Raiford Chatman "Ossie" Davis was an American actor, director, writer, and activist. He was married to Ruby Dee, with whom he frequently performed, until his death. He and his wife were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame; were awarded the National Medal of Arts and were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994.
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.
Helen Dorothy Martin was an American actress of stage and television. Martin's career spanned over 60 years, appearing first on stage and later in film and television. Martin is best known for her roles as Wanda on the CBS sitcom Good Times (1974–1979) and as Pearl Shay on the NBC sitcom 227 (1985–1990).
Lenox Avenue – also named Malcolm X Boulevard; both names are officially recognized – is the primary north–south route through Harlem in the upper portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. This two-way street runs from Farmers' Gate at Central Park North to 147th Street. Its traffic is figuratively described as "Harlem's heartbeat" by Langston Hughes in his poem Juke Box Love Song. The IRT Lenox Avenue Line runs under the entire length of the street, serving the New York City Subway's 2 and 3 trains.
Calvin Lockhart was a Bahamian–American stage and film actor. Lockhart was perhaps best known for his roles as Reverend Deke O'Malley in the 1970 film Cotton Comes to Harlem and Biggie Smalls in the 1975 Warner Bros. film Let's Do It Again.
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.
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.
Come Back, Charleston Blue is a 1972 American comedy film starring Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques, loosely based on Chester Himes' novel The Heat's On. It is a sequel to the 1970 film Cotton Comes to Harlem.
Gertrude Hadley Jeannette was an American playwright and film and stage actress. She is also known for being the first woman to work as a licensed taxi driver in New York City, which she began doing in 1942. Despite being blacklisted during the Red Scare in the 1950s, she wrote five plays and founded the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players in Harlem, New York, remaining active in mentoring African-American actors in New York City. In the 1960s and 1970s she appeared in Broadway productions such as The Long Dream, Nobody Loves an Albatross, The Amen Corner, The Skin of Our Teeth and Vieux Carré. She also appeared in films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1969, Shaft in 1971, and Black Girl in 1972. She acted into her 80s and retired from directing theater at the age of 98.
Judy Lenteen Pace is an American actress known for her roles in films and television shows, particularly blaxploitation films. Pace portrayed Vickie Fletcher on the TV series Peyton Place (1968–1969) and Pat Walters on the ABC drama series The Young Lawyers (1969–1971), for which she won an Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series in 1970.
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.
Founded in the 17th century as a Dutch outpost, Harlem developed into a farming village, a revolutionary battlefield, a resort town, a commuter town, a center of African-American culture, a ghetto, and a gentrified neighborhood.
New Heritage Theatre Group (NHTG) is the oldest Black nonprofit theater company in New York City, established in 1964. Through its multiple divisions: IMPACT Repertory Theatre, The Roger Furman Reading Series, and New Heritage Films, New Heritage gives training, exposure, and experience to new and emerging artists, playwrights, directors and technicians of color. New Heritage was founded by the late Roger Furman and is currently headed by Executive Producer Voza Rivers and Executive Artistic Director Jamal Joseph. NHTG presentations capture the historical, social, and political experiences of Black and Latino descendants in America and abroad.
The Movies is a documentary miniseries that premiered on CNN on July 7, 2019. Produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's studio Playtone, the six-part series chronicles the cinema of the United States, ranging from the "Golden Age of Hollywood" to the present day. It is a spin-off of Hanks and Goetzman's retrospective miniseries for CNN.
