Angela Davis, being interviewed at Marin County Jail, in California,
in 1972.
By ERIC KOHN
Published: September 2, 2011
IN 1967 a young Swedish journalist named Ingrid Dahlberg traveled to
New York to interview the black militant activist Stokely Carmichael
for the Swedish National Broadcast Company. As she sat in the home of
his mother, Mabel, she found herself unable to make the older woman
feel at ease on film. Suddenly Carmichael, who had met Ms. Dahlberg on
a Scandinavian book tour several months earlier, and who had
popularized the term "black power" the previous year, rose from his
seat and grabbed the microphone. With the camera running, he gently
prodded his mother into recalling the struggles of her husband, who
had died but in his lifetime attributed his constant layoffs during
Carmichael's childhood to the prevailing racial biases of the era.
Ms. Dahlberg, now 70, said she was happy when he took over. "I
couldn't get from her what he could," she said by phone from her
summer house on the Swedish island of Faro. "He wanted very much to
show his own background, to show her."
The Carmichael footage, which was broadcast in Sweden that year,
offered an affable, intimate contrast to the furious pundit usually
seen in the American news media. But for the next 40 years it sat
forgotten in the basement archives the network shared with the Swedish
Radio Corporation, along with other broadcasts about the movement
produced around that time.
Then, around 2007, Goran Hugo Olsson, a documentary filmmaker,
stumbled upon the 16-millimeter material as he looked for footage for
a project about the Philadelphia soul singer Billy Paul ("Me and Mrs.
Jones"). The trove included interviews with members of the Black
Panther Party and a candid conversation with Angela Davis in a
California jail. "I immediately realized that these images couldn't
stay in this basement," Mr. Olsson, 45, said during a recent visit to
New York. "It was my duty to put them out for a new audience."
Using material from some 20 different Swedish television productions,
he conceived the backbone of a feature-length documentary eventually
titled "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975," which opens in New York on
Sept. 9. The movie also contains new audio interviews with veterans of
the movement, including Ms. Davis, as well as younger artists and
activists inspired by it, like the rapper Talib Kweli.
Mr. Olsson called the documentary "a new way of telling a story that
has been put on hold for some time and needed a fresh look," citing a
contrast between the American coverage of black power and the Swedish
reportage he watched on television in the '70s. "In America it was
always connected to court trials or crime," he said, compared with the
gregarious, somewhat insular tone of Swedish coverage, which he called
"the Eskimo perspective."
Hoping to lure American producers, Mr. Olsson traveled to New York and
showed up at the offices of Louverture Films without an appointment.
There he encountered the producer Joslyn Barnes, who was skeptical of
the idea. "Here's this tall, blond Swede saying he wants to make a
film about the black power movement," Ms. Barnes said. "I blinked at
him." Then Mr. Olsson showed her the footage of Carmichael. "It was a
much more rounded view of these people as individuals," she said. Ms.
Barnes called her producing partner, the actor and activist Danny
Glover. "The breadth of it was incredible," he said of the footage.
"There was a great deal of openness to the movement. You could find
the voices of all these leaders outside of just snippets of what they
would say to form a certain attitude."
The documentary reflects a trend in black studies scholarship. "What
we're seeing is really a re-evaluation of the black power period,"
said Peniel Joseph, a professor at Tufts University and the author of
"Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in
America," from 2006.
"There are striking juxtapositions between the documentary image of
black power and our popular memory of it," which he described as an
"emotionally charged and destructive movement." According to Ms.
Dahlberg many Swedish journalists were motivated less by the racial
politics than the views they shared with its leaders in opposition to
the Vietnam War. They also connected with their subjects partly by
maintaining a certain cultural distance lacking in their American
counterparts. Mr. Olsson followed their lead when gathering new
interviews. "If you have this Eskimo perspective, people are really
friendly and generous," he said.
Many veterans of the movement see the period of activism depicted in
the film validated by its continued relevance. "Because the past is
filled with unresolved conflicts, it keeps people's attention," said
Kathleen Cleaver, a law professor in Atlanta who was the
communications secretary for the Black Panther Party. (She was married
to Eldridge Cleaver, a party leader, who died in 1998.) She is also
one of the documentary's modern-day interview subjects. "We did things
specifically to get media attention to convey our views, " she added.
"Now it's in museums."
According to Dr. Joseph, the resurgence of black power iconography in
'80s hip-hop stimulated a new generation of interest in the movement,
which continues to mature in the academic world. "Black power is
slowly being humanized," he said.
After the movie earned acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in
January, Mr. Olsson and his producers made plans to continue its life
off screen. Next spring, Haymarket Books will publish a collection of
extended transcripts of the interviews Mr. Olsson conducted for the
film. And Mr. Olsson has collaborated with the SoHo gallery Third
Streaming for a photography exhibition opening the same day as the
documentary that will showcase stills from the era and additional
footage not included in the film.
Thirty years after Ms. Dahlberg interviewed Carmichael, she received a
call from him as he prepared to travel to Cuba for cancer treatment.
(He died in Guinea in 1998.) It was the first time the activist, now
using the name Kwame Ture, had contacted her directly since their
earlier time together. Reflecting on the changing times, "we laughed
and laughed," Ms. Dahlberg said, but she detected resignation in
Carmichael's voice. "He didn't have much hope," she recalled about his
illness. "I found it to be a goodbye call. It was clear he hadn't
forgotten me."
--
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