Donny Edward Hathaway was an American soul singer, keyboardist, songwriter, backing vocalist, and arranger who Rolling Stone described as a "soul legend". His most popular songs include "The Ghetto", "This Christmas", "Someday We'll All Be Free", and "Little Ghetto Boy". Hathaway is also renowned for his renditions of "A Song for You", "For All We Know", and "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know", along with "Where Is the Love" and "The Closer I Get to You", two of many collaborations with Roberta Flack. He has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame and won one Grammy Award from four nominations. Hathaway was also posthumously honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Dutch director David Kleijwegt made a documentary called Mister Soul – A Story About Donny Hathaway, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 28, 2020.
Cornell Luther Dupree was an American jazz and R&B guitarist. He worked at various times with Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, King Curtis and Steve Gadd, appeared on David Letterman, and wrote a book on soul and blues guitar, Rhythm and Blues Guitar. He reportedly recorded on 2,500 sessions.
James Thomas Ramey, better known as Baby Huey, was an American singer. He was the frontman for the band Baby Huey & the Babysitters, whose sole LP for Curtom Records in 1971 was influential in the development of hip hop music.
Chester Bomar Himes was an American writer. His works, some of which have been filmed, include If He Hollers Let Him Go, published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series of novels for which he is best known, set in the 1950s and early 1960s and featuring two black policemen called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. In 1958 Himes won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
Across 110th Street is a 1972 American action-crime film directed by Barry Shear and starring Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Franciosa and Paul Benjamin. The film is set in Harlem, New York and takes its name from 110th Street, the traditional dividing line between Harlem and Central Park that functioned as an informal boundary of race and class in 1970s New York City.
Ellsworth Raymond "Bumpy" Johnson was an American crime boss in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Gregory Joseph Sierra was an American actor known for his roles as Detective Sergeant Chano Amengual on Barney Miller, Julio Fuentes, the Puerto Rican neighbor of Fred G. Sanford on Sanford and Son, and as Marruja in The Castaway Cowboy (1974).
Godfrey MacArthur Cambridge was an American stand-up comic and actor. Alongside Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and Nipsey Russell, he was acclaimed by Time in 1965 as "one of the country's foremost celebrated Negro comedians."
Philip Upchurch is an American jazz and blues guitarist and bassist.
Bernard Lee "Pretty" Purdie is an American drummer, and an influential R&B, soul and funk musician. He is known for his precise musical time keeping and his signature use of triplets against a half-time backbeat: the "Purdie Shuffle." He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-American organized crime emerged following the first and second large-scale migration of African-Americans from the South to major cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and later the West Coast. In many of these newly established communities and neighborhoods, criminal activities such as illegal gambling, speakeasies and bootlegging were seen in the post-World War I and Prohibition eras. Although the majority of these businesses in African-American neighborhoods were operated by African Americans, it is often unclear the extent to which these operations were run independently of the larger criminal organizations of the time.
The Harlem Detective series of novels by Chester Himes comprises nine hardboiled novels set in the 1950s and early 1960s:
Cotton Comes to Harlem is a 1970 American neo-noir action comedy thriller film co-written and directed by Ossie Davis and starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx. The film, later cited as an early example of the blaxploitation genre, is based on Chester Himes' novel of the same name. The opening theme, "Ain't Now But It's Gonna Be," was written by Ossie Davis and performed by Melba Moore. The film was one of the many black films that appeared in the 1970s and became an overnight hit. It was followed two years later by the sequel Come Back, Charleston Blue.
Everything Is Everything is the first studio album by American soul artist Donny Hathaway, which was released on July 1, 1970 on the Atlantic Records' subsidiary, Atco.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. The genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the protagonists and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, antagonists or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Cotton Comes to Harlem is a hardboiled crime fiction novel written by Chester Himes in 1965. It is the sixth and best known of the Harlem Detective series. It was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1970 starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx.
Coffin Baby is a 2013 American slasher film written and directed by Dean C. Jones and starring Bruce Dern, Brian Krause, Clifton Powell, and Ethan Phillips. It has been represented as a sequel to 2004's Toolbox Murders, but is not. The majority of the footage in the film was shot for Toolbox Murders 2, the sequel to the 2004 film in which the eponymous toolbox killer, Coffin Baby, resumes his gruesome killing spree from the first film. Actor Christopher Doyle reprises his 2004 role as Coffin Baby. However, distribution of Coffin Baby has been stopped by agreement between Dean Jones and the producers of Toolbox Murders 2.
"Little Ghetto Boy" is a soul song composed by Earl DeRouen and Edward Howard, and first recorded in 1971 by Donny Hathaway for his 1972 Live album. The song also appeared on the Come Back, Charleston Blue soundtrack later that year, in studio quality.
