Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he was ranked among the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Harry Belafonte was an American singer, actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's career breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.
William Henry Cosby Jr. is an American former comedian, actor, spokesman, and media personality. He performed over a period of decades in film, television, and stand-up comedy, with his longest-running live-action role being that of Cliff Huxtable in the sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–1992). He also released several stand-up comedy albums and was a popular spokesperson in advertising for decades. Cosby was well known in the United States for his eccentric image and gained a reputation as "America's Dad". Since 2014, dozens of allegations of sexual assault have been made against him, which has effectively ended his career and tarnished his legacy. There had been previous allegations against Cosby, but they were dismissed and accusers were ignored or disbelieved.
Ghost Dad is a 1990 American fantasy comedy film directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Bill Cosby, in which a widower's spirit is able to communicate with his children after his death. It was a box office disaster.
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 received numerous accolades including a Grammy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award as well as nominations for five Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and Tony Award. Davis was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1995, Kennedy Center Honors in 2004
Rosalind Cash was an American actress. Her best-known film role is in the 1971 science-fiction film The Omega Man. Cash also had another notable role as Mary Mae Ward in ABC's General Hospital, a role she portrayed from 1994 until her death in 1995.
Lee Chamberlin was an American theatrical, film and television actress.
Johnny Sekka was a Senegalese actor.
A Piece of the Action is a 1977 American crime comedy film directed by and starring Sidney Poitier and co-starring Bill Cosby. It was the third film pairing of Poitier and Cosby, following Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Let's Do It Again (1975). The films are considered a trilogy, even though the actors play characters with different names in each film. It was also Poitier's last acting role for more than a decade, as he focused his attentions on directing.
Richard Wesley is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing.
Let's Do It Again is a 1975 American action crime comedy film, starring Sidney Poitier and co-starring Bill Cosby and Jimmie Walker among an all-star black cast. The film, directed by Poitier, is about blue-collar workers who decide to rig a boxing match to raise money for their fraternal lodge. The song of the same name by The Staple Singers was featured as the opening and ending theme of the film, and as a result, the two have become commonly associated with each other. The production companies include Verdon Productions and The First Artists Production Company, Ltd., and distributed by Warner Bros. The movie was filmed in two cities, Atlanta, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana, where most of the plot takes place. This was the second film pairing of Poitier and Cosby following Uptown Saturday Night, and followed by A Piece of the Action (1977). Of the three, Let's Do It Again has been the most successful both critically and commercially. Calvin Lockhart and Lee Chamberlin also appeared in Uptown Saturday Night. According to the American Film Institute, Let's Do It Again is not a sequel to Uptown Saturday Night.
"How I Got Over" is a Gospel hymn composed and published in 1951 by Clara Ward (1924–1973). Ward's original release sold 1 million copies and is one of the best-selling gospel songs of all time. Other notable recordings of this work have been made by Mahalia Jackson, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. It was performed by Mahalia Jackson at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 before 250,000 people.
Black Hollywood is the third album by hip hop duo Camp Lo, released on July 24, 2007, on Good Hands Records. It was the duo's first album in five years. The album was produced by long-time collaborator Ski, who had produced the majority of the group's first two albums, Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again. The album features guest appearances from Ski and Jungle Brown, who appeared on the duo's debut. The album's first single was "Black Hollywood".
Buck and the Preacher is a 1972 American Western film released by Columbia Pictures, written by Ernest Kinoy and directed by Sidney Poitier. Poitier also stars in the film alongside Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when the combined momentum of the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Black Panthers spurred African-American artists to reclaim the power of depiction of their ethnicity, and institutions like UCLA to provide financial assistance for African-American students to study filmmaking. This combined with Hollywood adopting a less restrictive rating system in 1968. 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. After the race films of the 1940s and 1960s, the genre emerged as one of the first in which black characters and communities were protagonists, rather than sidekicks, supportive characters, or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Mark Cullen and Robb Cullen are brothers and American film and television writers and producers, who usually work together.
Imaging Blackness is the complex concept of expressing, recognizing, or assigning specific sets of ideas or values used in the depiction of Black people. This depiction can be shown through various forms of media: film, television, literature. More specifically in film, the portrayal of Black people as been imaged and captured throughout history.
Black Dynamite is an American adult animated blaxploitation comedy television series developed by Carl Jones for the Cartoon Network late-night programming block Adult Swim. It is based on the 2009 film of same name, although the series follows an alternate continuity. Michael Jai White, Byron Keith Minns, Tommy Davidson and Kym Whitley reprise their film roles as Black Dynamite, Bullhorn, Cream Corn and Honeybee, respectively. Cedric Yarbrough also reprises his film role as the Western-style pimp Chocolate Giddy-Up, along with Jimmy Walker Jr. as the restaurant owner Roscoe and Arsenio Hall as fellow pimp Tasty Freeze.
American former comedian, actor, author, director, and producer Bill Cosby performed over a period of decades in film, television, and stand-up comedy. His longest-running live-action role was that of Cliff Huxtable in the sitcom The Cosby Show (1984-1992).
African American cinema is loosely classified as films made by, for, or about Black Americans. Historically, African American films have been made with African-American casts and marketed to African-American audiences. The production team and director were sometimes also African American. More recently, Black films featuring multicultural casts aimed at multicultural audiences have also included American Blackness as an essential aspect of the storyline.
