Word: cotton
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...prisoners. He then gives a short interpretive history of the prison system and how the songs developed in reaction to it. He follows with his photographic essay on the camps--pictures of chain gangs marching on dusty roads driven by fat sheriffs and photographs of strong black inmates picking cotton. He concludes with the songs, certainly the most instructive part of the book...
...conditions that gave impetus to these songs are rapidly disappearing. The prisoners don't sing the songs as often as they used to, and only the older inmates remember the days when men would sever their Achilles tendons in order to avoid slave labor in the cane and cotton fields. By recording the stories and songs of the prisoners, Jackson has provided a valuable record of one of the bleaker chapters in American history...
...poor, heavily blue collar city of New Bedford as well as several wealthy suburbs and Cape Cod, had a fund-raising party at a large seaside estate at Woods Hole. It was a beautiful people party at a beautiful people place: the men clad in bright red and yellow cotton pants with boat shoes or tassled loafers, the women in heels and tastefully chic dresses...
...other offenders are Cotton Comes to Harlem and Come Back Charleston Blue, which feature Raymond St. Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge as veteran Harlem detectives. In Cotton a modern day Marcus Garvey is unmasked as a charlatan, while in Charleston Blue a dynamic young black photographer who rids the community of heroin turns out to be using it for his own purposes. Black Americans are implicitly instructed that Pan-Africanist leaders are frauds and that blacks who attempt to serve the community have alternative motives. The thrust of these films is that blacks are incapable of solving their own problems...
...forcefed a steady diet of demeaning characterizations. Black actresses are literally and figuratively screwed from one reel to the next. The title character in Melinda is a black whore for a white gangster. The women in Super Fly are all prestitutes mindlessly devoted to the drug supplier, while in Cotton Comes to Harlem and Charlston Blue, black women are portrayed as naive, frivolous, or insane. The women in the Shaft films are merely repositories for the super-stud's semen. And as if there aren't enough real monsters to contend with in the ghetto, the king of horror films...