a review of 1967-1975 黑权运动呐声集

February 2/28: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Netflix streaming) An excellent overview of the various streams of black thought and activism to come out of the end of the civil rights era. Being "recent history" (I was born in 1977) this was all stuff that I never really learned in my normal public school education, so a lot of my knowledge of Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and Nation of Islam came piecemeal from my other reading. The detached, neutral nature of the documentary footage, coming from (of all places) Swedish television film crews gives it all a very interesting outsider's perspective. The Black Power movement still gets demonized today for supposedly not living up to MLK Jr's ideal of nonviolent resistance, but when divorced from the normal cultural associations, it's hard not to see a certain level of complicated heroism in even the more controversial figures of the era.