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      Douglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDouglas Turner Ward, Pioneer in Black Theater, Dies at 90A founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York in the 1960s, he was outspoken about limited opportunities for fellow Black actors and directors.Douglas Turner Ward, right, in 1971 with the director and producer Michael Schultz on the set of the play “The Sty of the Blind Pig.”Credit…Edward Hausner/The New York TimesFeb. 22, 2021Douglas Turner Ward, an actor, playwright and director who co-founded the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater group that supported Black writers and actors at a time when there were few opportunities for them, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.The death was confirmed by his wife, Diana Ward.Mr. Ward was establishing his own career as an actor in 1966 when he wrote an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”“If any hope, outside of chance individual fortune, exists for Negro playwrights as a group — or, for that matter, Negro actors and other theater craftsman — the most immediate, pressing, practical, absolutely minimally essential active first step is the development of a permanent Negro repertory company of at least Off-Broadway size and dimension,” he wrote. “Not in the future … but now!”The article got the attention of W. McNeil Lowry, the Ford Foundation’s vice president of humanities and the arts, who arranged a $434,000 grant to create precisely the kind of company that Mr. Ward was proposing. Thus the Negro Ensemble Company was born, in 1967, with Mr. Ward as artistic director, Robert Hooks as executive director and Gerald S. Krone as administrative director.The company went on to produce critically acclaimed productions, among them Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” (1972), which won the Tony Award for best play in 1974 and was adapted for film in 1976. Mr. Ward not only directed the play but also acted in it, earning a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play.Other notable productions by the company included Samm-Art Williams’s “Home” (1979) and Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “A Soldier’s Play” (1981), about a Black officer investigating the murder of a Black sergeant at a Louisiana Army base during World War II, when the armed forces were segregated. The cast included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. (It, too, was adapted for film, as “A Soldier’s Story,” in 1984.)Frank Rich of The Times called the production, directed by Mr. Ward, “superlative.” (The play was revived last January on Broadway, starring Blair Underwood, before being forced to close because of the pandemic.)The Negro Ensemble Company became — and continues to be — a training ground for Black actors, playwrights, directors, designers and technicians. Many of the troupe’s actors over the years went on to become stars, among them, in addition to Mr. Washington and Mr. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad.Mr. Ward, right, in 1967 with the ensemble company co-founder Robert Hooks. They started the troupe that year with a grant from the Ford Foundation, setting up headquarters at St. Mark’s Playhouse in the East Village.Credit…Don Hogan Charles/The New York TimesThe company, and Ford’s contribution, won immediate praise after its founding. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the grant represented “a magnificent step toward the creation of new and greater artists in the community,” and Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, said the foundation had “recognized the potential in the Negro theater” and the talent of “hundreds of actors and entertainers who have struggled individually.”The company began racking up Obie, Tony and Drama Desk awards and recording firsts. In 1975, the Times critic John J. O’Connor acknowledged the historical significance of a “superb” television production of Lonne Elder III’s play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” set in 1950s Harlem. “The event marks the debut of a major Black theater organization, the Negro Ensemble Company, on American network television,” he wrote.Mr. Ward starred with Rosalind Cash in 1975 in the well-received ABC television movie adaptation of the play “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men.” Credit…Bert Andrews/ABC, via Getty ImagesThe company enabled Mr. Ward to solidify his own career as an actor and director.“I love acting for the communal thing — you know, working with people,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1975. But directing, he added, “sort of happened to me.”“I never had any intention of functioning as a director,” he continued, “but as the artistic director of the company, I choose the plays, and if I can’t find someone to direct them for us, I do it myself.”One of the first plays he directed was Richard Wright and Louis Sapin’s “Daddy Goodness” (1968), about a town drunk in the rural South who falls into such a stupor that his friends think he is dead.In an interview, Mr. Fuller said, “Doug is the only director I have worked with that could read any play and know whether its story line and characters would ‘work’ onstage.”The Negro Ensemble Company was not immune to criticism, however. The founders were criticized early on for setting up their headquarters at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village rather than at a theater in Harlem, and for appointing a white administrator, Mr. Krone. (He died last year at 86.)Mr. Ward, front left, on opening night of a revival of “A Soldier’s Play” in New York last January. He shook hands with the play’s author, Charles Fuller. Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRoosevelt Ward Jr. was born on May 5, 1930, in Burnside, La., to Roosevelt and Dorothy (Short) Ward, impoverished farmers who owned their own tailoring business. His family moved to New Orleans when he was 8, and he attended Xavier University Preparatory School, a historically Black Roman Catholic institution.Mr. Ward was admitted to Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1946, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he studied politics and theater. He quit college at 19 and moved to New York City, where he met and befriended the playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and Mr. Elder.In the late 1940s, Mr. Ward joined the Progressive Party and took to left-wing politics. He was arrested and convicted on charges of draft evasion and spent time in prison in New Orleans while his case was under appeal. After his conviction was overturned, he moved back to New York and became a journalist for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker.He also began studying theater, joining the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and choosing the stage name Douglas Turner Ward, in homage to two men he admired: the abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, who led a revolt against slavery.One of Mr. Ward’s first acting roles was in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in 1956 at Circle in the Square in Manhattan; another was as an understudy in Ms. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil in the lead roles.He also began developing as a playwright. In 1965, an Off-Broadway double-bill production of his satirical one-act comedies “Happy Ending” and “Day of Absence” became a hit, bringing him a Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright. Surviving a transit strike, the production ran for 15 months.Mr. Ward had lead roles in many plays, including “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” for which he won the Drama Desk Award, and “The Brownsville Raid,” about an incident of military racial injustice in a Texas town. Clive Barnes, reviewing “Brownsville” for The Times, wrote “Ward, who, to be frank, I usually admire more as a director than an actor, has never been better.”Among his many awards and honors, Mr. Ward received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award. In 1996, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.He continued to write into his later years. Last March, he published “The Haitian Chronicles,” a series of three plays that he had been working on since the 1970s, all centered on the Haitian Revolution, which threw off colonial rule in the early 1800s. His wife said that he had considered the project his magnum opus and that she and others were hoping to have the plays staged in New York with alumni from the Negro Ensemble Company.In addition to Ms. Ward, whom he married in 1966, he is survived by their two children, Elizabeth Ward-Cuprill and Douglas Powell Ward, and three grandchildren.At the Negro Ensemble Company, Mr. Ward often played matchmaker in connecting actors to roles, seeking out opportunities for people whom he knew had not been getting much work.“Doug never saw N.E.C. as a place to feature himself,” the playwright Steve Carter, who was a production coordinator for the company, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was always looking for new people.”Mr. Carter, who died last year, said Mr. Ward had been known for his willingness to step into any role in which he was needed. He recalled in particular a 1972 production of “A Ballet Behind the Bridge,” by the Trinidadian playwright Lennox Brown. With the actor Gilbert Lewis unable to appear one evening, Mr. Ward was hastily summoned to fill in.“Doug went on with script in hand,” Mr. Carter said. Then Mr. Ward actually injured his hand on the set and began bleeding profusely, but he refused to go to the hospital until he had finished the show.“He would always do what was necessary for N.E.C.,” Mr. Carter said.Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tom Ford on Wearing the Same Ripped Jeans and Allowing Himself to ‘Be Unproductive’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTom Ford on Wearing the Same Ripped Jeans and Allowing Himself to ‘Be Unproductive’As New York Fashion Week ends, the designer and film director explains why his show was postponed and how he has been affected by the pandemic.Tom Ford on the runway at his show in Los Angeles last year.Credit…Calla Kessler/The New York TimesFeb. 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETUntil last week, Tom Ford — designer, film director and chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America — had never done an Instagram Live interview. In fact, he said, he exists on Instagram under a secret name, known only to close friends, to protect his privacy and see what people are doing. (His corporate account is run by an employee.) But he agreed to talk to The New York Times for a special fashion week series, speaking from his empty atelier in Los Angeles. This interview has been edited and condensed.Vanessa Friedman New York Fashion Week just ended, even if many people may not have realized it began! You were supposed to close out the collections, but the digital reveal was postponed a week. What happened?Tom Ford We had a Covid outbreak in our L.A. atelier. Two people. They’re OK, but we all had to quarantine. The collection’s not finished, even though we were supposed to post all of our lookbook images today. Hopefully we’ll do it next week. I won’t complain. Everyone’s in the same situation, but it’s been hard.VF Wait, the collection is not finished? Do you always design so close to the wire?TF Often, five or six days before a show, I just cut everything up and move it all around. You work until the last minute because if you think of a good idea, and it’s two days before a show, you can’t not use it. You can’t say, “Oh, I’ll save that until next season” because you won’t want it next season.VF So you think we going to get dressed up again?TF Of course. I’ve been wearing these same dirty jeans with holes in them and this same dirty jean shirt for, it seems like, months. As soon as we can go out again, we’ll want to dress up. It’s only natural.VF What about shows? Is that whole circus coming back?TF There is something about seeing a show live: the electricity in the room, something that can’t be captured on film. It used to be about presenting your clothes to press and to buyers. Now it’s about an Instagrammable moment. You need a lot of people Instagramming, Instagramming, Instagramming because it’s a way to get images of your clothes out into the world. For that, live shows that happen on a schedule where everyone comes into town are effective. It’s like the Oscars in L.A.Looks from Mr. Ford’s spring 2021 collection.Credit…via Tom FordVF Speaking of the Oscars, how does your career as a film director relate to your work as a designer?TF Being a fashion designer is dictatorial. It’s: “This is what all men should look like, this is what all women should look like. This is how you should do your hair. This is what you should wear.” But film, as a director, is the closest thing to being God.VF You’re God?TF You’re not God of the world, but you are God of that film. You decide what people say, what they do, where they go, whether they die, whether they live. You create something, and it’s very permanent. Fashion is not, sadly, as permanent.You know, you can look at a beautiful dress from a different period, and you can admire it and say “Wow,” and you can look at the pictures, but you will never have the feeling that person at the dinner party felt when this woman walked into the room, or that man walked into the room, and what you saw for the first time was new and fresh and beautiful, and it just took your breath away.Whereas in film, forever and ever and ever, if it’s well-made and it ages well, you’ll start crying when you’re supposed to cry. You’ll laugh when you’re supposed to laugh. It’s a very permanent thing, and I find that incredibly appealing.VF You say fashion is not permanent, and over the summer people talked a lot about seizing the moment for change. But now there’s talk among big brands about going right back to the old system once things open up.TF We probably will because the system is driven by the consumer. Last season I did not do pre-collections, and the CFDA in combination with the British Fashion Council, issued a letter that we really wanted to return to two collections a year. But you lose business if you don’t have pre-collections. We have trained the consumer to think there’s something new every few months.On the other hand, we have found that we don’t need to travel as much as we thought.VF Less travel would also help with fashion’s environmental footprint, which is pretty dire.TF Personally, I don’t do fur anymore. I became vegan a few years ago. I remember watching a talk show with Adrian Grenier, who was talking about straws and plastic, and I thought, “Plastic straws, how’s that going to change the world?” I did a little research — it actually does change the world. I switched to metal straws. What I design is not meant to be thrown away.VF Aside from sustainability, the other pressing issue facing fashion is the question of social justice. Do you believe the industry will change?TF One of the very first things I did at the CFDA was to change the board to make sure it was more balanced racially, and balanced in terms of men and women. The CFDA is starting an in-house — I can’t legally call it a talent agency — but that is what it is. Fashion has taken so much from Black culture throughout history, so we owe a lot to the Black community.I like to think of myself as colorblind, but I recognize, of course, that I’m not. I live in this world. I know I will never understand what it feels like to be a Black man or woman in our culture today, but we have to keep having the conversation.VF What about another film?TF I have two things I’m working on: an adaptation and an original screenplay. To be honest, I thought that during Covid I would have time to work on these. I’m so lucky, I have everything in the world, but I think everyone has felt a certain depression. It’s been a very turbulent year. And I have a child at home who hasn’t been to school in a year. So, unfortunately, I have not felt as creative as I thought I was going to feel.VF What do you do in that situation?TF I go to bed. Maybe I drink some coffee and lie in the bathtub and probably watch way too much CNN and MSNBC and just make myself even more agitated. I try to get some sleep, which I never get. I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Second City Is Sold to Private Equity Group

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySecond City Is Sold to Private Equity GroupThe comedy company has faced intense criticism over race and had committed to restructuring. The new owner, ZMC, said it would not abandon this plan.Second City, in Chicago, also has outposts in Hollywood and Toronto. “We are very excited to partner with management and the incredible talent at The Second City to grow the brand and build a diverse organization,” ZMC said in a statement.Credit…Danielle Scruggs for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021Updated 4:02 p.m. ETSecond City, the storied comedy theater, which for more than half a century has helped define American humor, was sold to a private equity group on Thursday, the company said in a statement. The group, ZMC, run by Strauss Zelnick, invests in media entities; Zelnick is also the chief executive of Take-Two Interactive Software, the video game conglomerate behind Grand Theft Auto.It is the first time Second City, which is based in Chicago and has outposts in Hollywood and Toronto, has changed ownership since the 1980s, when Andrew Alexander, a producer and former head of the Toronto location, took over as co-owner and chief executive. Since it opened in 1959, Second City has helped ignite the careers of Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and Keegan Michael-Key. Pre-pandemic, it was almost certainly the largest live comedy business in the nation, with more than 700 full- and part-time employees, and an Actors Equity stage contract. The sale price was not disclosed but was estimated at around $50 million, according to The Financial Times.In the statement, Steve Johnston, the president of Second City (also known as The Second City), said, “We are thrilled to work with ZMC as we continue to transform the company into an equitable and thriving environment while delivering world-class comedy to our audiences.”The move comes as Second City is grappling with a business drop-off caused by pandemic shutdowns. It curtailed its in-person shows, tours, classes and corporate workshops — a big part of its business — though the theater aimed to rebound with online comedy and digital content. When Alexander announced that he was looking for buyers last October, he said it was “time for a new generation with fresh ideas to take the company to the next level.”Second City also has been trying to restructure itself after intense criticism over its handling of race. Alexander, who had been involved with the theater for nearly 50 years, stepped down abruptly last summer after Black performers publicly detailed their experiences of being stereotyped and demeaned. A series of open letters from artists and staff members of color then outlined complicated and expensive steps for the theater to combat institutional racism, and Second City leadership agreed to make wholesale changes.“We are prepared to tear it all down and begin again,” the theater’s leaders wrote in an open letter. They appointed a new interim executive director, Anthony LeBlanc, the first Black leader in the company’s history, and took many other measures, even as its performance spaces remained closed.The announcement of the sale suggested that ZMC would not abandon this plan. “We are very excited to partner with management and the incredible talent at The Second City to grow the brand and build a diverse organization that elevates all voices,” Jordan Turkewitz, co-chief investment officer and managing partner at ZMC, said in the statement.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Billie Holiday’s Story Depends on Who’s Telling It

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBillie Holiday’s Story Depends on Who’s Telling ItThere are almost as many interpretations of her short life and enormous legacy as there are books and films about her, including the new biopic starring Andra Day.Andra Day and Kevin Hanchard in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” directed by Lee Daniels.Credit…Takashi Seida/Paramount Pictures/HuluFeb. 18, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETFor the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, the story of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer, came to her in dribs and drabs. When Parks was growing up, she said, “our parents would tell us, ‘She had a tragic story.’ And then, as we got a little older, ‘She used drugs.’ And then as we got a little older, my mom would start saying things like, you know, they got to her. But she didn’t really get into it.”In the forthcoming drama “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” Parks, who wrote the screenplay, really gets into it, placing many of Holiday’s better-known battles — with heroin addiction, Jim Crow-era racism, and a seemingly endless string of swindlers and cads — in the context of her lesser-known struggles with Harry J. Anslinger, the unabashedly racist head of the now-defunct Federal Bureau of Narcotics.“The story is about how this woman, this icon, was much too outspoken, and so the government came after her,” Parks said in a phone interview. “It’s about how we African-American folks love this country that doesn’t really love us back.”Directed by Lee Daniels, the film reveals how Anslinger doggedly pursued Holiday (played by the Grammy-nominated vocalist Andra Day) ostensibly for her drug use, but really because she refused to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” the haunting and visceral anti-lynching anthem that has become one of the most famous protest songs of all time.The role, Day admitted, was daunting. Holiday was one of the world’s most gifted and celebrated jazz singers, her songs later covered by artists like John Coltrane, Barbra Streisand and Nina Simone, her influence felt by singers from Frank Sinatra to Cassandra Wilson to Day herself. And then there were all the others who had tackled the role before her. “I just had this idea running in my head that people would be like: ‘Billie Holiday’s so amazing, Diana Ross was amazing, Audra McDonald was amazing,’” Day said in a video call. “‘Oh, and then remember that girl, Andra Day, who tried to play Billie?’”Audra McDonald played the jazz star in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” on Broadway in 2014.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPremiering on Hulu on Feb. 26, the biopic is the latest in a series of portrayals of Lady Day and her music that date back decades. Day’s Golden Globe-nominated performance follows Ross’s star turn in the 1972 feature “Lady Sings the Blues” and McDonald’s Tony-winning performances in the Broadway musical “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.” In addition, there have been biographies (“Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon”), children’s books (“Mister and Lady Day: Billie Holiday and the Dog Who Loved Her”), and documentaries (“The Long Night of Lady Day”; “Billie”). Over the years, portrayals of Holiday have become more nuanced, shifting focus away from her problems with addiction to include insights into her history and legacy as a musician, a pioneering Black female entertainer and, with “Strange Fruit,” a champion of civil rights.Looming over them all is “Lady Sings the Blues,” Holiday’s 1956 ghostwritten autobiography, which omitted many details of her life (the singer’s affairs with Orson Welles and Tallulah Bankhead) and fictionalized others (her place of birth; the marital status of her parents).The book formed the basis for the 1972 biopic, a film that, coincidentally, inspired Daniels to become a director. (His credits include “The Butler” and “Precious.”) “‘Lady Sings the Blues’ changed my life,” he said in a phone interview. “It was beautiful Black people. It was Diana Ross at the height of her everything. It was Black excellence mixed in with a little bit of pig’s feet and pineapple soda and cornbread. It was magic. I had never been so entranced by anything.”The musical “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” imagines a single set — but what a set! — during which the singer goes off the rails in a small nightspot in Philadelphia, the site of her previous arrest on drug charges. (“When I die,” she cracks, “I don’t care if I go to heaven or hell, as long as it ain’t in Philly.”) Holiday rails against the bad men in her life, including her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, and the anonymous attacker who raped her when she was a child.Since that musical’s premiere in 1986, a host of would-be Lady Days have tackled the demanding role in theaters across the country, including Lonette McKee and Ernestine Jackson. In 2014, McDonald’s rendition won the actress a record-breaking sixth Tony.Diana Ross as Holiday in the 1972 movie “Lady Sings the Blues.”Credit…Paramount PicturesTo bring the icon to life in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” Parks read everything she could about the singer and immersed herself in her music. She reread “Lady Sings the Blues” but didn’t revisit the movie. (“Lee loves that film, so I was like, I’m going to let him have that.”) She also read several books by Anslinger, Holiday’s longtime nemesis (played by Garrett Hedlund in the film), who declared that jazz “sounded like the jungle in the dead of night” and declared that the lives of its players “reek of filth.”“Anslinger was fascinated with what he called the ‘jazz type,’ and saw himself as making America great again,” Parks said.Parks also studied up on Jimmy Fletcher, the Black narcotics agent whom Anslinger enlisted to help bring Holiday down. “That’s the situation we’re in as Black America right now,” Parks said. “Want to prove you’re not really Black? Put down some Black people. That’s the way to climb the ladder in the entertainment business. I’m not going to name any names! But you still see it.”In addition to Fletcher and Anslinger, a whole roster of bad men enter Holiday’s life, including the mob enforcer Louis McKay, the singer’s third husband. In the 1972 “Lady Sings the Blues,” McKay, as played by Billy Dee Williams, is Holiday’s super-suave, would-be savior, who struggles mightily (and fails) to get the singer off drugs. (The real McKay served as that movie’s technical adviser.) In reality — and in Daniels’s film — McKay was a pimp, a junkie and a wife beater.“The same woman who was so strong, who could see so clearly the injustices in our culture, just kept hooking up with the wrong guy,” Parks said. “But I guess that’s how it always is. Great people do great things, but then at home, they’re like —” and here the writer screamed.Even so, the singer who emerges in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” is more fighter than victim, taking on Anslinger (near the end of the film, she tells him, “Your grandkids are going to be singing ‘Strange Fruit’”) and holding her own against Fletcher.“You get to see her as human,” Day said. “As Black women, we’re not supposed to show the ugly parts or the mistakes. Billie’s funny, she has this great magnetism, she can be crazy and self-destructive. But she can also stand up and be a pillar of strength when forces that are so much greater than her are trying to destroy her.”The singer as seen in James Erskine’s documentary “Billie.”Credit…Michael Ochs/Greenwich EntertainmentJames Erskine, the director of the recent documentary “Billie,” also wanted to move beyond the standard narratives of Holiday as victim. “I was really keen to show that she lived life,” he said. “There’s a sequence where she’s on 42nd Street and she’s having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs, and I really wanted that to feel very positive, that she was determining her own destiny.”Erskine’s film drew from 200 hours of audio interviews conducted by the journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl in the 1970s. Many of the comments haven’t aged well: One psychiatrist declares Holiday a psychopath; others attribute her beatings by assorted men to masochism.The documentary also includes commentary about Holiday’s deep and platonic love for the saxophonist Lester Young, her unfulfilled desire to have children, and her sold-out 1948 concert at Carnegie Hall, following her stint in a federal prison in West Virginia.“The perception from ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ is very much Billie as victim and junkie, but I think that while she was victimized by people, she was really a fighter,” Erskine said. “And she was also a great artist, of course, which is why we’re still talking about her long after she died.”For Daniels, Holiday’s story will always be relevant. “It’s America’s story,” he said. “And until we’re healing, until American has healed, it’s not going to not be relevant.”In Parks’s view, “She was a soldier. Just the fact that she kept singing ‘Strange Fruit’! She was a soldier of the first order. Those mink coats and diamonds that she wore were her armor, and her voice was her sword.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      'Judas and the Black Messiah' Is Hollywood at Its Most Radical

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookIs This the Most Radical Film Ever Produced by Hollywood?“Judas and the Black Messiah” is the rare Hollywood film to explore a vision of Blackness that has nothing to do with white audiences.Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated PressFeb. 16, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ET“Judas and the Black Messiah” is a very good — nearly great — movie about the charismatic Fred Hampton and the way the Black Panther Party was targeted by the United States government. Yet neither the standout performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield nor the sensitive and insightful direction by Shaka King are the most remarkable aspects of the film: Not since Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic “Malcolm X” has there been a mainstream American film this thoroughly Black and radical.Black History Month was a mystery to me as a kid. I could never understand why we were taught some Black history but not nearly enough, not even close. We would learn about Frederick Douglass but not Nat Turner. Booker T. Washington but not W.E.B. Du Bois. Our teachers made a point of telling us about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but completely neglected Malcolm X. With this approach, they tacitly communicated that only the Black historical figures who included white people doing the work of Black liberation were the ones worthy of remembrance. This was especially true when it came to Black radicals. The Panthers, who were important to my community when I was growing up, and the Black power movement were never part of the narrative at school. The same can be said of Hollywood.Hollywood has long told Black stories from the perspective of white people. Think of Oscar-winning dramas like “The Blind Side” (a white adoptive mother comes to the aid of a Black football player), “The Help” (a white journalist awakens to the injustices Black maids face in the civil-rights-era South) or “Green Book” (a white chauffeur helps a Black classical pianist): Instead of exploring what Black characters endured, these movies catered to white audiences, giving them lessons on how to better perform their whiteness while in proximity to Blackness.This tradition of making Black films about white people thus makes the mere existence of “Judas and the Black Messiah” shocking and exhilarating. The movie, available on HBO Max and distributed by Warner Bros., is not exactly hostile to white people, but for a mainstream movie likely to garner Oscar attention, the version of Blackness it depicts, one rooted in an unapologetic love of the descendants of enslaved people, is rare. Surprisingly, it does not apologize for Hampton’s embrace of Blackness nor his deep suspicion of capitalism. It also does not sugarcoat the depiction of the Judas of the title, the F.B.I. plant Bill O’Neal. In another era, if a studio film tackled the material at all, Hampton would have been secondary in the story of a sympathetic informant. Instead, King is intentional about putting us on the side of the Black radicals, and we see the government for what it was: a destructive force.The movie isn’t perfect. Hampton was a fiery speaker, yes, but to fully understand him and his appeal, one must see him in action — a vantage the movie does not afford its viewers. What made him a legend in Chicago was his organizing skills and his undeniable charisma. But his most important achievement was bringing together the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance of the Black Panthers; the leftist, mostly white Young Patriots Organization; and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican gang that was concerned with human rights. This is not really given much screen time. Instead, the film shows us a Hampton who has already reached his zenith — it does not show us the work he did to get there. Obviously, a film is not a history lesson, but a bit more time could have been devoted to Hampton’s ideas.Recent documentaries like Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” and Göran Olsson’s “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” have examined the Panthers’ history and what they stood for. There have been a handful of features about the Panthers, most notably the beautiful and intimate “Night Catches Us” (2010), which depicted what happened to former members who tried to make a life outside the party. Perhaps the drama that comes closest to what “Judas” has achieved is a movie about Black nationalism, Lee’s “Malcolm X.” The politics of the two films are similar in that they both depict men who are vocal in their vision of Black self-determination. Yet “Judas” is more explicit about how Hampton married his racial critique with an economic one.It’s clear why we finally got a film like this. Black protesters have forced this country and its cultural creators finally to pay attention to its vicious legacy of white supremacy. Not only have people been in the streets for the past few years chanting “Black Lives Matter,” but Hollywood has also been an explicit target for criticism. It was only a few years ago that #OscarsSoWhite forced the academy to do some serious soul searching about how the industry marginalizes Black talent. More still needs to be done to make the industry an equitable place for all stories and creators, but the work so far is already having an impact.And it’s important to see a film telling a story about Black figures who have been neglected by America’s history books. If nothing else, the movie might inspire viewers to dig deeper and learn more about the Black radicals it depicts. Hampton and the Black Panther Party were always heroes to me; this is a film that does justice to their memory.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free Speech

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyObscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free SpeechA scholar’s address about racism and music theory was met with a vituperative, personal response by a small journal. It faced calls to cease publishing.A debate about racism, musicology, free speech and the music theorist Heinrich Schenker — pictured here with his wife, Jeanette — has roiled academia.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021Updated 4:27 p.m. ETA periodical devoted to the study of a long-dead European music theorist is an unlikely suspect to spark an explosive battle over race and free speech.But the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies, with a paid circulation of about 30 copies an issue per year, has ignited a fiery reckoning over race and the limits of academic free speech, along with whiffs of a generational struggle. The battle threatens to consume the career of Timothy Jackson, a 62-year-old music theory professor at the University of North Texas, and led to calls to dissolve the journal.It also prompted Professor Jackson to file an unusual lawsuit charging the university with violating his First Amendment rights — while accusing his critics of defamation.This tale began in the autumn of 2019 when Philip Ewell, a Black music theory professor at Hunter College, addressed the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio. He described music theory as dominated by white males and beset by racism. He held up the theorist Heinrich Schenker, who died in Austria in 1935, as an exemplar of that flawed world, a “virulent racist” who wrote of “primitive” and “inferior” races — views, he argued, that suffused his theories of music.“I’ve only scratched the surface in showing out how Schenker’s racism permeates his music theories,” Professor Ewell said, accusing generations of Schenker scholars of trying to “whitewash” the theorist in an act of “colorblind racism.”The society’s members — its professoriate is 94 percent white — responded with a standing ovation. Many younger faculty members and graduate students embraced his call to dismantle “white mythologies” and study non-European music forms. The tone was of repentance.“We humbly acknowledge that we have much work to do to dismantle the whiteness and systemic racism that deeply shape our discipline,” the society’s executive board later stated.At the University of North Texas, however, Professor Jackson, a white musicologist, watched a video of that speech and felt a swell of anger. His fellow scholars stood accused, some by name, of constructing a white “witness protection program” and shrugging off Schenker’s racism. That struck him as unfair and inaccurate, as some had explored Schenker’s oft-hateful views on race and ethnicity.A tenured music theory professor, Professor Jackson was the grandson of Jewish émigrés and had lost many relatives in the Holocaust. He had a singular passion: He searched out lost works by Jewish composers hounded and killed by the Nazis.And he devoted himself to the study of Schenker, a towering Jewish intellect credited with stripping music to its essence in search of an internal language. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, published under the aegis of the University of North Texas, was read by a small but intense coterie of scholars.He and other North Texas professors decided to explore Professor Ewell’s claims about connections between Schenker’s racial views and music theories.They called for essays and published every submission. Five essays stoutly defended Professor Ewell; most of the remaining 10 essays took strong issue. One was anonymous. Another was plainly querulous. (“Ewell of course would reply that I am white and by extension a purveyor of white music theory, while he is Black,” wrote David Beach, a retired dean of music at the University of Toronto. “I can’t argue with that.”).Professor Jackson’s essay was barbed. Schenker, he wrote, was no privileged white man. Rather he was a Jew in prewar Germany, the definition of the persecuted other. The Nazis destroyed much of his work and his wife perished in a concentration camp.Professor Jackson then took an incendiary turn. He wrote that Professor Ewell had scapegoated Schenker within “the much larger context of Black-on-Jew attacks in the United States” and that his “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black anti-Semitism.” He wrote that such phenomena “currently manifest themselves in myriad ways, including the pattern of violence against Jews, the obnoxious lyrics of some hip-hop songs, etc.”Timothy Jackson, a professor at the University of North Texas, was removed from the Journal of Schenkerian Studies after publishing an issue that was denounced as racist.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesNoting the paucity of Black musicians in classical music, Professor Jackson wrote that “few grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued.” He proposed increased funding for music education and a commitment to demolishing “institutionalized racist barriers.”And he took pointed shots at Professor Ewell.“I understand full well,” Professor Jackson wrote, “that Ewell only attacks Schenker as a pretext to his main argument: That liberalism is a racist conspiracy to deny rights to ‘people of color.’”His remarks lit a rhetorical match. The journal appeared in late July. Within days the executive board of the Society for Music Theory stated that several essays contained “anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks” and said that its failure to invite Professor Ewell to respond was designed to “replicate a culture of whiteness.”Soon after, 900 professors and graduate students signed a letter denouncing the journal’s editors for ignoring peer review. The essays, they stated, constituted “anti-Black racism.”Graduate students at the University of North Texas issued an unsigned manifesto calling for the journal to be dissolved and for the “potential removal” of faculty members who used it “to promote racism.”University of North Texas officials in December released an investigation that accused Professor Jackson of failing to hew to best practices and of having too much power over the journal’s graduate student editor. He was barred him from the magazine, and money for the Schenker Center was suspended.Jennifer Evans-Crowley, the university’s provost, did not rule out that disciplinary steps might be taken against Professor Jackson. “I can’t speak to that at this time,” she told The New York Times.Professor Jackson stands shunned by fellow faculty. Two graduate students who support him told me their peers feared that working with him could damage their careers.“Everything has become exceedingly polarized and the Twitter mob is like a quasi-fascist police state,” Professor Jackson said in an interview. “Any imputation of racism is anathema and therefore I must be exorcised.”This controversy raises intertwined questions. What is the role of universities in policing intellectual debate? Academic duels can be metaphorically bloody affairs. Marxists slash and parry with monetarists; postmodernists trade punches with modernists. Tenure and tradition traditionally shield sharp-tongued academics from censure.For a university to intrude struck others as alarming. Samantha Harris, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, urged the university to drop its investigation.She did not argue Professor Jackson’s every word was temperate.“This is an academic disagreement and it should be hashed out in journals of music theory,” Ms. Harris said. “The academic debate centers on censorship and putting orthodoxy over education, and that is chilling.”That said, race is an electric wire in American society and a traditional defense of untrammeled speech on campus competes with a newer view that speech itself can constitute violence. Professors who denounced the journal stressed that they opposed censorship but noted pointedly that cultural attitudes are shifting.“I’m educated in the tradition that says the best response to bad speech is more speech,” said Professor Edward Klorman of McGill University. “But sometimes the traditional idea of free speech comes into conflict with safety and inclusivity.”There is too a question with which intellectuals have long wrestled. What to make of intellectuals who voice monstrous thoughts? The renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi Party member and Paul de Man, a deconstructionist literary theorist, wrote for pro-Nazi publications. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima eroticized fascism and tried to inspire a coup.Schenker, who was born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was an ardent cultural Germanophile and given to dyspeptic diatribes. He spoke of the “filthy” French; English, and Italians as “inferior races”; and Slavs as “half animals.” Africans had a “cannibal spirit.”Did his theoretical brilliance counter the weight of disreputable rages?Professor Ewell argued that Schenker’s racism and theories are inseparable. “At a minimum,” he wrote in a paper, “we must present Schenker’s work to our students in full view of his racist beliefs.”The dispute has played out beyond the United States. Forty-six scholars and musicians in Europe and the Middle East wrote a defense of Professor Jackson and sounded a puzzled note. Professor Ewell, they wrote, delivered a provocative polemic with accusations aimed at living scholars and Professor Jackson simply answered in kind.Neither professor is inclined to back down. A cellist and scholar of Russian classical music, Professor Ewell, 54, describes himself as an activist for racial, gender and social justice and a critic of whiteness in music theory.Shortly after the Journal of Schenkerian Studies appeared in July, Professor Ewell — who eight years ago published in that journal — canceled a lecture at the University of North Texas. He said he had not read the essays that criticized him.“I won’t read them because I won’t participate in my dehumanization,” he told The Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas. “They were incensed by my Blackness challenging their whiteness.”Professor Ewell, who also is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center, declined an interview with The Times. He is part of a generation of scholars who are undertaking critical-race examinations of their fields. In “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” the paper he presented in Columbus, he writes that he is for all intents “a practitioner of white music theory” and that “rigorous conversations about race and whiteness” are required to “make fundamental antiracist changes in our structures and institutions.”For music programs to require mastery of German, he has said, “is racist obviously.” He has criticized the requirement that music Ph.D. students study German or a limited number of “white” languages, noting that at Yale he needed a dispensation to study Russian. He wrote that the “antiracist policy solution” would be “to require languages with one new caveat: any language — including sign language and computer languages, for instance — is acceptable with the exception of Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German, which will only be allowed by petition as a dispensation.”Last April he fired a broadside at Beethoven, writing that it would be academically irresponsible to call him more than an “above average” composer. Beethoven, he wrote, “has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years.”As for Schenker, Professor Ewell argued that his racism informed his music theories: “As with the inequality of races, Schenker believed in the inequality of tones.”That view is contested. Professor Eric Wen arrived in the United States from Hong Kong six decades ago and amid slurs and loneliness discovered in classical music what he describes as a colorblind solace. Schenker held a key to mysteries.“Schenker penetrated to the heart of what makes music enduring and inspiring,” said Professor Wen, who teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “He was no angel and so what? His ideology is problematic but his insights are massive.”How this ends is not clear. The university report portrayed Professor Jackson as hijacking the journal, ignoring a graduate student editor, making decisions on his own and tossing aside peer review.A trove of internal emails, which were included as exhibits in the lawsuit, casts doubt on some of those claims. Far from being a captive project of Professor Jackson, the emails show that members of the journal’s editorial staff were deeply involved in the planning of the issue, and that several colleagues on the faculty at North Texas, including one seen as an ally of Professor Ewell, helped draft its call for papers. When cries of racism arose, all but one of those colleagues denounced the journal. A graduate student editor publicly claimed to have participated because he “feared retaliation” from Professor Jackson, who was his superior, and said he had essentially agreed with Professor Ewell all along. The emails paint a contradictory picture, as he had described Professor Ewell’s paper as “naive.”Professor Jackson hired a lawyer who specialized in such cases, Michael Allen, and the lawsuit he filed against his university charges retaliation against his free speech rights. More extraordinary, he sued fellow professors and a graduate student for defamation. That aspect of the lawsuit was a step too far for FIRE, the free speech group, which supported targeting the university but took the view that suing colleagues and students was a tit-for-tat exercise in squelching speech.“We believe such lawsuits are generally unwise,” the group stated, “and can often chill or target core protected speech.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      3 New Albums Retell the History of Black Composers

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story3 New Albums Retell the History of Black ComposersRecordings by the pianist Lara Downes, the Catalyst Quartet and the baritone Will Liverman aim to correct the canon.Among the artists using recordings to advocate for racial equity in classical music are, from left, Lara Downes; the Catalyst Quartet: Karlos Rodriguez, Karla Donehew Perez, Abi Fayette and Paul Laraia; and Will Liverman.Credit…Max Barrett; Ricardo Quiñones; Jaclyn SimpsonFeb. 12, 2021Music can’t survive on its own. Composers not entrenched in the canon need support: from publishers, from foundations, from performers. Without these champions, it’s all too easy to slide into obscurity.Three projects — by the Catalyst Quartet; the baritone Will Liverman; and the pianist Lara Downes — consider another avenue for maintaining a legacy: recordings. Gone are the days when classical albums could be relied on as moneymakers. But in the age of streaming, they are endlessly accessible, easy to disseminate and, in the case of these new releases, ideal for spreading the word about overlooked composers of color, whose music often exists in varying states of disrepair.Recordings have helped propel the recent revivals of Julius Eastman and Florence Price, whose works are held up by scholars and critics today but languished for decades — neglected for a variety of reasons, including race.When a friend of mine, the musicologist Jacques Dupuis, programmed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Endymion’s Dream” a few years ago for the Boston ensemble Calliope, the only full score of it he could find was a rare holograph at the Library of Congress. So he traveled to Washington and spent dozens of hours transcribing it and creating a performing edition. A video of the resulting concert is the only available recording of the piece.“I’m not sure that would be sustainable as a regular practice without robust institutional support,” he said, “which speaks to some of the hurdles in bringing equity and diversity to music programming.”Similar labor went into the creation of these albums, made with the goal of highlighting music by Black composers and offering new possibilities for the classical canon.‘Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’[embedded content]The Catalyst Quartet’s Uncovered project began in 2018, growing from an initial idea of performing and recording a program of works by a few underrepresented composers. That quickly blossomed into something more ambitious: a series of focused surveys, beginning with music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.Coleridge-Taylor, born to a white mother and Black father in Britain in 1875, wrote the pieces on “Uncovered, Vol. 1” while he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. Although they reflect the influence of Brahms and Dvorak, as the violinist and scholar Matthew Leslie Santana observes in the album’s liner notes, they have the feel of “a new music project,” said Karlos Rodriguez, the quartet’s cellist.“Except it of course isn’t new, and now it’s redefining the canon,” Rodriguez added. He pointed to the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor: “You think of Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets, but this is up there. It holds its own.”“Uncovered, Vol. 1,” released earlier this month on the Azica label, features Catalyst — the violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Jessie Montgomery, the violist Paul Laraia and Rodriguez — in three early Coleridge-Taylor works, including quintets performed with the pianist Stewart Goodyear and Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet. (Montgomery, increasingly in demand as a composer, left the quartet last month and was succeeded by Abi Fayette.)Preparation for the Coleridge-Taylor album — and future installments of Uncovered, which continues with a Florence Price recording — didn’t come as easily as, say, a recording of Beethoven quartets. The scores were not always readily available, and there wasn’t an established interpretation history.“These pieces are not in your blood,” Donehew Perez said.Some of the music had never been recorded, or there was only a single record, and, as Laraia said, “None of these pieces should exist in one recording.” The members of the quartet are hoping that “Uncovered, Vol. 1” prompts more Coleridge-Taylor performances.“I think this is an interesting way for presenters to move in an interesting direction, but there doesn’t have to be shock,” Fayette said. “You can hear the Classical era and Romantic era; it’s not like you’re throwing audiences into the deep end. And I think this year has proven to us that classical music is ready for a shift.”‘Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers’[embedded content]Will Liverman’s “Dreams of a New Day,” a program of American art songs by Black composers out Friday on Cedille Records, has been in the works for two years. But, Liverman said, the album “is coming at a good time.” Because of pandemic delays, he found himself recording it with the pianist Paul Sánchez last summer, a time of widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations and renewed urgency for racial equity in classical music.At the heart of the album — its roster includes both living composers and older ones like Margaret Bonds and Harry Burleigh, known for his influence on Dvorak and the threading of spirituals with classical idioms — is the premiere recording of Shawn Okpebholo’s “Two Black Churches.” It is an affecting setting of poems about the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963 and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.Liverman, who is scheduled to sing this fall in the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening production of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — the company’s first opera by a Black composer — said that he has been performing these works in recitals, but that the recording is a way to “normalize” them.“When I was starting off as a student, I kept seeing people like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau because they had made so many recordings,” he said. “There’s something very important about having music that’s out there and accessible.”Rising Sun Music[embedded content]About two years ago, Lara Downes wanted to record an album of unearthed piano works by Florence Price. She took the project to three labels; none were interested.“But it needed to happen,” she recalled. “So I just did it.”A similar spirit led to the creation of Rising Sun Music, a digital label that debuted this month with the EP “Remember Me to Harlem” and will continue to release recordings of works by Black composers. “If you’re independent,” Downes said, “you can move a lot faster.”Downes has been working to develop a community of scholars and musicians to help with the project, which seeks to highlight the work of composers of color going back more than 200 years. Two of those collaborators appear on “Remember Me to Harlem”: the oboist Titus Underwood, in William Grant Still’s “Song for the Lonely”; and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, achingly gentle in Margaret Bonds’s “When the Dove Enters In.”As part of the initiative, Downes also intends to release new — in some cases, the first — editions of scores, to make them more accessible to performers and students. The shaky state of these works, she said, reflects the history of American music, and of the country more broadly.“Every story you uncover, there’s a question of, ‘Why was this covered?’” Downes said. “You’re talking about Black life and an imbalance. Part of this is bigger than the music. We can look at our art and culture as a microscope of us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max Film

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max FilmThe Shaka King movie dramatizes the life and death of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Here’s a guide to the people and the issues of the day.Daniel Kaluuya, top, as Fred Hampton, and below him Lakeith Steinfeld as the informant William O’Neal  in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 12, 2021, 12:18 p.m. ETTo Black Americans in the 1960s who were targeted and harassed by the police, 21-year-old Fred Hampton was an empowering figure.To the F.B.I. and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was a radical threat.Hampton was killed by Chicago police officers early on the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, during a raid on his West Side apartment, which was a block south of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago headquarters. The ambush, and the months of F.B.I. surveillance of Hampton and the Panthers that preceded it, are dramatized in Shaka King’s film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which begins streaming Friday on HBO Max.At the time of Hampton’s death, Chicago was the site of political protests and violent clashes with law enforcement. The infamous trial of the Chicago 7, a court battle that involved seven Vietnam War protesters charged with conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (a saga chronicled in Aaron Sorkin’s recent film “The Trial of the Chicago 7”), had been underway for a little over two months.King, who co-wrote the script with Will Berson, drew mostly from fact while taking viewers inside the Black Panther Party in the months leading up to Hampton’s death, though they took a few dramatic liberties. For instance, the film’s star, Daniel Kaluuya, is a decade older than the 21-year-old Hampton was when he was killed.Here is a guide to the real-life people, groups and events that feature in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Be warned, there are spoilers, if such a thing is possible when speaking of history.Who were the Black Panthers?Bobby Seale, left, and Huey P. Newton at the Black Panther Party headquarters in San Francisco.Credit…Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by a pair of Black college students, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, to oppose police brutality and racism in local neighborhoods. The Panthers, who were known for their military-style black berets, leather jackets and raised-fist salute, believed in removing abusive officers from communities by any means necessary, including armed resistance.The F.B.I. viewed the Panthers as a radical group capable of galvanizing a militant Black nationalist movement. (Hoover, the bureau’s first director, called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). But the Panthers also launched a number of social initiatives: Members ran medical clinics, provided free transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, and started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of schoolchildren.Who was Fred Hampton?Fred Hampton at the “Days of Rage” rally in Chicago, less than two months before he was killed.Credit…David Fenton/Getty ImagesThe charismatic community organizer enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from campaigning for an integrated community pool and recreational center in his hometown, Maywood, Ill., to preaching to thousands as the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.In 1969, a few months after helping to found the party’s Illinois chapter, the 20-year-old Hampton brokered an alliance he called the Rainbow Coalition, which united the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots (Southern white leftists) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican civil and human rights organization) in an effort to combat poverty and racism in their Chicago communities.Hampton’s rapid ascent through the ranks of the Black Panther Party landed him in the cross hairs of a secret F.B.I. counterintelligence program, known as Cointelpro, that Hoover formed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations.” Targets included both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover declared in an internal memo that he sought to prevent the “rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.”Under Cointelpro, the F.B.I. tried a number of tactics to sow discord within the Black Panther Party at the national and local levels, including sending bogus letters to two of its leaders, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, which claimed that each sought to depose the other. Authorities also arrested Hampton and several other Panthers in an effort to publicly discredit the group. In the months before the raid on Hampton’s apartment, the Panthers and the police also faced off in two gun battles: One in July 1969 at the party’s West Side headquarters in which five police officers and three Panthers were injured, and a South Side fight that November that left two officers and one Panther dead.Who was William O’Neal?At 17, O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) already had a criminal record when the F.B.I. agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) tracked him down after he stole a car in 1966. But O’Neal soon took on a new role: F.B.I. informant. Given the choice between facing felony charges or agreeing to infiltrate the Panthers, he opted for the latter: as a security captain in the Illinois Black Panther Party, he infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle.In 1969, O’Neal sketched a floor plan of Hampton’s West Side apartment, including where everyone slept, which the F.B.I. then shared with the Chicago Police Department, the agency that conducted the fatal raid. But unlike the character in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the real O’Neal did not see his actions as a betrayal of Hampton or the Panthers. “I had no allegiance to the Panthers,” he recalled in an interview for the PBS docuseries “Eyes on the Prize,” which chronicled the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.What happened the morning Fred Hampton was killed?Demonstrators in Boston in 1970 protested the killing of Fred Hampton. Credit…Spencer Grant/Getty ImagesFourteen Chicago police officers showed up before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, at Hampton’s apartment, acting on the orders of Edward V. Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney. Over the course of about 10 minutes, more than 80 shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, Hampton, 21, and another party leader, Mark Clark, 22, were dead, and four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded.At first, the police claimed they killed Hampton in self-defense after people in the apartment began firing shotguns at them as they tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons. But ballistics experts determined that only one of the bullets was probably discharged from a weapon belonging to an occupant of the apartment. A federal grand jury investigation also revealed that the “bullet holes” in the apartment’s front door, which officers had cited as evidence that the Panthers had shot at them, were in fact nail holes created by police.Though the Chicago Police Department had led the raid, the grand jury concluded that it had been coordinated by the F.B.I. as part of Hoover’s mission to cripple the Black Panther Party — and an F.B.I. memo later revealed that the bureau had authorized a bonus payment to O’Neal.The first federal grand jury declined to indict anyone involved in the raid, and though a subsequent grand jury indicted Hanrahan and the police officers who participated in the shootings, all the charges were dismissed. In 1982, without admitting any wrongdoing, the federal government, the City of Chicago and Cook County agreed to pay $1.85 million to the families of Hampton and Clark and to survivors of the raid.Clarence M. Kelley, who succeeded Hoover as head of the F.B.I. in 1973, issued a public apology three years later for the bureau’s abuse of power in the “twilight” of Hoover’s career. “Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible,” Kelley said. “We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More