zoomer NGO employees in the audience today.

But not only is it a total fabrication — the very spirit of it goes against every principle Rustin upheld in both his work and his writing. The truth is that Rustin was highly critical — and explicitly so — of the emerging tendency among young radicals to “substitute self-expression for politics” and often complained about the shortsightedness of youthful exuberance getting in the way of reasoned deliberation. All of which is to say Rustin was anything but a youth fetishist. And as for the youth themselves, there was no love lost with them either. In the later 1960s, in fact, the real Rustin would perpetually rumble with the students of the New Left, who took special care to skewer Bayard in their polemical essays and speeches.

Instead of spending his time with wet-behind-the-ears radicals, the real Rustin spent long evenings planning with veteran generals. Not only Randolph but also labor leader Norman Hill, who gets almost no attention in the film, and socialist A. J. Muste, who is portrayed as an out-of-touch peacenik who tells Rustin to get back in the closet, accusing him of reverse-racism — a dramatically useful caricature of the Old White Man.

The problem with leaving these characters out, or distorting their roles, is not merely that certain Great Men didn’t get their due, but that these particular figures represent a now dead political world that this film desperately wants to keep dead. Unfortunately, in Bayard Rustin, the filmmakers have resurrected a historical figure whose actual politics could not be more at odds with the ones they desperately wish he had held instead.

Invisible Labor

Rustin himself credits Randolph for coming up with the very concept of a March for Jobs and Freedom. The first mention of this name for the march, though, is hardly remarked upon in Rustin. The filmmakers seem so embarrassed by the very mention of “jobs” (and jobs first) that they bury it in a meaningless conversation. Again, these aren’t just mistakes. The hip young activists are meant to replace labor and socialist movement veterans like Randolph, Muste, and Hill as the real protagonists of history, just as the Democratic Party has spent years trying to replace their old union voters with “the youth.”

Though expected for any Hollywood film, the extent to which the labor movement is made invisible here is genuinely remarkable. As a friend of mine complained, it’s as if the only reason the unions are consulted at all is because march organizers need more money for latrines. Fitting. Worse, this is precisely the kind of attitude Rustin railed against all his life. “I must confess I find it difficult to understand the prejudice against the labor movement currently fashionable among so many liberals.” Rustin carped in 1970, “These people, for reasons of their own, seem to believe that white workers are affluent members of the Establishment.”

Ironically, the march itself was meant to mend and solidify the relationship between labor and the civil rights movement — not simply legal protections for racial minorities, but economic redistribution and social renewal for all, ideas barely mentioned in Rustin. The real Rustin warned against the fraying of the progressive coalition and worried that both race-forward militancy and a focus on young “stylish liberals” would destroy any social democratic horizon.

It’s with truly remarkable prescience that Rustin fretted in 1969 that a new liberal coalition was forming “to be comprised of the forces at the top — middle-class professionals and the wealthy of good conscience — and the minorities and the poor at the bottom.” But Rustin’s favored coalition, with organizations of the civil rights movement and labor at the center, was dead before it was born. Born in 1912, he was a man of the Old Left. By 1972 he lamented: “What was, at the time of the 1963 March on Washington, a reflection of broad interracial cooperation is, no longer a movement, but a series of causes, each vying with another for ascendancy.”

Today, we live in the long shadow of that era. Rustin succeeds only in making certain that we forget that there was indeed a road not taken.

Anti-Racist?

In the film, we get the impression that Bayard is the consummate anti-racist, modeled in today’s ideological mold. In a key scene he stares down Washington, DC police officials and lectures the cops about what it means to be a “racist” as if the very threat of the word is supposed to shake them. Of course, today, “racist” is the worst thing a liberal can call someone or be called. Yet not only was the word relatively alien to Rustin, but “race prejudice” (the far more common phrase for the time) was not, according to him, even the main problem he was trying to solve.

The real Rustin warned that “we get such a kick out of calling people racists” that we are incapable of seeing the fundamental conflict in society, let alone doing anything about it. That conflict, again according to Rustin, “is between poor people and affluent people. That’s where the problem is, and where it will always be. And it won’t be easy to solve.”

Throughout the film this view is alternatively erased or perverted beyond recognition. Even the very words used are designed to distract or otherwise reframe the problem in ways that Bayard would have found inconceivable or detestable. For instance, instead of discussing “inequality,” screenwriters opted for the word “inequity,” a little sleight of hand that allows Rustin to fit perfectly with today’s dominant anti-racist ideology but was likely nowhere to be found in any of Rustin’s actual writings or speeches.

These little changes make it easy to forget that Rustin’s actual views were controversial on the Left in his time and perhaps even more so today. “To talk about blackness is silly,” Bayard complained in 1968, “anybody who talks of the black agenda is a reactionary.” I wonder how this would play on Twitter/X today? Yet, this is a typical Rustinism, repeatedly expressed, in different ways, across several magazines, in speeches, in union halls, and university lectures. For him, race tribalism was tied to race hatred. “Prejudice,” he was fond of saying “is of a single bit.”

And he noticed that race came to replace many of the issues that he found much more pressing: “I’ll bet you there is not a class on this campus that hasn’t discussed racism,” Rustin charged in a 1969 speech to Clark College. “Our fixation on racism, as important as the problem is,” he continued, “has obscured the effects of the technological revolution,” and the economic roots of so many social ills. A focus on racism was “a cop-out for whites who are titillated and delighted to be called racists.” It served to satisfy their masochism more than anything it did for working-class blacks: “And thus Stokely can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink.” Sound familiar?

Yet this Rustin could never be shown on the screen today — in fact, this Rustin couldn’t even be tolerated. Instead, liberals today embrace his gay identity because they reject his ideas. Can you imagine a major black character in a prestigious movie or television show railing against the abuses of anti-racism today? Famously, a magician once convinced a live audience that he made the Statue of Liberty disappear by simply turning the stage beneath their feet. For Rustin, race politics operated like that — race activists were illusionists who made the class problem, and all its attendant political complications, disappear.

Now, thanks to Rustin, Bayard himself has become a prop in the illusion.

Thanks, Obama

Leave it to the Obamas to make this movie. Amid a small revival of interest in Rustin’s ideas, shared across journals on the Left and in the political center, they’ve swooped in to make certain that Rustin’s most important contributions, and especially his warnings to the Left, would be forgotten entirely. It’s a tragedy. Because a showcase of Rustin’s ideas could have served as a useful starting point for probing just what went wrong in the late 1960s that has led the Left down such a disastrous path.

Instead, we were served a beautifully staged feel-good film that ultimately allows those of us on the Left to feel self-satisfied at falsely remembering a lost icon. As such we are no better off. And until we’re willing to confront Bayard’s critique seriously, we will continue to make the same basic mistakes that the real Rustin properly warned us against more than fifty years ago.

We will continue to confuse therapeutic protest for meaningful political interventions. Bayard insisted that the Left ought to push for larger economic investments and the socialization of the economy and complained of “dramatic confrontations” that “in no way further the achievement of radical social goals.” Yet today, when riots of frustration break out, Congress responds with guilt and pity instead of investment. In 1969 Rustin groaned that “payments from the rich to the poor” have begun to “take the form of ‘Giving a Damn’ or some other kind of moral philanthropy.”

We will continue to demand radical-sounding solutions that serve conservative ends. Rustin would have argued that the activist demand to defund police budgets can sound too similar, especially in resource-starved neighborhoods, to the conservative call to defund public schools — and the notion that government cannot do anything to solve our problems, that government is the problem. As Bayard warned in 1969, “deracinated liberals may romanticize this politics, nihilistic New Leftists may imitate it” — but ordinary black workers “will be the victims of its powerlessness.”

And when we learn that working-class whites have suffered startling declines in life expectancy, or that overdoses rates have again broken new records, or that Democrats are failing to convince larger and larger shares of non-white working-class voters, we will ignore these problems too. Because we will continue to “get such a kick out of calling people racists.”

In his time, the political pathologies Rustin identified, and the coalition that advocated them, were in their infancy. Maybe we are witnessing their final years today. Or perhaps we are once again trapped in what Rustin would call “a cycle of frustration,” where the hopes of the Obama era have crashed hard on the rocks of Trumpism. Either way, we are at least this lucky — the entire political experience of the late 1960s through today has proven many of Rustin’s most trenchant critiques not only valid but urgent.

It’s best that we don’t forget that.

Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia.

A Brief and Unflattering History of General Motors on Film / by Eileen Jones

Interior shot of a General Motors factory from American Factory. (Netflix, 2019)

Reposted from Jacobin

With the UAW’s historic strike wins this week, we look back at the history of US auto manufacturing in movies — with a focus on films that show how the auto industry has tried to shaft workers over the decades.

According to a Bernie Sanders bulletin, the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike is ending with a tentative agreement reached that Sanders sums up like this:

Workers won a 25% wage increase over the life of the agreement, temporary workers will get raises of over 150%, there are increased retirement benefits, and they won the right to strike over future plant closures.

In other words, in addition to wage and benefit hikes, they sent a message to the Big Three that they can’t keep closing plants and hurting our communities without consequences.

On such an occasion, it seems right to mark it with a “why we strike” commemoration, looking at films that show us the typical ways the automotive industry has tried to shaft the worker over the decades.

General Motors (GM), for example, has an unusually large profile in film history, and not at all a flattering one. “The largest automotive company in the world,” as it has so often billed itself in its long, hubristic history, seems to generate resentful portrayals in the entertainment industry.

Even an innocuous light comedy like The Solid Gold Cadillac was inspired — according to coauthor Howard Teichmann, who was working with the legendary wit George S. Kaufman — by a chance remark he overheard that he found hilarious: “Poor General Motors!”

Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) / Columbia Pictures

Because who could possibly pity 1950s GM, which bestrode the narrow world like a colossus?

In the hit play of 1953, which became a successful 1956 Judy Holliday film, Teichmann wound up renaming the ubiquitous, filthy rich, and highly corrupt corporation something even more generic — International Products (IP). The plot is about a nice, honest woman who owns ten shares of IP stock and begins attending shareholders’ meetings, soon disrupting the whole company by asking a series of commonsense questions of the board of directors, starting with, “What do you do to earn your salary?” When she gets the vague and highly unimpressive answer, she offers the indignant comment, “Talk about overpaid!”

She winds up leading a small shareholders’ revolt against the board, which is a good illustration of the mutinous spirit that GM inspires in film.

The rest of the films are documentaries. Most famous of them is Michael Moore’s film debut, the still-bracing Roger & Me (1989). Moore centers the film on his own hometown of Flint, Michigan, a GM company town that boomed during the postwar era and became one of many Rust Belt ruins when the bust came. GM relocated its Flint factory to the Texas-Mexico border, chasing cheap labor. It was a common practice in the “race to the bottom” that characterized American corporate practices of the 1970s and ’80s.

Still from Roger & Me. (Warner Bros.)

Moore structured his documentary around his quest to have a meeting with GM chairman of the board Roger Smith and plead the case of Flint, Michigan as a representative GM town. It was very Solid Gold Cadillac of him, proceeding from the assumption that of course an Ordinary Joe could stand up in person to the chairman of the board of an immense corporation and bring him to reason. Wearing his ubiquitous winter parka and trucker hat, the heavyset, shaggy-haired Moore would go schlumping up the steps of the glass-and-steel edifice of corporate headquarters as if he fully expected to be ushered into Smith’s presence by blazer-wearing lobby guards. Cameras would roll on the scenes of him being turned away repeatedly by suited security guards there to make sure that highly paid executives never actually had to deal with lowly members of the public.

Moore became famous overnight with this film because he seemed to have found a formula for representing bleak realities in a bracing fashion, capturing the cruelty and corruption of insanely overpaid executives who feel they owe nothing to the workers who make their profits for them, and the grim pleasure that can be taken in exposing their abuses and fighting them.

But other documentaries about GM tend to be so infuriating, and ultimately so depressing, that they’re quite hard to watch. If you want to see encapsulated the deliberate destruction of the American working class along with any practical hopes for a better future, you can just watch these films to see it play out.

The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? lays out the way the combined forces of the auto industry, the oil industry, and the federal government set out to destroy the highly promising GM experimental model released in California — the EV1. Don’t look to see the EV1 on the road anywhere, because it exists no more outside of beautiful dreams. It seems it wasn’t enough to simply halt the manufacture of the small, beautifully sleek, ultramodern electric car — it wasn’t even enough to confiscate all the cars that were leased by people lucky enough to get ahold of one, many of whom begged to buy the cars or at least continue leasing them, and were threatened with legal action if they didn’t return their EV1s.

No, GM actually confiscated all the cars, sometimes with platoons of police holding back protesters, and destroyed them — had them crushed to bits of metal and plastic so that no trace of the lovely cars would remain to tantalize the public and make them wonder why they hadn’t been able to buy environmentally beneficial electric cars a long, long time ago. An accompanying disinformation campaign put out false consumer testimony claiming that people didn’t actually like or want electric cars like the EV1.

Still from Who Killed the Electric Car? (Sony Pictures Classics)

And the next big trend in order to boost profits for the auto and oil industries was to popularize Hummers, gigantic SUVs, and obscenely massive pickup trucks.

One lone EV1 survived somehow, and got donated to an automobile museum. “That’s number ninety-nine,” says the sales rep who worked at GM during the brief heyday of the EV1, tearing up when she recognized the wonderfully sporty little red car. “That one was Christine’s.”

All very melancholy, but nothing compared to the despair-inducing experiences of two HBO documentaries made by Stephen Bognar and Julia Reichert about the same factory in the Rust Belt town of Moraine, Ohio. The first is The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009), which brilliantly relies on footage shot by the workers themselves, who smuggled in cameras during the last days of work at the Moraine Assembly plant that was the employment mainstay of an entire community. If you want a blast of the canniness and gallows humor characteristic of workers at their best, you should watch it, painful as it is. There’s a wonderful scene when workers on the line mock the idiots in management who, having no idea how the cars were actually made, botched a final work order, bringing the line to a halt far sooner than intended.

But their grief makes the far greater impression, because it’s not just a workplace shutdown, which would be plenty bad enough. Lifelong friendships, community structures, a town’s prosperity, are all broken up with the closing of one GM plant.

In 2019, Bognar and Reichert returned to the abandoned factory to document its reopening when it was taken over by a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass Industry Group. American Factory, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground Productions, and winner of the Best Documentary Academy Award, shows us how many of the workers who’d been unemployed or underemployed in the ten years since the GM plant had closed got hired back at crushingly reduced wages. People who’d lost their houses, lost everything, crept back and expressed gratitude for making eighteen dollars an hour at the same place where they’d once made twenty-nine.

“I had nothing, and I mean nothing,” said one former employee with sad dignity on the day of his return to the factory. “Now I’m just thankful I’ve got something.”

Still from American Factory. (Netflix)

American Factory is often compared to the fictional Ron Howard movie Gung Ho (1986), starring Michael Keaton, which is about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, mining comedy out of the culture clash. A lot of attention in the documentary is paid to the tensions between Chinese management and American workers. The language barrier is an enormous problem, but also allows each group to insult the other freely, with the Chinese managers particularly confident that no American will understand them when they complain, for example, about the Americans’ “fat fingers” that prevent them from doing the more dexterous jobs on the line.

The major complaints from the Chinese contingent concern the supposed slowness and laziness of the American worker, a particularly horrifying claim considering what we know of the grueling physical labor of life on the line. When a group of American workers are sent to China to observe the labor practices in a Fuyao plant, it’s chilling to hear the accounts of labor abuses that are accepted there, right under the huge painting of Mao. Women on the line talk about not seeing their children except on rare holidays, because they work such long daily hours and don’t get weekends off as a rule.

A Chinese manager says with quiet contempt that the American eight-hour day with weekends off is “pretty soft,” and an American manager — seemingly anxious to curry favor — agrees fervently with him that Americans need to toughen up and follow the Chinese model if they want to prosper again.

We see a ghastly neglect of safety standards at the Chinese factory. Workers crouch over a huge mound of broken glass discarded by the factory, having to pick through it without equipment or protective wear of any kind. “Look at the gloves they’re wearing,” exclaims one shocked American worker to another, of the ordinary cloth gloves the workers wear. “That glass will slice right through! That is fucked up.”

The Chinese labor union that factory members belong to, we’re informed, works hand in glove with factory management, with hardly any separation between them. It operates according to the same ideological stance as the factory bosses, with union reps arguing that the workers need to dedicate themselves entirely to the factory’s success, because if the factory fails they’re all out of work.

Here we get a look at how far we still have yet to fall in the United States in our international “race to the bottom.” The rights to weekends and eight-hour workdays and safety regulations, won by unions in brutal labor struggles that took generations, are all on the chopping block.

So let’s celebrate what seems to be a spectacular UAW win, and the American labor history that still has strength enough left in it to allow for these struggles and triumphs to occur.

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.

Raoul Peck’s New Doc, Silver Dollar Road, Chronicles the Dispossession of Black Americans / An interview with Raoul Peck

Still from Silver Dollar Road. (Prime Video, 2023)

Reposted from Jacobin

Oscar-nominated documentarian Raoul Peck is back with Silver Dollar Road, the true story of black dispossession in America.

scar-nominated writer/director Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, Silver Dollar Road, focuses on Elijah Reels, a black American who — after the Civil War — purchased “65 marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore” in Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. As Lizzie Presser detailed in her 2019 ProPublica article “Kicked Off the Land,” copublished by the New Yorker, the property soon became a refuge for the extended Reels family, and on his deathbed Elijah Reels, the family patriarch, exhorted his relatives: “Whatever you do, don’t let the white man take our land.”

Over the decades the Reels enjoyed their very own beach — at a time when black Americans were banned from most sands in the segregated South — and pursued livelihoods as commercial fishermen, shrimpers, and farmers. But in time, the waterfront property near the eponymous Silver Dollar Road became extremely valuable and coveted by white interests. Legal machinations were used to strip away the family’s property, and two brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, were arrested for trespassing on their legacy land, which had been in the family for generations. Remarkably, they ended up serving eight years behind bars, “becoming two of the longest-serving inmates for civil contempt in U.S. history,” as Presser noted.

But as Peck chronicles in his documentary Silver Dollar Road, the Reels family remained united and persisted in their support of their incarcerated kinfolk. They continued the struggle in the streets with civil rights demonstrations and in the courts of Beaufort, the Carteret County seat, fighting for their relatives’ liberty — and for their land.

As Peck discusses below, no matter what medium he works in, whether it’s films like his Academy Award–nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro or his HBO miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes, all have a thematic unity stressing empathy for and solidarity with the wretched of the earth. Peck was interviewed about his latest production, Silver Dollar Road, via Zoom in Los Angeles.

ED RAMPELL

How did you get wind of this story?

RAOUL PECK

The story was brought to me by ProPublica, Amazon, and JuVee Productions. They had been working on it for a few years, and as you know, it’s an incredible story. But when it came to me, I saw a possibility to tell the same story I told in Exterminate All the Brutes or Baldwin did with I Am Not Your Negro from a different perspective. Much more down to earth, much more humane group of people, but for me, it’s the same core story of this country and the injustices that exist.

It’s the story of a family who had been denied justice about a piece of land they owned for at least 160 years. It’s the typical story of appropriation in an urban world of gentrification where people are unable to keep their property and they are being pushed out by other entities that want to make a profit from that piece of land.    

ED RAMPELL

How did the Reels family originally get that land?

RAOUL PECK

Like many people who came out of enslavement, they tried to make a living. Some of them succeeded in buying swamp land. They were able as well to make that land prosperous — nobody bought it because it was the only land they could have access to and pay for.

Of course, it became a problem for the surrounding white population that a former slave could own land and make a living out of that land. That’s when the terror started. Lynching, burning down houses, burning down plantations. And then sending a big exodus of black farmers to the North.

ED RAMPELL

According to your film, during the twentieth century, 90 percent of black landowners lost their land. Can you tell us about that?

RAOUL PECK

They were pushed out, and the laws voted were not in their favor. Or even when they were in their favor there were ways to manipulate those laws and make sure that blacks and minorities — I’m not even talking about the indigenous part of the population, the original inheritors — were deprived of everything. You can trace the source of today’s poverty, today’s economic down spiral, the fact that all of the community doesn’t have access to the minimum of education or wealth, cannot live in proper places where they feel protected. So, you can trace the whole history of this country through the same history of land, and land acquiring and land being stolen, and land being used for capitalistic profit.

ED RAMPELL

It’s astounding in your film that two members of the Reels family, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, go to prison for trespassing on their own legacy land. What is “heirs’ property law,” which is mentioned in Silver Dollar Road?

RAOUL PECK

It’s a simple concept. Because most of the black population doesn’t trust the justice system, when they die, a lot of the time they don’t leave a will. Because for a will, you have to go to a notary; it’s a legal document. They prefer to let the land to all their inheritors, all their children and grandchildren, believing that because it’s the whole family, [the land] is all protected. But you fall into what’s called “heirs’ property” — that means it’s a property that each part of the family owns a little bit of, like a stakeholder. But there is no paperwork.

So, the heirs’ property makes the property, in fact, more fragile. People can find loopholes where they can go to one of those supposed heirs, whether that person lived on the property or not, and say, “I want my piece.” Usually, because it’s the whole family who is responsible — but as you know in everyday life, when you have one hundred or two hundred family members, it’s very hard to get a hold of everybody. That helped make the thing very complicated. And the property is sold at some auction, usually at the bargain price, and the family loses the whole property. They get some money for it, but there’s nothing they can do and they lose the very place where they live. Just because somebody from elsewhere pushes some sort of document that they were also owner. So that’s how those bad stories started, because the laws enable it.

ED RAMPELL

Can you give some examples of how Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were cheated out of their land?

RAOUL PECK

One of them is the Torrens Act, where somebody can indeed bring some sort of paper of title, whether the title is proven truthful or not; in that case, it was a fraudulent title. Because if you could prove that you have a line on the land or that you put people on the land who can witness that it belongs to you, the judge might decide, okay, it’s rightfully true.

But in that case, most of the names in that deed did not exist — the family did not know who they were. But a judge decided it was truthful. So, basically that’s when the problems started. There were two documents: One fraudulent; one was legal, but conflicted, because the justice said both are in conflict. Starting from there it was impossible to really find the right way to get out of the situation, and the property kept being sold to other companies.

I hope the film will give more insight about what else is happening in this country right now. And in order to understand, you need to know more about your whole history since the beginning.

Following a limited theatrical release Silver Dollar Road will be released October 20 on Prime Video. For more info click here. 

Raoul Peck is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian/critic, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, and coauthor of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.

How Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus Broke the Hollywood Blacklists / by Taylor Durrell

Woody Strode (L) and Kirk Douglas (R) in gladiatorial battle in a publicity still issued for the 1960 film Spartacus.(Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)

Reposted from Jacobin

May 1, 1946 was an unparalleled May Day for the Left in America. Recently discharged veterans joined with teachers, writers, artists, lawyers, and other workers to march triumphantly through Manhattan. “The number of paraders, as we counted them, was over 150,000, and when they packed Union Square, cheering left-wing and Communist leaders and speakers,” the Communist writer Howard Fast wrote in his memoir, Being Red, “one would have said that the future of the left in America was extremely bright and of course they would have been wrong.”

By May Day of 1948, the same Communists who were celebrated only two years earlier became the targets of violent reactionary crowds chanting “Kill a commie for Christ!” Fast was leading the Communist Party’s “culture block” made up of thousands of academics, artists, and writers who quickly found themselves in a street fight with anti-communist students from a nearby parochial school.

The second parade was a bad omen. With the advent of the Second Red Scare and Cold War, Communists soon became the national enemy, seen not as freedom-fighting progressives, as they had been by many on the broad left, but instead as anti-American authoritarians and dangerous subversives. Fast himself was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was imprisoned when he refused to name names.

Fast was blacklisted from the publishing industry. He was only one of a generation of artists who were purged from America’s mainstream, the blacklist ruining their careers, consigning them to obscurity and often poverty. Many books from that time still remain unpublished and screenplays unmade; cultural figures, once famous, have been largely erased from America’s history.

But within the unwavering terror of the McCarthyist period are stories of resistance. Fast’s experience in prison, for example, led him to write the novel Spartacus, which was later adapted into a screenplay by the Communist writer Dalton Trumbo. When the movie was screened in 1960, after a decade of remaining underground, two Communists’ names illuminated the beginning of the film, a giant middle finger to the reactionaries of the era. This is the story of Spartacus, or how Communists first broke through the blacklists.

“Today’s Prisons Will Be Tomorrow’s Victory”

Howard Fast is one of those forgotten figures in the spotty memory of America’s literary canon. He published his first novel at age eighteen, and spent several decades building his career in publishing, emerging as a popular novelist. He was also an active member of the Communist Party. Before being blacklisted, he was passionately involved with supporting Spanish Republican fighters; in 1945 he joined the executive board of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. The group was hardly subversive, bringing in donations from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Lehman, the wife of New York governor Herbert Lehman. But political currents shifted, and in 1946 Fast was issued a subpoena to appear before HUAC to give over the donor list.

Fast refused to name names, assured by lawyers that contempt of Congress wouldn’t result in any jail time. But later that same year he was subpoenaed again, this time for a book he’d written on the Yugoslav revolutionary, The Incredible Tito, and his future became uncertain. In 1947, he and ten others from the Refugee Committee were sentenced to prison.

Fast and his comrades had faith in their appeal, but there was little to be done for his reputation and career. “My new book, The American” — a portrait of John Atgeld, the progressive governor of Illinois — “was being trashed mercilessly,” Fast recalled. He was also now under constant surveillance. “My telephone was tapped. Featherbrained FBI agents were slipping into my apartment [during fundraisers] . . . and other agents were following me through the streets,” he remembered.

In 1949, New York schools were instructed to remove any copies of his historical-fiction book, Citizen Tom Paine, from their shelves. J. Edgar Hoover sent agents ordering New York Public Library librarians to destroy Fast’s books. The FBI blocked publishers from printing new works of Fast’s, even some he had written under the supposed anonymity of a pen name.

By 1950, anti-communism had spread, and Fast’s hopes for a reversal of his prison sentence were lost. Fast was booked in a district prison, an experience he recalled as distinctly dehumanizing:

There on long benches sat about a hundred men, black men and white men, all of them naked. They sat despondently, hunched over, heads bent, evoking pictures of the extermination camps of World War Two. . . . The dignity we had clung to so desperately was now taken from us.

He was put in a five-by-seven foot cell with a frightened eighteen year old who’d been in and out of prison since he was twelve and, according to Fast, had been raped by other prisoners over a hundred times. Fortunately for Fast, he was transferred to Mill Point, a minimum security prison in West Virginia.

To those outside the United States, Fast and his imprisoned comrades were martyrs. Rallies and fundraisers were held in support of the imprisoned as international solidarity poured in. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote the poem “To Howard Fast,” praising Fast’s writing about “black heroes, of captains and highways, of the poor and of the cities,” and lamenting the tyranny of the Second Red Scare, what Neruda called the “gestapo reborn.”

Fast’s imprisonment was a calamity for free speech, but there were also silver linings. He spent much of the end of his term with the Communist novelist Albert Maltz and found solace in his daily work building structures for the prison — his masterpiece was a functioning replica of the famous Manneken Pis statue. The warden of the prison was oddly kind, offering up a typewriter for Fast to write after his daily prison duties.

Fast, himself hoping to use the time to write, was unable to bring himself to commit any words to paper. Instead, he took to researching. He was particularly interested in a 1914 German movement founded by Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg that later merged with the Communist Party of Germany. The name of the group was the Spartacus Group. It was his experience in Mill Point, with all the anxieties and fears that being in prison often invokes, that inspired him to write his novel, Spartacus.

“I never regret the past,” he wrote, “and if my ordeal helped to write Spartacus, I think it was well worth it.” It was in prison, after all, where he “began more deeply than ever to comprehend the full agony and hopelessness of the underclass.” As Neruda wrote in his poem dedicated to Fast, “Today’s prisons will be tomorrow’s victory.”

After his months in prison, he was released into a world where the Second Red Scare was in full swing. “The country was as close to a police state as it had ever been,” he wrote in his 1996 introduction to Spartacus. “J. Edgar Hoover, the chief of the FBI, took on the role of a petty dictator. The fear of Hoover and his file on thousands of liberals permeated the country.” In this environment, Fast began the journey of writing a manuscript chronicling Spartacus, the slave who was trained as a gladiator and led a fictionalized slave revolt in ancient Rome.

But with the writing of a book also comes the finding of a publisher. And publishers, in the case of blacklisted writers, were as accessible to them as yachts are to the poor — which is to say, not at all. Fast’s longtime publisher, Angus Cameron at Little, Brown and Company, loved Spartacus and agreed to publish it swiftly and with pride. But then Hoover sent a federal agent to Boston, where he met with the president of the publishing house and delivered direct instructions from Hoover to not publish another book by Fast. The publishing company abandoned the book, causing Cameron to resign in protest.

After several failed attempts at securing other mainstream publishers, Fast resorted to self-publishing. His name and notoriety were enough to spark interest even without a publisher. The book sold well enough. His family shipped forty thousand hardcover copies of the book out of their home.

It would be years before the book would be picked up by mainstream publishers. Eventually it would sell millions of copies and go through over a hundred editions in over fifty-six languages. It would also be turned into a famous film of the same name. But first, Fast and his collaborators would need to break the grip of anti-communism on Hollywood.

Time of the Toad

By 1947, Hollywood was increasingly divided into two polarizing factions: Communist Party members and their sympathizers, and anti-communists who were devoted to rooting them out of the industry. It was the reactionary Motion Picture Alliance that pushed the industry into these opposing camps, with scarcely any room remaining for neutrality.

Hollywood Communists were open in their opposition to antisemitism, fascism, racism, and labor exploitation, contributing under their real names to “dangerous” publications like People’s World, New Masses, and the Daily Worker. “They saw the danger — real danger — to the people in the industry posed by the labor practices of the period,” the liberal California lawyer Carey McWilliams, later editor at the Nation, said in an interview with Trumbo biographer Bruce Cook. “And they knew the Nazis were not playing make-believe.”

After HUAC subpoenaed Hollywood’s “unfriendly nineteen,” more than seven thousand people gathered for a rally at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium before the group’s departure to the capital. They made the most of their trip to Washington, holding rallies in Chicago and New York before arriving at the hearings. Of the original nineteen, the eleven individuals who refused to cooperate with the committee came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. (The eleventh was German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was living in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany and then, after his hearing, fled the United States for East Germany.)

Among them was the group’s highest-paid screenwriter and also the committee’s most unfriendly witness: Dalton Trumbo. “[Y]our job,” Trumbo told chief investigator Robert E. Stripling after he instructed Trumbo to answer “Yes” or “No,” “is to ask questions and mine is to answer them. . . . I shall answer in my own words. Very many questions can be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ only by a moron or a slave.” On his way out, he yelled, “This is the beginning of an American concentration camp!” That late October of 1947, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress. All were sentenced to prison, Trumbo to a year.

HUAC and the 1947 Waldorf Agreement, the studio-executive pact that enforced the blacklists, devastated many in the entertainment industry. “People would be stunned at the suicides from the period, and incredible things that happened then,” McWilliams recalled. “The use of freedom,” Trumbo wrote in The Time of the Toad (1949), “the actual invocation of the Bill of Rights, is an exceedingly dangerous procedure.” Trumbo directed his moral outrage at not only the conservatives, but also the liberal collaborators with the anti-communist witch hunt, and those who sat by passively.

But far from completely purging the industry of Communists, the blacklists forced them into the shadows. The blacklists created a new market in Hollywood: the black market. Screenplays by blacklistees were sold under false names or under the names of other writers. While waiting for his appeal to go through, Trumbo made a modest living writing pulpy screenplays for the King brothers, a B-movie production house. Between the hearing in 1947 and his entrance into America’s penal system in 1950, Trumbo, under fake names, pumped out eighteen screenplays. “None,” he insisted, “was very good.”

The Ashland Federal Correctional Institute in Kentucky was, for Trumbo, similar to Fast’s experience at Mill Point — that is, fortunately uneventful. Trumbo was not completely on his own in prison. In fact he was only a short distance, twenty-four inches to be exact, from another Hollywood Ten member, John Howard Lawson. They were later joined by Adrian Scott.

Exhausted from the constant rallies and screenplays, Trumbo almost welcomed certain aspects of prison life. In prison he met moonshiners, bootleggers, and counterfeiters, many of whom were illiterate. He read and wrote letters for one moonshiner named Cecil, whose wife was caring for five sick children on her own, struggling to keep them warm and fed. Those eleven months in Ashland changed Trumbo in many ways. Once a night writer, he now only wrote in the day. Once unaffected by the sound of a whistle, he now stopped instantly to fall in line. But he never abandoned his principles.

After serving their time, John Wexley, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Ian Hunter, Dalton Trumbo, and many other blacklistees lived in exile in Mexico City, seeking work and refuge from the persistent harassment of the FBI. One day, the Canadian-born blacklisted screenwriter Hugo Butler dragged Dalton and Cleo Trumbo out to watch some bullfighting. One bullfight ended in an indulto, or pardoning of the bull, which is given after the crowd waves handkerchiefs in support of a bull’s showcase of bravery. The event inspired Trumbo’s film, The Brave One (1956), a drama following a boy and his bull. The film went on to win an Oscar under Trumbo’s pseudonym, Robert Rich. It was the first fracture in the wall that was the blacklists.

Press caught onto rumors that Trumbo was Robert Rich. Instead of confirming them, he exposed how extensive Hollywood’s black market was by pointing the press to other blacklisted writers who might have written it. By 1956, Trumbo was back in Hollywood and had mastered the art of the black market. He had numerous pseudonyms and writers volunteering their names to help them get into the industry. John Abbott, Sam Jackson, C. F. Demaine, and Peter Finch were just some of his alter egos. What he proved in his strategic elusiveness was that any screenplay could be written by a Communist using a fake name or a front writer. The blacklist was only as effective as the employers willing to enforce it — and the tide was turning.

“I’m Spartacus”

The first draft of the screenplay for Spartacus was written by Fast, but he wasn’t quick enough to finish the job in time. Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators, a movie with a similar theme, was on the way to production, and Kirk Douglas’s production company, Bryna Productions, which was producing Spartacus, needed to beat it to the screen. So Douglas turned to the fastest pen in the West, Dalton Trumbo — signed under the pseudonym Sam Jackson.

They quickly began filming, but the original director, Anthony Mann, butted heads with Douglas. Apparently forgetting that Douglas was not only the star of the film but also the boss, Mann got himself fired. Douglas replaced him with Stanley Kubrick, whom he referred to as a “cocky kid from the Bronx.” Many problems ensued throughout the filming of the movie. From the censors limiting any vaguely sexual or homosexual content to the bribing of Spain’s Franco government to use soldiers in a scene, the movie was a vast and complex undertaking.

It wasn’t clear at the time of filming whether Trumbo and Fast could be credited on screen. The 1950s were coming to an end, and it was unclear how effective the blacklists were at this point. The debate heated up when Mann spread the news that it was Trumbo, not Sam Jackson, who wrote the movie. Gossip columns picked up the news, and for the first time in a decade Trumbo’s cover was blown.

And then the January 19, 1960, edition off the New York Times was published, proclaiming on the cover that Trumbo would be credited as the screenwriter of Otto Preminger’s upcoming production Exodus. Hollywood was dipping its toes in the tides of the blacklists. Would there be a crackdown in response? If not, would that mean McCarthyism was over? Would audiences boycott the film, or celebrate it? Upon Spartacus’s release, theaters across the country displayed a giant middle finger to the anti-communist repression of the era. Audiences flocked to see a movie whose title screen displayed the names of two convicted Communist subversives, Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo.

Pickets ensued, but they were relatively reserved. A group called the Catholic War Veterans were the most vocal. (They had been, however, in full support of the English film that came out earlier that year called Conspiracy of Hearts, about Catholic nuns protecting Jewish children from Nazis. The screenplay was credited to Robert Presnell Jr, but was actually written by Dalton Trumbo.)

The blacklists were, for all intents and purposes, broken. In 1960, Kennedy was elected president, and shortly thereafter, he made a trip to a movie theater with his brother. With a number of films they could’ve seen, the Catholic brothers chose no other than Spartacus, crossing the Catholic War Veterans picket to deal a final death blow to the blacklists. When Kennedy exited the theater and was asked what he thought of the film, he responded simply: it was a good film.

“The terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus,” a Roman soldier yells out in a famous concluding scene of Spartacus. Kirk Douglas rises, but is followed in unison with his two neighbors who yell “I’m Spartacus,” as a thousand other slaves rise behind them. Spartacus became a pseudonym for resistance, for liberty.

The story of Spartacus is also the story of the story of Spartacus. Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were two of the thousands of Communists in the United States who struggled to survive through the Red Scare. It was a time when, as Trumbo put it, “devils persuad[ed] us that freedom is best defended by surrendering it altogether.”

Taylor Dorrell is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer.