I’m sitting here in my office listening to 98.7 Kiss fm as they play music from movie soundtracks. These songs are infusing me with inspiration to pen these words today. In the early 1970’s a wave of films were made that targeted black audiences. They starred black actors and usually took place in urban areas.
In the year of 1971 Hollywood financed the movie Shaft which starred Richard Roundtree a tough as nails private investigator. Shaft probably is the grandfather of the genre.
Blaxploitation movies received a lot of flack from various civil rights organizations which called for an end to the genre and by the late 1970’s this genre was terminated.
Politics aside these films were pretty good.
They served a very powerful purpose by speaking to the issues affecting and effecting the black community. I want to salute those films because they opened up my eyes as well as my mind to a lot of things.
Now here is a list of my favorites in no particular order.
Cooley High
Buck and the Preacher
Claudine
Uptown Saturday Night
A Piece of the Action
Let’s Do it Again
Car Wash
Willie Dynamite
Black Caesar
Hell up In Harlem
Across 110th Street
Cotton Comes to Harlem
Sparkle
JD Walker
Super Fly
The Mack
Mahogany
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs
Blackula
Foxy Brown
Three the Hard Way
Cornbread Earl and Me
Three the Hard Way
The film genre may be non existent today, we still live in a blaxploitation nation wheter we like it or not.
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