My 5th grader and I are watching The Black Power Mixtape. My 5th grader is wishing her entire class had seen it together--although it's not too late--as it would have been, in according to her, the perfect culmination of their year-long study of US civil rights and government. Clips above.
We are both sitting here moved and I loved that my kid knows so many of the references. It's interesting to me seeing this while reading Cassidy, as the rise of the Black Power movement chronologically parallels David Cassidy's rise to fame, and you forget that while both the saccharine Brady Bunch and Partridge Family were on the air, the Vietnam War was raging, prisoners were rioting, and the FBI was infiltrating suspected "communists" and "radicals" in America in the most insidious ways.
I get very intense on Friday nights.
In the Democracy Now! clip, Angela Davis is wearing red tights; her words will knock you out. I'm making a "Black Power" LibGuide, by the way; there seems to be a need for it at the library.
(Twenty minutes from the end of the movie, the content got way too intense for a fifth grader, so we stopped it.)
Wow. That looks incredible.
ReplyDelete