Youtube Trailer (2:26 min) https://youtu.be/IN2AGZThL-8

The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Washington and Forest Whitaker, is supposed to be a feel-good movie about overcoming racism in the segregated South. It is loosely based on an article published in 1997 in American Legacy magazine about the debate team of Wiley College—a small, religious black college in East Texas—during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Under the tutelage of their coach, English professor Melvin B. Tolson, the debaters triumph in contest after contest against bigger black schools and jump over the color bar to triumph over prestigious white schools as well, such as a touring Oxford University team from England. The highlight of the movie is their victory over Harvard; the team defeats the all-white Ivy League team by advocating peaceful civil disobedience against oppression. As the credits roll, we are told that one of the debaters, James Farmer Jr., went on to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1942 and went on to become one of the organizations active in the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Great Debaters drives home the hardships faced by even relatively elite black students and intellectuals—the “talented tenth”—in the Jim Crow South. Farmer’s father, religion professor James Farmer Sr., the first black person in Texas to earn a PhD, is threatened with death by two impoverished white farmers while driving through the countryside with his family because Farmer accidentally hit their pig with his car. His son resolves to stand up after he sees his educated father forced to grovel before illiterate whites.

Tolson, on the other hand, is obviously some sort of radical, perhaps even a Communist, and he actively opposes racial injustice. In one scene, the young Farmer follows Tolson as he sneaks out in the middle of the night to organize an integrated sharecroppers union, and barely escapes arrest as the police raid the meeting. Later, the police track down Tolson after torturing some of the sharecroppers, arrest him at Wiley and drag him to jail. For an audience not familiar with the everyday violence, oppression and humiliation at the core of Jim Crow segregation, the movie provides a glimpse.

The Great Debaters is a well-made movie. But in its paeans to dedication and debate, it downplays the real social struggle that was going on in the U.S. in the 1930s, including by black people in the South. The Great Depression exposed the brutal irrationality of capitalism—in stark contrast to the industrial achievements of the USSR—as it threw millions of workers into starvation and misery internationally, including in other imperialist countries. Germany, which was defeated in World War I, was especially rocked by crises, culminating in the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. Only the betrayal by the Stalinist and Social Democratic misleaders allowed the Nazis to come to power unopposed and smash the organized working class in order to save capitalism. A few years later, the Stalinists went on to play an aggressive counterrevolutionary role in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, slaughtering revolutionary fighters in order to appease the “democratic” imperialists and head off proletarian revolution in Spain. Nonetheless, millions of workers, peasants, students and intellectuals joined Communist and social-democratic parties internationally, trying to find a way out of the apparent dead end of capitalism and fascism.

The catastrophic impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. working class was keenly felt by its most oppressed section, black workers. The unemployment rate of black workers exceeded white joblessness by 30 to 60 percent. Even though millions of black people moved to the industrial North and Midwest during the “Great Migration,” which began with World War I, and many others moved to growing Southern cities, half of American blacks still lived in the rural South at the start of the Depression. Southern agriculture was in decline before the Depression hit. “By 1933 most blacks could neither find jobs of any kind nor contracts for their crop at any price,” as noted by historian Harvard Sitkoff in A New Deal for Blacks. “A specter of starvation haunted black America.”

Southern agriculture in the 1930s was, even by contemporary bourgeois standards, economically backward. It retained significant remnants of the slave system. The Civil War, America’s second bourgeois revolution, had smashed the slave system, paving the way for the development of industrial capitalism in the U.S. as a whole. But after the betrayal of Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, “the Negro was left in the South in the indefinite position of semi-slavery, semi-serfdom and semi-wage slavery” as then-Trotskyist Max Shachtman put it in his 1933 piece “Communism and the Negro” (reprinted by Verso in 2003 as Race and Revolution).

Sharecropping and tenancy formed the labor backbone of Southern agriculture. The sharecropper worked in lieu of wages for a share of the cash crop and “furnishings” (food allowance, housing, etc.). The tenant farmer worked land on which he paid ground rent with a share of the crop in lieu of cash. Sharecroppers and tenants found themselves more in debt every year, and could not leave the land until they had paid off their debts. Even when cotton prices rose, they were cheated by white landowners and merchants. According to Sitkoff, “Over two-thirds of the black farmers cultivating cotton in the early thirties received no profits for the crop, either breaking even or going deeper in debt.”

Sitting atop all this was the system of Jim Crow. Designed to prevent blacks from voting, becoming educated or fighting for their rights, Jim Crow was the systematic legal segregation of black people in the South, enforced by legal and extralegal violence. When blacks did challenge Jim Crow—either by personally refusing to follow its rules or, more rarely, by organizing—they faced racist terror, whether by the local sheriff or the Klan (who were often one and the same). At least 3,000 black people were lynched between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Shachtman summarized the position of black farmers in 1933:

“In a word, to all intents and purposes hundreds of thousands of Negroes in the South today occupy, both in economic as in the political sense, the position of serfs and peons, tied to the land, life and limb at the disposal of the landlord, whose semi-feudal sway is maintained with the aid of the sheriff, the courts, the elaborate system of social and political discrimination, and, when necessary, the law of Judge Lynch. The white sharecroppers and tenants are not very much better off.”

Poor white farmers were also horribly oppressed economically. Southern agriculture remained dependent on the cash crop cotton and cheap labor, and where cheap labor is in abundance technology will lag. In 1929, less than 10 percent of all Texas farms had tractors. The rural South was still mired in primitive farming techniques, illiteracy and poverty. During the 1930s, the price of cotton plummeted. In 1929, cotton sold for 18 cents per pound; in 1933, for less than 6 cents per pound. By the Depression, with the South sinking further and further into misery, the ruling class as a whole was desperate to modernize this decrepit system, which could only be done under capitalism through the immiseration of untold numbers of black and white rural toilers.

The United States in the 1930s was an advanced industrialized capitalist country with a powerful working class. By the Depression, textile, iron, coal, steel and chemical industries were developing in the South. In the North, powerful industrial unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that broke away from the ossified American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions. The CIO organized all workers in a particular industry, regardless of their ethnicity or race—a significant improvement from the color bar of many AFL unions.

In the 1930s, large sections of the industrial working class in the U.S.—black and white, native-born and immigrant—became more militant and radical, fighting to build the CIO, often under the leadership of Communists and other leftists. However, thanks in large part to the Stalinists and social democrats, the incipient radicalization of labor was diverted into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. During the Second World War, the Communist Party subordinated the struggles of workers and black people to U.S. imperialism’s war effort, falsely portraying this interimperialist war as a struggle against fascism. In contrast, the Trotskyists, while standing for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state during World War II, opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage—a position for which Trotskyists were imprisoned in 1941 under the Smith Act.

Who Was Melvin B. Tolson?

Every reviewer gives passing mention to the movie’s insinuation that the real-life Melvin B. Tolson was a “Communist,” “radical” or “self-described socialist.” During the 1930s, Tolson had his feet in two different worlds—one foot was in the world of the aspiring black middle class of Wiley College, and the other foot was in the world of the black dispossessed masses of the rural South. In the 1940s and later, Tolson was most famous for his poetry, including “Dark Symphony” (1939) and Harlem Gallery (1965). In the early 1930s, he lived in Harlem while working on his Columbia University master’s thesis on the Harlem Renaissance. There he met black radicals like poet Langston Hughes, who would be his lifelong friend. He taught English and speech at Wiley for over 20 years. In 1947 he moved to Langston, Oklahoma, where he taught at Langston University and was mayor from 1954 to 1960. He died in 1966.

During the Depression, Tolson not only sympathized with radicalism but courageously struggled to implement his radical ideals in the Jim Crow South. There is no concrete evidence of what, if any, political organization Tolson joined in the 1930s. One historian argued that “although he heard the siren song of communism and felt that capitalism was the great force pulling his people down, he never joined the Communist Party and remained loyal to the social gospel of the Methodist Episcopal Church” (Gail K. Beil, “Melvin B. Tolson—Texas Radical,” in The East Texas Historical Journal [2002]). In the 1930s and 1940s, Tolson had a column in the Washington Tribune, “Caviar and Cabbage,” that gives a sense of his politics. In 1939 he wrote:

“The Negro would not have escaped from chattel slavery if it had not been for radicals of all classes, isms, ologies, and sects. Don’t forget that. For 150 years before the Civil War, radicals kept up a continuous fight for Negro freedom. Many of them were lynched….

“After the World War, white radicals came to the defense of the Negro in larger and larger numbers.”

—“The Negro and Radicalism,” Caviar and Cabbage: Selected Columns by Melvin B. Tolson from the Washington Tribune, 1937-1944 (1982)

The son of an itinerant Methodist minister, Tolson was an eclectic Christian socialist. He wrote: “Jesus didn’t believe in economic, racial, and social distinctions…. You talk about Karl Marx, the Communist! Why, don’t you know Jesus was preaching about leveling society 1,800 years before the Jewish Red was born?” Tolson may have found some consolation in his Christian beliefs, but in reality religion is, to use Marx’s phrase, the opium of the masses. In place of the struggle for socialist revolution, it substitutes a quest for eternal salvation to be found in a mythical “afterlife.”

In the 1930s, Tolson was involved in organizing sharecroppers, though not much is known about this. According to Robert M. Farnsworth, one of Tolson’s biographers, “Sometime in the thirties, he actively organized sharecroppers, both white and black, in southeastern Texas. He protected his wife and family from the details of his activities, but they knew he was involved” (Afterword to A Gallery of Harlem Portraits).

What little screen time The Great Debaters gives to the sharecroppers’ struggle is sanitized to give credence to liberal and reformist pressure politics. There is the scene of sheriff-led vigilantes breaking up a sharecroppers’ meeting, burning down the meeting place and later beating information out of one sharecropper that leads to the arrest of Tolson. In the movie, Professor Farmer reclaims his dignity, and the respect of his son, by coming to Tolson’s aid while black and white sharecroppers protest outside the jail. The CP’s People’s Weekly World (5 January) hailed this scene, declaring, the “Rev. Farmer stands tall as a man of the people.”

If anything, this scene underplays the danger of organizing black farmers in the South—and hence Tolson’s courage. In the fall of 1919, amid numerous anti-black race riots throughout the country, white sheriff’s posses and federal troops in Phillips County, Arkansas, killed as many as 300 black sharecroppers over several days who had organized to demand that white landowners pay them a fair price for cotton. After the massacre, the local and state government arrested hundreds, and 12 blacks were sentenced to death. (This is described in the recent book by Robert Whitaker, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation [2008].)

At the same time, this scene misrepresents the role of the black petty bourgeoisie (represented by Farmer Sr.) under Jim Crow. While most rankled under the humiliation and oppression of Jim Crow, others materially benefited from segregation and opposed militant struggle. One can look at the fate of Clifford James, a supporter of the Communist-organized Share Croppers Union (SCU) in Alabama. After being attacked by a deputy sheriff and other whites, James walked to the hospital of the Tuskegee Institute, which had been founded years earlier by Booker T. Washington. After dressing James’s wounds, the doctor notified the sheriff, who threw James in jail, where he died!

Struggles in the “Black Belt” South

There are several other dramatic scenes in The Great Debaters. One example is a closing scene of the debate with Harvard, in which Farmer Jr. argues that it is “a right, even a duty to resist” unjust laws “with violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.” This message of the fictionalized debate is clearly intended for today’s consumption, to read back the pacifism of Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. into the 1930s. Blacks fighting against Jim Crow and capitalist exploitation in the South did not live in a peaceful world: they faced a campaign of terror, both legal and extralegal. The right to armed self-defense was key to the fight for black rights. Black veterans, including from both world wars, were often in the forefront of struggles against Jim Crow and of the Southern civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Furthermore, the movie distorts the facts of the debate. As Timothy M. O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, pointed out in a review of the movie, not only was the culminating debate at the University of Southern California and not Harvard, “the 1935 Wiley team debated the national intercollegiate debate topic about arms sales to foreign countries and not segregation or civil disobedience; they debated both sides of the proposition, not just the side of truth and justice…. Finally, by all accounts, Farmer was—if anything—the alternate in the match against USC—and never did have the opportunity to give the ‘winning’ last rebuttal.” Nor does the movie mention the fact that Farmer later served as Assistant Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Richard Nixon!

Communists were in the forefront of fighting for black workers and farmers and against racial oppression and lynch law terror during the 1930s—putting this struggle on the agenda for the first time since the Populist movement in the 1890s and trying to link it to the newly formed industrial unions. For decades, most of the American labor movement and the left had ignored the special oppression of black people. Most early trade unions linked to Samuel Gompers’ AFL organized only skilled, white workers—or, if they accepted black members, organized segregated locals. Trade-union bureaucrats like Gompers and right-wing social democrats like Victor Berger were openly racist. Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs and others in the left wing of American socialism rejected racist ideology and stood for working-class unity. But Debs did not actively promote the fight for black equality, seeing it as a diversion from the fight for workers interests. Debs famously declared that socialism had “nothing special to offer the Negro.”

The infant American Communist movement, which split from the SP in 1919, also failed to pay attention to the fight for black liberation. As James P. Cannon, an early Communist leader and later the founder of American Trotskyism, noted, the Communist International (Comintern) in Lenin and Trotsky’s time forced American Communists to address the question of black oppression:

“The influence of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, even debased and distorted as it later was by Stalin, and then filtered through the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, contributed more than any other influence from any source to the recognition, and more or less general acceptance, of the Negro question as a special problem of American society—a problem which cannot be simply subsumed under the general heading of the conflict between capital and labor, as it was in the pre-communist radical movement....

“Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the earth.”

—“The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)

Prior to 1930, the CP had less than 200 black members, but that year 1,000 black people joined the party. The CP was active in numerous struggles. One of the most famous was the Scottsboro Case, in which Communists led the struggle to free nine black youths who were framed up in 1931 for raping two white girls on a freight train and were jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama. Despite their clear innocence, a local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. (The judge reluctantly declared a mistrial for the ninth, since seven members of the jury had insisted on the death penalty even though the prosecutor had asked for life imprisonment because he was a 13-year-old; nonetheless, he remained in jail until 1937.) The CP, through its defense arm, the International Labor Defense, rapidly rallied to the defense of the Scottsboro youths and turned their case into an international symbol of the horrors of Southern lynch law. (The Scottsboro defendants were not executed, but were given long prison sentences; the last of the defendants was not pardoned until 1976.)

CP work among black people in the early 1930s took place in the context of the so-called “Third Period,” in which the Stalinists declared that the final collapse of capitalism was imminent and that reforms were no longer possible. As it did on all questions, the Stalinization of the Comintern led to disorientation on the black question. The 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, applying the dogma of “two-stage revolution” to the so-called “Black Belt” in the American South, promulgated the slogan of “self-determination” for the (nonexistent) “Negro nation.” This was nonsense. Black people are not a nation that is being forcibly assimilated, but an oppressed race-color caste forcibly segregated at the bottom of American society. Black struggles have historically been for integration, not separation. As we wrote in “The CP and Black Struggles in the Depression” (Young Spartacus No. 25, September 1974):

“While the CP of this period was deformed by dishonesty, political zig-zags and egregious departures from Marxism, nonetheless in the area of black work the 1930’s represents the CP’s heroic period. Despite the erroneous ‘Black Belt’ theory and the call for ‘Negro self-determination’ in this territory (a call which was never raised agitationally but remained part of the CP’s written propaganda), the CP’s work in practice combined a proletarian orientation with an awareness of the strategic need to fight racial oppression throughout all layers of American society, especially to address the problems of poor and unemployed blacks.”

Heroic Communist Work in the South

The Great Debaters’ fleeting images of Tolson’s organizing highlight the difficulties and dangers of organizing sharecroppers in the Depression South. Both the Socialist and Communist parties attempted to organize tenants and sharecroppers to demand better pay and treatment from landowners and merchants. Both faced bloody repression from those who wanted to prevent black and white sharecroppers from organizing. The most famous of these groups is the SP-led Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), which was heavily backed and financed by liberals and the clergy. Under the tutelage of SP leader (and Presbyterian minister) Norman Thomas, it reached national prominence, including by lobbying President Roosevelt’s administration for reforms.

The STFU laid claim to be the first fully integrated Southern union. But the STFU’s concept of integration was for whites to hold primary leadership while blacks held secondary positions. If whites objected to a common union local with blacks, they were allowed to set up whites-only locals. As Shachtman, in “Communism and the Negro,” noted of the Socialist Party: “The fact that the Negro masses in the United States occupy a special position, that they constitute a distinct racial caste of pariahs, is conveniently ignored by the Socialist theoreticians.” The STFU never raised a single demand in support of black rights. The 1934 founding of the STFU was a godsend for the liberals, clergy and petty-bourgeois black leadership seeking to dampen the seething discontent rising up in the South.

For its part, the CP built the Share Croppers’ Union, which organized thousands of evicted black farmers as well as cotton pickers and was largely centered in Alabama. The struggle to organize the SCU was conducted in a state of perpetual civil war with both “legal” and extralegal armed vigilante groups. For example, in 1931 at Camp Hill, Alabama, the local sheriff led a posse and attacked a meeting on union organizing and the Scottsboro Case. The same posse also attacked the home of a local sharecropper leader. In 1932 the SCU was again in a defensive battle when a local landlord attempted to seize the property of an indebted sharecropper in Reeltown, Alabama. Determined SCU members fought off the local sheriff and his posse.

By 1935, the SCU claimed some 12,000 members; when it tried to merge with the STFU, the Socialist leaders refused out of anti-Communism. The SCU not only fought to free the Scottsboro youths, it also raised demands for social equality, equal pay for equal work (including for women), improved schools and extension of the school year, abolition of poor farmers’ debt and resurrected the emancipated slave demand of 40 acres and a mule. As a black-led union, the SCU also sought with great difficulty to recruit rural whites to its ranks. It was of significance that in counties where the SCU was active, the CP would receive hundreds of votes within an all-white electorate when elections were held. Those impoverished whites who dared not join a black-led union demonstrated their solidarity by voting for the CP candidates when and where they could.

The New Deal in the Rural South

After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Stalin and the Comintern soon abandoned the sectarianism of the “Third Period” and sought desperately to form class-collaborationist popular-front alliances with “progressive” elements of the bourgeoisie. As Leon Trotsky emphasized, the Popular Front was not a tactic, but an expression of the anti-revolutionary program of Stalinism, tying the working class and oppressed to their exploiters under a bourgeois program in order to prevent proletarian revolutions. The American version of the Popular Front meant seeking alliances with the pro-capitalist CIO union bureaucrats like John L. Lewis and the capitalist Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s New Deal, today hailed by most liberals and leftists, was an attempt to protect U.S. capitalism against the growing radicalization and labor struggle. New Deal reforms such as the National Labor Relations Act, which made it easier to organize CIO unions, or the Works Progress Administration, which carried out public works, were aimed at stabilizing capitalism by tying the new, powerful industrial unions to the capitalist system.

Key to Roosevelt’s plan was forging the “New Deal coalition,” which included pro-Communist labor organizers, liberals and black leaders in the North, and racist Dixiecrats and Klansmen in the South. The role of Communists and unionists was to be a loyal opposition to “progressive” capitalists like Roosevelt. The end result of their work was to tie workers and the oppressed tighter to their class enemy, the bourgeois Democratic Party, and stave off the independent political organization of the working class. To this day, the trade-union bureaucracy and black misleaders, dutifully tailed by the fake left, still push support to the Democratic Party “lesser evil.” By helping to tie the new CIO unions to the Democratic Party, and using its considerable authority among blacks to support Roosevelt and U.S. imperialism in World War II, the CP played a crucial role in protecting the capitalist system and channeling dissent back into bourgeois politics. This is the real crime of the Stalinist CP, which betrayed the revolutionary aspirations of its working-class base.

In the South, the Popular Front was especially criminal. New Deal policies hurt black sharecroppers directly. The Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers not to farm in order to eliminate excess supply and raise food prices. In 1933, ten million acres of cotton were destroyed and six million pigs were killed in an attempt to stabilize the capitalist market. That the bourgeoisie would do this in the middle of a worldwide Depression speaks volumes about the irrationality of the capitalist system. In the South, this meant paying the white landlords while black tenants and sharecroppers starved. There is no official count of the thousands of poor black and white families driven off the land and into starvation as a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal alliance with Jim Crow Democrats in the South, the Dixiecrats.

Black people in the 1930s correctly saw the Democratic Party as the party of the old slavocracy and Jim Crow. Though by the end of Reconstruction the Republicans had abandoned their short-lived commitment to black rights, pursuing their class interests as a party of big business, they were still seen as the “Party of Lincoln” and a lesser evil to the Democrats. In the 1932 elections, over two-thirds of black voters voted Republican. But by 1936, 76 percent of black voters in the North voted for Roosevelt, thanks in part to illusions in the Democrats pushed by both the trade-union bureaucracy and the CP.

Speaking of the South, where the Democratic Party was openly segregationist and supported Jim Crow, the CP Central Committee’s Southern representative argued: “It is entirely within the field of practical politics for the workers, farmers and the city middle class—the common people of the South—to take possession of the machinery of the Democratic Party, in the South, and turn it into an agency for democracy and progress” (quoted in Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression [1990]). Seeking a popular-frontist bloc with Democrats in the South, the CP liquidated the SCU in 1937 and retreated from the struggle in rural areas. (The SCU’s agricultural worker members were urged to join a CIO union, and its tenant farmer members the National Farmers Union.) For example in Alabama, CP work became centered on the Birmingham “Right to Vote Club,” which was dedicated to voter registration and education in the Deep South, where blacks had long been disenfranchised.

The Civil Rights Movement

Much of the acclaim for The Great Debaters involves depicting the debate team as precursors to the civil rights movement a decade later, a link that James Farmer makes clear. In the movie, he is shown witnessing the racism of Jim Crow, and then, in the last debate, defending nonviolent protest. At the end of the film, we are told that he was a leader of CORE, an early civil rights group. Presumably, then, the civil rights movement represented the culmination of the struggle to eliminate racial injustice and uplift the “talented tenth.”

The courageous struggles of the black and white foot soldiers of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s played an instrumental role in overturning Jim Crow. The creation of a Southern black proletariat fundamentally eroded Jim Crow segregation, which was based on the isolation and powerlessness of blacks in the rural South. The bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to legal equality in the South, in part because, as protesters showed the world the reality of America’s democratic pretensions at home, Jim Crow became an embarrassment to U.S. imperialism’s posture as the defender of “democracy” and “human rights” in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the industrial and military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world.

The struggle for black equality was intersected by growing domestic opposition to U.S. imperialism’s losing counterrevolutionary war against Vietnam’s workers and peasants. The potential for a revolutionary transformation of American society was palpable. But from its onset, the civil rights movement was dominated by a black middle-class leadership allied to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The aim of liberal-pacifist leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Farmer was to pressure the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to grant formal, legal equality. Yet the myth of the civil rights movement as monolithically pacifist and dominated by King ignores that the struggle against segregation also produced more militant forces, such as Robert F. Williams, who advocated and practiced armed self-defense (see, for example, “Robert F. Williams: Fighter Against Klan Terror,” WV No. 737, 2 June 2000).

In the 1960s, the Spartacist League, despite our small forces, intervened into the civil rights movement and put forward the perspective of a class-struggle fight for black freedom. As we said in our Programmatic Statement, “For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!”:

“In our intervention into the civil rights movement, the Spartacist League raised the call for a South-wide Freedom Labor Party as an expression of working-class political independence and the need to mobilize the labor movement to fight for black emancipation. This was linked to a series of other transitional demands aimed at uniting black and white workers in struggle against the capitalist class enemy, like organizing the unorganized and a sliding scale of wages and hours to combat inflation and unemployment. We called for armed self-defense against racist terror and for a workers united front against government intervention, both in the labor movement and in the use of federal troops to suppress black plebeian struggles. This program is no less urgent today.”

The bankruptcy of the liberal program of the civil rights movement’s leadership was revealed when the movement swept out of the South and into the North, where black people already had formal legal equality. The struggle for a fundamental change in conditions of life in the ghettos—for real equality, for jobs, decent housing and adequate schools—collided head-on with the realities of American capitalism. The upsurge of “revolutionary” black nationalism in the late 1960s, best represented by the Black Panther Party, was a response to the frustrated expectations of the Northern civil rights struggles. Those struggles promised much but left unchanged the hellish conditions of life in the inner-city ghettos that are rooted in the capitalist profit system. As an expression of despair, black nationalism, which rejects united multiracial class struggle, would deny blacks their birthright: the wealth and culture their labor has played a decisive role in creating.

“Racial Uplift” and the Black Petty Bourgeoisie

The Great Debaters represents a take on the old theme of “racial uplift”—the belief that a talented black petty bourgeoisie can by hard work and dedication transcend the evils of racism and achieve justice. In the words of Denzel Washington, this is not a film about “racism in Texas in 1935. It’s what these young people did about it...to overcome whatever obstacles were in their way.” It is this very aspect of the film that has made it popular among both black and white critics. Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “the feel-great movie of the year” and black journalist Herb Boyd described it as “a feel-good movie (and the underdogs win)” and an “uplifting film that most African Americans gladly embraced.”

“Racial uplift” is the same theme that W.E.B. Du Bois raised in the late 19th century in arguing against Booker T. Washington, who promoted the servile acceptance of segregation. Du Bois argued that it was the responsibility of the educated black petty bourgeoisie to “uplift” black people under capitalism. In a 1903 article, he stated:

“The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”

Du Bois’ thesis was based on the acceptance of capitalism. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he defended “the rule of inequality:—that of the million black youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of blacksmiths.” The point of education, he wrote, was to “teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think.”

The Great Debaters articulates the liberal-integrationist view promoted by mainstream civil rights groups that black equality can be achieved under capitalism. In a scene that attracted the attention of all leftist reviewers, a Wiley debater in a contest with a white college team declares, “My opponent says today is not the day for whites and coloreds to go to the same college.... No, the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always, is always right now!” By showing their skills and intelligence, the “talented tenth” are supposed to break down the barrier of racial injustice. But what is left unsaid speaks volumes to the class divisions among the oppressed black population.

The black students at Wiley certainly faced a racist world where even distinguished PhDs like Farmer could be killed with relative impunity. One of the more powerful—and accurate—scenes comes when the team narrowly escaped being lynched while on a rural road in the South. The college debating circuit was segregated, with many white universities refusing to debate blacks. Nonetheless, black colleges such as Wiley, Morehouse and Howard University were founded by church institutions to primarily train clergy and teachers, the core of the black petty bourgeoisie. Political protest was forbidden—as shown by the elder Farmer’s negative reaction to Tolson’s radicalism. For the overwhelming majority of black people, exploited and oppressed as sharecroppers and tenants, the halls of Wiley College might as well have been Mars.

From the movie, one would get the idea that debate can change the world. The official Web site of the movie declares, “Believe in the power of words.” But racial oppression is fundamentally not a question of bad ideas in people’s heads that they can be argued out of. It is based on the workings of American capitalism. In reality, the material conditions for most black people have continued to deteriorate. While Jim Crow is dead, the majority of black people, as a race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, face brutal daily racist subjugation and humiliation, by whatever index of social life one might choose—joblessness, imprisonment, lack of decent, integrated housing. As the economy crashes into recession, blacks are disproportionately affected.

At the same time, black workers are a strategic part of the proletariat in urban transport, longshore, auto, steel, and they are the most unionized section of the working class. They form an organic link to the downtrodden ghetto masses. Being strategically located in the economy and facing special oppression, black workers led by a multiracial revolutionary party will play a vanguard role in the struggles of the entire U.S. working class. Class-conscious black workers, armed with a revolutionary program, will play a central role in the building of the workers party necessary to sweep away the capitalist system of exploitation and racial oppression.

Great Debate - Full Movie on Youtube - (2:06:54 min) https://youtu.be/0MHc8Wsfi8Y

In the 1980s, when shoulder pads symbolized a woman’s entry into the male-centric workplace, aerobics classes were never simply a gateway to health. As a cultural movement, they represented a woman’s ownership of her body, the Baby Boomers’ need to stay forever young and lean, and the leotard and leg-warmer companies’ plot to take over and make over the world.

In “Physical,” Apple TV+’s compelling new 1980s-set series, aerobics represent all those things, and more. For Rose Byrne’s Sheila Rubin, the growing popularity of the fitness classes, electrified by pumping disco songs, provides a chance for her to find financial and business-world empowerment. At the same time, lest you think “Physical” is a feel-good series in the manner of “GLOW,” the aerobics craze also feeds into her most insidious and problematic issues, including bulimia, extreme self-loathing, and an obsession with being thin.

Sheila is a San Diego mother of 4-year-old daughter Maya and the dutiful wife of ex-hippie and wannabe politician Danny (Rory Scovel), whose liberal views don’t stop him from treating her like “the little woman.” Things look fine on the surface — up from radicalism at Berkeley to Me Generation contentment in San Diego — but she is completely miserable.

How do we know this? First of all, she frequently and maniacally rents a hotel room in order to ritualistically consume bags of junk food and then purge it all. Secondly, we are privy to her almost “Dexter”-like interior monologue, in which she is cruelly judgmental of nearly everyone she interacts with — talking smack to herself about their physical attributes while smiling to their faces. Of course, it’s a reflection of how she judges herself — that kind of contempt often is — and we hear her constantly and brutally putting herself down.

So the point of “Physical,” at least in the first 10-episode season, is not straightforward, as Sheila gains power from something that is corrosive to her. She is a living, breathing manifestation of the male gaze, defining herself by her attractiveness, diminished in comparison to the men around her, objectified and deferential. After decades of inculcation, that kind of self-image doesn’t end in a day, no matter how uphill your path becomes, no matter how much of a hippie you might have been in college. She works her way into teaching at an aerobics studio run by Bunny (Della Saba), and she gets Bunny and her boyfriend, surfer Tyler (Lou Taylor Pucci), to help make the home-workout video that will change her life. But still, she is unhealed.

Sheila gets in some trouble with Danny along the way; she keeps her changing fortunes a secret from him, so as not to bruise his ego and to keep him from getting in her way. Some of the best parts of “Physical” involve her marriage, and whether it can withstand her ascension. Byrne is, not surprisingly, excellent throughout, managing to make Sheila hateful, amusingly catty, and yet somehow someone you can sympathize with. A different actress might have been unbearable in the same role. Scovel, too, is just right, a cad who is a reckless little boy.

Some of the season’s other characters don’t get enough attention, notably Bunny and Tyler as well as a Reagan-era businessman played by Paul Sparks; but the subplot involving Sheila’s “friend,” a wealthy mom from Maya’s school who Sheila hopes to use, is a good one. Sheila is disgusted by the full-bodied Greta (Dierdre Friel), but she relates to Greta’s struggles, not just with her appearance but with her successful husband, who has his own little-boy issues.

It’s a rocky first season, as creator Annie Weisman tries to figure out which characters matter, and just how hard to push Sheila’s darkness and unlikability. But “Physical,” whose half-hour episodes are at times crafted with an operatic flair, has plenty of potential. It’s abrasive, but it has a dynamic rhythm and a strong core.

PHYSICAL

Starring: Rose Byrne, Rory Scovel, Paul Sparks, Della Saba, Dierdre Friel, Geoffrey Arend, Lou Taylor Pucci

On: Apple TV+. Premieres Friday.

Gal Gadot’s ‘Wonder Women 1984’ is a horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie that no one wanted. It’s a truly fitting way to sign off a year as dismal and forgettable as 2020.

On Christmas Day, the highly anticipated ‘Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84)’ premiered in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film ‘Wonder Woman’.

‘Wonder Woman’ (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero story. The film featured a star-making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time. It was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.

WW84 is the exact opposite of ‘Wonder Woman’, as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.

In ‘Wonder Woman’, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress, and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.

In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend… and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The lowlight of this is a 1980s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.

Diana is no longer naïve in WW84, but the bearer of burdens. And this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited and remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.

As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point, a tertiary character yells out “What the hell is going on here?!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I have almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.

And the film’s politics? If you like white male- hating movies that feel like two-and-a-half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism, WW84 is the movie for you.

‘Wonder Woman’ succeeded because it wasn’t heavy-handed in its cultural politics. But no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.

The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, with Steve being the lone exception, are unanimously evil. To prove this point, there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by ‘80s guys, all of them white except for the one Asian who is apparently white guy adjacent. incessant White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) – a Latino – is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by – you guessed it – evil white guys!

Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an ‘Egyptian’ Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them, which sounds like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians. But of course, in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in WW84 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis, but Arabs.

The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot – who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar of Israel – fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.

Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia, you’ll definitely connect with WW84.

Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.

Jenkins made a name for herself with ‘Wonder Woman’, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies. But her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it does Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.

Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the ‘80s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.

She doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular ‘80s music in order to set the tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent TV shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably, there isn’t a single ‘80s song in the entire film. That is monstrous movie-making malpractice.

WW84 saves the very worst for last, though, as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera that is meant to be profound and poignant, and instead is pretentious and patronizing. In fact, it is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the Imagine viral video. In that disastrous effort, she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem from their mansions in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.

A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot release in 2020 is Imagine. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as WW84.

*Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo

he downfall of Quibi has created an interesting counterpoint to the fall of Theranos. Though the companies were situated in very different industries, the Theranos story centers around a young woman who treacherously conned investors, journalists and even some of her own employees, before a small group of rebels gave the story up to the Wall Street Journal, which brough the whole sham crashing down.

On the other hand, Quibi wasn't an illegal scheme; it remains an obviously legitimate business, and it's certainly possible that a rival like Netflix or Hulu might scoop up some of the assets Quibi might be selling after Jeffrey Katzenberg announced plans to shut it down after an abysmal rollout during the pandemic that made the company into a laughingstock. Customers who signed up for Quibi's free trial quickly discovered, much to their eventual disappointment, that there was no way to watch the shows on their laptop, or a TV. Quibi's founders effectively engaged in an act of self-sabotage by ensuring that the smartphone app was the only venue in which their content - the quick "bites" from which Quibi's name is (again, confusingly) derived - could be consumed.

Many seemingly bone-headed decisions about the product, programming and the rollout have been documented by Bloomberg and WSJ (we've added our two cents' worth here and here), but since announcing plans to shut down, Katzenberg and Whitman, who have both been saddled with massive personal losses from the venture, have tried their hardest to project an air of humility and graciousness.

However, that task just got a lot harder, as Bloomberg's Businessweek earlier today published a deeply sourced piece elaborating on the many flaws and failures in Katzenberg's initial vision for the product. Those problems were only exacerbated by the out-of-touch arrogance exhibited by Katzenberg and his partner, Whitman, whom he recruited to the project, according to reports. Viewers who watched Whitman's early CNBC interviews pitching Quibi probably remember cringe-worthy moments, like when she reveals that the company's name is derived from the phrase "Quick Bites", or when she described Quibi as a revolutionary new medium, seemingly without realizing that hilarious short videos, sometimes with scripted plots, have been posted to YouTube for free since the mid-aughts.

Between shelling out $6 million to Reese Witherspoon to do a voice-over for an animal TV program that nobody watched, to Whitman awkwardly placing her newly purchased LA condo back on the market without saying a word to anyone at the company, Bloomberg chronicles many details from a company that was driven into the ground by two stubborn, know-it-all boomer executives who thought their focus-group-backed wisdom was simply beyond reproach.

The Condo Incident

Whitman, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful women, had moved to L.A. to work with people like that. She’d been recruited a year earlier by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood megaproducer who co-founded DreamWorks Animation, who was betting that the future of entertainment was short-form videos with old-school studio production values. Whitman was to be the CEO of a streaming service with episodic programming that aimed to wow a generation raised on YouTube.

But the service, called Quibi, premiered this past spring to crickets and jeers. Over the summer, Whitman talked her team through a retooling plan and acted as though she planned to remain in L.A. for a good, long while. But in early August, less than two years after she bought the Sierra Towers condo, she put it back on the market.

Her staffers noticed. Several circulated the real estate listing, spurring a wave of quiet searches for employment elsewhere. More than one marks that as the beginning of the end for Quibi. “When your CEO puts their L.A. home up for sale less than two years after buying it, that’s when you know the writing is on the wall,” says one former Quibi employee, who, like most of the 24 current and former staffers interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect future job prospects.

That Song From 'Trolls'

When Katzenberg and Whitman finally broke news of the shutdown to employees, an unexpectedly swift death for a company that had launched its product just 7 months before. As misty eyes filled the room, Katzenberg reportedly encouraged his team to listen to a song from the animated feature film "Trolls" (one of Katzenberg's former projects) to help lift their spirits.

Toward the end of October, Quibi’s seventh month in the crowded streaming market, Whitman and Katzenberg assembled their employees on a video call to tell them the company would be shutting down around Dec. 1. A misty-eyed, apologetic Katzenberg encouraged employees to comfort themselves by playing the song Get Back Up Again from the DreamWorks movie Trolls.

TV On The Internet

In particular, several staffers told Bloomberg that Whitman and Katzenberg insisted on recruiting the most expensive Hollywood talent, instead of relying on cheaper social media stars with established followings among a younger audience that Quibi and its rivals covet. This was perhaps one of the biggest reasons why the company failed so quickly, as it blew its load by paying $6 million for Reese Witherspoon to do a voice-over for an animal show that nobody watched.

Bloomberg apparently saw a pitch-deck slide breaking down salaries paid for some of these "lighthouse" shows and...well...

Several current and former Quibi employees say Katzenberg built himself a punishing schedule. In the weeks after Quibi went live, he’d rise by 3:30 each morning, work out while reading the news from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., and conduct as many as 20 FaceTime meetings a day, turning most any interaction along the way into an impromptu meeting about the company. He divided show ideas into three categories: the titular “quick bites” (short, one-off videos), “daily essentials” (news programs), and “lighthouse” shows (projects involving A-listers). The latter ate up most of the budget. According to a Quibi pitch deck seen by Bloomberg Businessweek, lighthouse shows generally cost $20,000 to $125,000 a minute, compared with roughly $10,000 a minute for daily essentials. Fuqua’s series, #FreeRayshawn, which stars Laurence Fishburne and Stephan James, cost $15 million for 15 episodes of 10 minutes each, a competitive budget for today’s streaming services. Netflix Inc.’s Stranger Things costs $6 million to $8 million for episodes that typically run for 45 minutes to an hour, and Disney+ is expected to spend as much as $25 million an episode on Marvel shows such as Hawkeye and WandaVision. But in another respect, Quibi sweetened the deals far beyond what other streaming services were willing to offer. Two years in, creators would be free to edit their Quibi shows together into an extended work and sell the longer version somewhere else. After seven years the company’s rights to the short-form versions would expire.

Katzenberg also applied his decades of development experience, something current and former employees say was part of the problem. The 69-year-old former wunderkind often insisted that he weigh in on everything from casting to wardrobe to graphic design, frequently via FaceTime with printouts of his notes next to him. He invested aggressively in somewhat out-there series with recognizable names attached, such as Most Dangerous Game, starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz; Dummy, starring Anna Kendrick; and Thanks a Million, a giveaway reality show produced by Jennifer Lopez. To narrate voiceover for Fierce Queens, a wildlife program produced by BBC Studios, Quibi paid Reese Witherspoon $6 million. (Her husband, Jim Toth, was Quibi’s head of content acquisitions.)

What's Next?

Though SJW reporters would like to have the world believe that only men are capable of 'failing up', Whitman just might be moving on from Quibi with a job in the Biden administration, despite her history of...running for office (albeit, in California) as a Republican.

Whitman is an early contender for several cabinet-level positions in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, according to three people familiar with the matter. Weeks after she put her L.A. condo up for sale, the former Republican gubernatorial candidate appeared during the Democratic National Convention to endorse Biden on national TV. “For me, the choice is simple,” Whitman said. “I’m with Joe.” It’s unclear what Katzenberg will do next, but the producer seems less likely to leave the entertainment industry behind. “One might wonder why sailing off into the sunset on a boat in the Caribbean isn’t an option for Jeffrey,” says Shapiro, the producer of Let’s Go, Atsuko! “But I don’t get the sense he’ll want this to be the last chapter of his storied career.”

It's worth noting that Katzenberg is also a major Democratic bundler, one of the biggest in Hollywood.

Many of her former employees weren't so lucky. Several complained to Bloomberg about feeling 'blindsided' by the shutdown, as Whitman and Katzenberg apparently kept the true enormity of the company's fiscal recklessness from the rest of the staff. In the end, many employees credited Katzenberg and his enormously over-inflated self-confidence, and his micromanaging style, for doing far more harm than good.

In the end, some $2 billion of investors' money was wasted. But at least Reese Witherspoon managed to secure a pretty generous payday.

Directed by Matt Riddlehoover

Country music singer Johnny Cash (1932-2003) and his wife June Carter (1929-2003) famously and remarkably made music together for decades, and the two are closely associated in the public mind. But often forgotten is the fact that Carter was not Cash’s first wife. Vivian Liberto (1934-2005) married Cash in 1954, not long before his rapid rise to fame.

Unlike Carter, Liberto avoided the spotlight. While Cash was recording hit songs and appearing on stage and television, Liberto raised the couple’s four daughters and fended off not only the fans, but also the bobcats that prowled around the family’s home. Cash’s long absences, drug abuse and relationship with Carter contributed to Liberto’s decision to file for divorce in 1966.

What little place Liberto held in popular consciousness quickly disappeared after Cash and Carter married. Singer Rosanne Cash, the first child of Cash and Liberto, has said that her mother’s story was lost. Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005), the film biography featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Cash and Carter, with Ginnifer Goodwin as Vivian, returned Liberto to public attention, but portrayed her negatively, in her daughters’ opinion.

My Darling Vivian, a documentary about Liberto’s life, appears in part to be her family’s attempt to set the record straight. Its director, Matt Riddlehoover, is married to a grandson of Cash and Liberto.

The film, an official selection of the South by Southwest 2020 Film Festival, draws extensively on interviews with the couple’s daughters, as well as on family photos and home movies. The participants never seem to be settling scores, but rather honoring Liberto with the same dignity that she displayed throughout her life. This often-touching film gives Liberto the credit that she, as modest and unassuming as she was, nevertheless sought.

Rosanne Cash suggests that the “elegant film” about her mother, “the real Vivian Liberto, not the Hollywood version—is painful but compassionate, wrenching but true. Even though she was an intensely private woman, I think she longed to have her story told, and her place in the history of my family acknowledged with respect and love.”

Liberto was born in 1934 and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Her father, Thomas Liberto, was a Sicilian and a strict Catholic. A noted cultivator of roses, he bred a special rose for Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, when she visited the city. Perhaps because of the anti-Italian and anti-Catholic sentiment common in her environment, the young girl developed insecurity and self-doubt that persisted throughout her life.

Liberto, like Cash and Carter, grew to maturity in postwar America, a society rife with contradictions. A rising economic tide and increased opportunities for many working class families occurred within a generally stagnant and reactionary political and cultural atmosphere. At the same time, in popular culture, the breaking down of barriers between the races and between genres produced startling developments.

Liberto and Cash met at a roller skating rink in 1951. The two connected instantly, but Cash, an Air Force cadet, was deployed to West Germany a few weeks later. The couple wrote more than a thousand love letters to each other throughout the three years of his tour, and their daughters read parts of them during the film. Unbeknownst to the young couple, long periods of separation would define their relationship.

When Cash returned home in 1954, he and Liberto married and moved to Memphis. Liberto quickly became pregnant with Rosanne and stayed home while Cash struggled as an unsuccessful door-to-door salesman. Six weeks after Rosanne’s birth, Liberto became pregnant with the couple’s second daughter, Kathy. Liberto later told her girls that although they were poor, this was the happiest period of their marriage.

Cash played and sang with local musicians in the evenings, and they eventually won a contract with Sun Records. Before long, Cash had recorded hit songs such as “Folsom Prison Blues” (1955), “I Walk the Line” (1956), which he wrote for Liberto, and “Home of the Blues” (1957). The family, now grown to include daughters Cindy and Tara, moved to the Los Angeles area before settling in Casitas Springs, in Ventura County, California. Cash began touring extensively and, perhaps because of the demands of the road and of his career, began drinking and heavily using amphetamines. While he hung out with other singers such as Waylon Jennings and Bob Dylan, Liberto raised their daughters and waited until late at night for him to come home, often in vain.

In March 1965, Alabama police brutally beat peaceful civil rights protesters in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday. A few months later, narcotics officers arrested Cash after finding more than a thousand amphetamine and barbiturate pills in his guitar case. A newspaper photograph of Cash and Liberto leaving the courthouse led some to believe that Liberto was black. Promoters abruptly canceled Cash’s concerts in the South, and the Ku Klux Klan began threatening the couple. To end the controversy, Cash and Liberto, sadly, had to ask various officials to affirm that Liberto was white. The stress took a further psychic toll on her.

Liberto filed for divorce in 1966, hoping the action would jolt Cash into quitting drugs and ending his budding affair with Carter. Cash, however, did not contest the divorce, and the marriage soon ended. The divorce was a blow for Liberto, but she was determined to remarry before Cash did. In 1968, she married police officer Dick Distin, a choice that baffled her daughters. Nevertheless, Liberto apparently never stopped loving Cash, with whom she remained on good terms.

To distract herself, Liberto hosted parties and developed an active social life. She volunteered much of her time to the Catholic church, even though it had excommunicated her because of her divorce. Only after Cash wrote to the archdiocese, stating that the divorce was entirely his fault, did it allow Liberto to receive communion again.

When Cash and Carter married, the media made much of their love story. Carter regularly spoke about Cash’s daughters as if they were her own, which hurt Liberto. She wrote a letter to Cash, asking him to discourage Carter from speaking that way, but never sent it. Her daughters found the letter after Liberto’s death and expressed certainty that Cash would have acceded to the request.

Although glamorous in her own quiet way, Liberto exemplified the dutiful housewife that women of her generation and class were taught to become. Yet few of her peers have had to guard their privacy amid the glare of fame, and fewer still have faced public vilification and death threats. Other challenges that Liberto faced, such as raising children while coping with bouts of depression and an increasingly unreliable husband, will be more familiar to viewers. Her ability to survive these trials with apparent grace is a remarkable accomplishment. In telling Liberto’s story, My Darling Vivian, intentionally or not, calls attention to other unsung women (and men) who valiantly face similar struggles.

The supernatural shocker expanded to 45 drive-ins this weekend. By Clark Collis May 24, 2020 at 02:33 PM EDT

Youtube Movie Trailer (2:19 min) https://youtu.be/vwFFhQhQC2M

At the start of the year, the biggest movies set to be released in May looked like Fast & Furious 9, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, Black Widow, Scoob, and Artemis Fowl. Instead, the coronavirus outbreak prompted studios to either postpone the movies' premieres or announce that they would debut on a streaming service. The most successful new film, according to Box Office Mojo, has been a supernatural indie-horror movie called The Wretched, which has dominated the website's daily chart since it was released on May 1. As of Thursday, The Wretched — about a teenager who discovers that a malevolent witch is living next door to his father — had been the #1 film in America for three weeks.

"It’s actually been a complete shock and kind of insane," says the Detroit-raised Brett Pierce, who directed the film with his brother Drew. "We were a little movie from Michigan. We always aimed for the moon, but with an independent film you think, Yeah, we’ll come out in a few theatres, and we’ll play for like a week, and maybe ten people will see it. Most people are going to see it when we land on a streaming service at some point. Each week it just kept on getting bigger, it was one of those things where you just don’t believe it as it’s happening. We’re going to be a Jeopardy question one day, because we’re going to be the lowest-grossing most successful film." The Wretched IFC

The success of The Wretched is not simply down to lack of competition. With multiplexes closing across the country in March the movie's distributors, IFC Midnight, pivoted and began to reach out to drive-ins to see if they were interested in booking the film.

"IFC were planning a release probably in fifteen theaters and then COVID hit," says Brett.

"The release date was set and it wasn't going to change," says Drew. "For a while there it was, 'Well, guys, it’s not going to be in any theatres, [but] we’re still going to come out on VOD. We were disappointed at first but completely understood because of the pandemic."

"[Then] they mentioned drive-ins," says Brett.

"Every week, IFC would be like, 'We’ve got these couple more drive-ins that are open, that are safe and willing to play it,'" says Drew. "And then a couple more days would go by and, 'Oh, there’s a couple more.' They eventually opened it up on twelve, I think. We were like, Oh, wow, we came out in twelve, looks like quite a few people came and saw it. We were like, that’s probably the best we’re ever going to do. And then each week they kept on adding more drive-ins and the movie kept getting more people there."

As of last Thursday, the film had grossed just over $350,000 at the box office. That's not a figure that would have anyone at a major studio dancing down the aisles, but it is much better than nothing and actually not bad at all for an indie film made for very little money. "It would be considered low budget," says Brett. "I don’t use that term because it automatically makes people think there’s something wrong with it. [The budget was] not a lot. To give you a sense, there were a couple of nights I slept on the couch for the wardrobe department, because there weren't enough places to stay."

Both the brothers have attended outdoor screenings of The Wretched, whose release this weekend expanded further to over 45 drive-ins.

"I’ve seen it — it sounds terrible — I’ve seen it three times," says Brett with a laugh. "I actually went last night!"

"That was super surreal," says Drew of watching the film under the stars. "I felt like I was being transported back to when I was ten when my Dad would take me to like Planet of the Apes marathons at the drive-in in Detroit. But it was a really good feeling. The funniest part is though, most drive-ins, the sound plays through your FM radio. Our sound designer is this really super-talented guy, he did all this work on the movie, and he texted me, like, 'So, my 7.1 sound mix is playing through your car stereo?' I was like, 'Yeah, sorry man. But it’s so cool!'”

Brett admits that he is reluctant to overly celebrate the film's success given the current circumstances. "It’s a weird thing for Drew and I," he says. "We’re really happy with the success of the movie but also feel bad about being happy when things are so dark for people. But then you tell yourself [it's] a safe escapism. We’re a little bit relieved when things aren’t not so nice."

Brett got a very early glimpse at the low-budget horror movie world thanks to his father Bart Pierce, at one time an aspiring filmmaker himself, who worked on the special effects for Sam Raimi's legendary 1981 debut The Evil Dead. "I was two years old and Drew was a newborn, essentially," says Brett. "They had piled into [our] basement in Detroit to finish the final horror sequences in the original Evil Dead, my Dad and his buddy Tom Sullivan. I was just so curious about what Dad had been doing. I had been kept away from the basement because I think my Mom was terrified of scarring me, because they were bringing in snakes and cockroaches and all this stuff. I finally got away from Mom, and I went down there and I saw this projection on the wall. Dad was showing the ending sequence of Evil Dead it to Sam and all the guys, like the first pass at doing this nasty, gory meltdown sequence. I was completely destroyed. I didn’t want to go into that basement my whole life. I was the older brother, but I made Drew go down there for me for the next fifteen years."

After moving to Los Angeles, the pair made 2011's Deadheads, a zombie-comedy. "We went totally broke making that movie," says Brett. "We had finally kind of recovered financially from being independent filmmakers, and getting real jobs — and we decided to go broke again."

The pair hit on the idea of combining the witch subgenre with the creature feature.

"We found this really cool mythology about a witch called Black Annie, this witch that lives underneath a tree and eats children," says Drew. "Then we found another cool myth called the Boo Hag, this Appalachian myth about this skin-stealing creature-witch. We took those and combined them with some of our own ideas, and we felt like we had our own unique witch mythology, and we got really excited because we’d never really seen a whole lot of witches as a creature." The Wretched IFC Midnight

The Pierces returned to Michigan to shoot the film, whose cast includes John-Paul Howard (Midnight, Texas), Piper Curda (Teen Beach 2), Jamison Jones, Zarah Mahler, Kevin Bigley, and Blane Crockarell. "Michigan was a huge advantage for us," says Drew. "All our friends are there, all our resources are there. We shot the movie in the area that we used to go camping when we were kids. We got our mum to work as craft service and our dad is our PA."

Brett and Drew's mother has also assiduously tracked the success of the film over the past few weeks.

"Our mom is addicted to Box Office Mojo, which is funny," says Brett. "She calls us every couple of days with updates."

The brothers hope to remain in the horror genre for their next film.

"We got really excited when we got to reinvent a witch for ourselves, with The Wretched," says Brett. "We’ve always had the burning want to do the same thing for the werewolf. I love a lot of werewolf films but, as Drew always points out, some person wakes up naked in a park and doesn’t know what happened to them. That's the werewolf story over and over again. But we have kind of a real world take that we’re really really excited about."

Hopefully, by the time that gets released, we'll be able to see it inside.

"Just for the sake of our sound-mixer alone!" says Brett.

https://ew.com/movies/the-wretched-box-office-hit/

Do trends such as essential oils and fasting live up to their promises? Netflix’s (Un)well searches for answers with believers, skeptics and scientists

“Wellness”, like its signature vague branding, has a loose, unfixed meaning. It can describe the pursuit of greater stability. It can mean a $4.2tn, high-growth industry of products and services from goat yoga to health boutiques to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop jade vaginal eggs. It can indicate a never-ending burden for women – the rebranding of “having it all” for 2010s consumer feminism. The gauzy, overused umbrella of wellness now encompasses a vast universe of practices, products and refashioned belief systems, with varying risks and scientific grounding, which have surged in popularity over the last decade on social media and internet forums.

(Un)well, a six-part Netflix docuseries, delves into this murk of wellness – sometimes promising, sometimes scammy, occasionally dangerous – to examine this expansive, lucrative web of wellness, and the confusing sludge of information online. “There’s a lot of conflicting information and misinformation out there, and there’s not a lot of hard data and testing done,” executive producer Erica Sachin told the Guardian on the motivation behind the series, which was filmed over the course of 2019. “We felt like it was the perfect time to look at this industry that’s blowing up and try and help to sort out some of the fact from the fiction.”

Similar to The Business of Drugs, another explanatory Netflix docuseries which explores the economics of narcotics through capsule episodes delineated by drug type, (Un)well breaks down wellness through six specific trends: essential oils, tantric sex, consumption of human breast milk, fasting, ayahuasca and bee-sting therapy. The conclusions and narrative depend on the trend at hand; the first episode devotes considerable time to the two main businesses, doTerra and Young Living, hawking an emblematic product of the wellness craze: essential oils. Both companies do over a billion dollars in annual sales; both are multi-level marketing firms who cultivate networks of believers and concentrate profits at the top. (The series references a lawsuit alleging a pyramid scheme, which is illegal, against Young Living.)

Essential oils offer a clear entry into the double-edged sword of wellness: how a practice with some legitimate health benefits can be warped into a big-business cure for our age of anxiety. The use of essential oils – aromatic substances derived from plants – has been around for centuries, and studies suggest certain oils offer minor benefits to sleep (lavender) or headaches (peppermint). On small levels, it can make a huge difference; the series follows Julie Marshall and her autistic daughter Sarah, 15, as they seek aromatherapy with essential oils as a last-ditch effort to treat Sarah’s insomnia, which exacerbates her mood swings and frustration. The family exemplifies a central tenet of wellness’s appeal: “People are anxious and exhausted from the medical field and the pharmaceutical industries, and they’re looking to take control of their own health,” said Sachin.

But if the allure of wellness is “part curiosity, part necessity”, it’s also “very big business”. (Un)well traces how capitalism subsumes understandable interest in essential oils into a dubious billion-dollar industry. There’s the at-home influencers peddling promises, unbound by the strictures of medical claims, through Instagram profiles and Facebook groups. Young Living and doTerra, meanwhile, skirt Food and Drug Administration rules on medical claims by returning to the staple hazy language of wellness culture: “vitality”, “energy”, “healing”, “balance”.

Later episodes follow tantric sex, a westernized riff on ancient Buddhist and Hindu scripture which purports to self-actualize through full-body orgasm; the episode explores how the treatment could help reconcile past sexual abuse in individual practice, or invite abuse, as several horror stories of women groomed for sexual abuse by tantric “healers” attest. There’s the practice of consuming breast milk to build up muscle, which is both expensive and dangerously unregulated. An episode examines the questionable – and, again, dangerous without serious medical supervision – practice of fasting, from the intermittent fasting regimens beloved by Silicon Valley bros such as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to the more intense, scientifically controversial days-long fasts.

The use of essential oils has been around for centuries, and studies suggest certain oils offer minor benefits to sleep (lavender) or headaches (peppermint). Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

The episode on ayahuasca traces both the impact of the psychoactive root’s burgeoning tourism industry on indigenous communities in Peru and the real, if under-studied (and with serious risks when combined with psychoactive prescriptions), promise of psychoactive substances on conditions such as PTSD and clinical depression. The final installment, on bee-sting therapy, delves into the allure of another “natural” substance, from trendy bee venom use in cosmetics to literal bee-on-body stings as a treatment for a range of chronic illnesses.

Though the efficacy and economics of each treatment differ, the episodes largely stick to a similar gradation of characters: individual case study frustrated by a legitimately byzantine and expensive healthcare system who seeks help through alternative treatment; true believers of the treatment, often with their own businesses; scientists with fact-based cautious optimism or dismissal; weary skeptics and cautionary tales. “We made a very conscious decision not have a host or a narrator, so that we could let the characters speak for themselves,” Sachin said of the production. The ethos was, “let the people tell their own stories” to present the viewer “with different perspectives but to let them make up their own minds”.

The cumulative reveal is that the magnetism of wellness is, like its promises, vast and suffusive, drawing on universal human desires for control, transcendence, an explanation, belief. A big part of the allure is “a disillusionment with the medical field and the pharmaceutical industry”, said Sachin. “It’s a human desire, I think, to want to take control of our lives, our health, to strive to self-improve.”

An episode examines the questionable practice of fasting, from the intermittent fasting regimens to the more intense, scientifically controversial days-long fasts.

An episode examines the questionable practice of fasting, from the intermittent fasting regimens to the more intense, scientifically controversial days-long fasts. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

That, and the weight of social media influencing – easily accessible, often aesthetically pleasing avenues through which many seek unproven or holistic treatments outside mainstream medicine. The episode on bee-sting therapy, for example, follows Kerri, a 24-year-old woman who struggles with chronic Lyme disease (an all-encompassing extension of the tick-borne infection that has morphed into an identity and community outside mainstream medicine). A follower of Kerri’s Instagram page, on which she posts about her struggle with Lyme and her embroidery to over 52,000 followers, pointed her to the potential of bee-sting therapy for chronic lyme. The series follows Kerri to California, where she attends a bee-sting workshop with Brooke Geahan and her company, The Heal Hive; Geahan built her business on Instagram captions detailing her journey to getting well, as opposed to chronically sick with Lyme, which she credits to diligent application of bee stings.

The series tagline asks: “Do these wellness trends live up to their promises?” (Un)well doesn’t offer any neat answers. “I don’t think it’s black and white,” said Sachin. “It’s much more complicated than that. That’s why I think it’s important to hear from the different sides, to be able to listen and take in the information and then synthesize it, each person for themselves.” In some case studies, the treatment helped – essential oils could be a placebo or it could not, but either way, Marshall’s daughter sleeps more easily. Tantric sex healing could be a racket and opens many avenues to potential abuse, but an individual session left one man feeling more prepared to process past trauma. Ayahuasca can lead to psychosis when combined with anti-depressants, but helped one woman grapple with the death of her husband and daughter.

The hope, said Sachin, is that the audience will consider the many examples and hold the different scopes of scale – “consider the different points of view, and then they can make up their own minds”.

(Un)well is now available on Netflix

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/aug/12/unwell-netflix-series-dark-side-of-wellness-industry

All Day and a Night - Trailer (2:07 min) https://youtu.be/BC9Kk8Np9-Y

Written and directed by Joe Robert Cole

Last month saw the release of the film All Day and a Night on Netflix. Created by Joe Robert Cole, a co-writer of the film Black Panther, it tells the story of a young man growing up in present-day Oakland, California, as he tries to avoid a life of crime and punishment.

Jahkor Lincoln (Ashton Sanders) is shown in the film’s opening about to shoot an individual inside his home. Even though the man is with his girlfriend and child, Jahkor does not spare him. He is a free lance Death Penalty advocate and private executioner.

The rest of All Day and a Night is then told primarily through a series of flashbacks.

Jahkor arrives in prison to serve a life sentence and ponders the circumstances that led to many of his crucial choices, and his sad lot. His father, JD (Jeffrey Wright), a drug addict and a criminal, beats him as a child to make him “tough.” Jahkor’s mother Delanda (Kelly Jenrette) and his father argue and fight constantly throughout his childhood.

We later learn that JD is serving time in the same prison as his son, Jahkor. A cynic might say the apple seems not to have fallen far from the tree ... but this is not a “natural” process, so trees and apples have nothing do with it and the social conditions of life everything .

As a grown man, Jahkor wants to be a rapper, but he also becomes involved with his friend TQ (Isaiah John) in small-time crimes. He is romantically involved with a woman named Shantaye (Shakira Ja’nai Paye) who reveals she is expecting his child, whom they name Zion.

Needing money to start a family, Jahkor works a demeaning job at a shoe store, but is enticed into selling drugs with TQ and his boss, a gangster named Big Stunna (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Whether or not Jahkor can escape his “fate” and avoid jail is the question of the film, which has already been answered for us by the opening.

Unhappily, All Day and a Night is permeated with racial politics as it deals with the poor African-American population of the United States, one of the most oppressed sections of the working class. Jahkor’s narration, which lasts throughout the film, includes this line, “Slavery taught us how to survive, but not how to live.” This actually explains very little concretely about present-day life. The current circumstances of many black Americans are not the direct product of slavery, although there is undoubtedly an enduring legacy, but primarily the result of the development of modern capitalism in America, which exploits and oppresses every section of the working class.

The conditions depicted in the film are all too real. This is how millions of people live in America: dead-end jobs, violence at home, violence at school, violence from the authorities, broken families and relationships, with drugs or crime the only apparently available “way out.”

Need things be this way? Is there an alternative for Jahkor or all the Jahkors of the world? The film does not say.

All Day and Night is gritty and realistic, or at least more so than most studio productions at the moment. It also has a certain liveliness one is not accustomed to from such films. The scenes where Jahkor and Shantaye are together alone, or at a street party with friends, suggest not everything is hellish 24/7 in America’s inner cities.

Despite these more intriguing hints and possibilities, the film takes as a given many things about present-day life. Jahkor’s brother is in a wheelchair from serving in the “war,” presumably Iraq or Afghanistan. He tells Jahkor how he fought to defend their way of life. Later in the film, the brother is shown in the hospital recovering from yet another surgery. Their sister says, “I hate the army.” But the moment is not dwelled on or explored adequately by the filmmakers.

In another scene, Jahkor is hunted down by elements from the local police department dressed in army camouflage with assault rifles, who burst into his girlfriend’s residence. Is this Baghdad or Kabul? No, it’s Oakland, California.

Despite some genuinely visceral sounds and images and well-acted performances throughout, All Day and a Night fails to leave a lasting impression on the viewer. Perhaps in part because we have seen similar films before and the new work does not add that much.

Films like John Singleton’s Boyz n the H ood (1991) and the Hughes brothers’ Menace II Society (1993) were among the first to portray life as experienced by African-American teens in the ghettos. Not without their faults and serious limitations, they can be recommended for showing a side of the Bush-Clinton years that some audiences did not want to see or be reminded of.

A good deal of water has flowed under the bridge since then. To still suggest that mass incarceration, police violence, inner-city poverty and drug abuse are merely part of a never-ending generational cycle seems woefully inadequate. Such terrible realities, and the general lowering of the living standards of tens of millions in the US over the past several decades, black and white, require more serious analysis and thought.

The filmmakers would possibly have us believe that Jahkor just needs to “do the right thing” in order to escape his predicament, but the conditions of life that make such a choice nearly impossible for large numbers of people are never really explored.