Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that a consensus is building that the U.S. must pick out the black money from the gray, the tools at hand seem minimal for the task. Says Jaime Chavez, an international banking consultant: "The people who will probably be searching for it have a very limited knowledge of what money movement is all about. How is a third-rate employee of the Justice Department going to dissect the entire financial system to pinpoint the drug money correctly?" During the Reagan years, the budgets of agencies in charge of ctaching financial cheats failed to keep pace with the changing world...
Such a metaphor is available in Driving Miss Daisy. If you look hard, you can find in this account of the 25-year relationship between Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a genteel Southern, Jewish matriarch, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), a microcosmic study of changing racial attitudes in a crucial time and place (Atlanta, circa 1948-73). What you will not find in this marvelously understated movie is overtly inspirational comments on that subject, broad sentimentality or the slightest pomposity about its own mission. In other words, Alfred Uhry's adaptation of his Pulitzer-prizewinning play aspires more...
...entirely. For the specific historical events the film narrates -- the formation, training and terrible blooding in battle of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black fighting unit enlisted in the Union cause -- are little known yet resonant with high symbolic significance. The 54th, led by an idealistic 25-year-old white man, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick skillfully blending shyness and tenacity), had to fight to fight. Their white comrades-in-arms were full of contemptuous prejudice against them, and the high command was afraid to arm black men who had their own bitter racial grievances (many were runaway...
...century warfare at its most brutal. Director Edward Zwick graphically demonstrates the absurdity of lines of soldiers slowly advancing across open ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the face of withering rifle volleys and horrendous cannonade. The fact that the 54th finally achieves respect (and opens the way for other black soldiers) only by losing half its number in a foredoomed assault on an impregnable fortress underscores this terrible and brutal irony...
...late afternoon eight years ago, Griffiths Mxenge, a well-known black lawyer and antiapartheid campaigner in the city of Durban, was driving home when he stopped to help four men whose pickup truck had apparently broken down. According to an affidavit given to the police, the men abducted Mxenge, drove him to a field outside a nearby soccer stadium, stabbed him repeatedly and then left him to die in a pool of blood...