1970s blaxploitation films: a lot has changed, but much has stayed the same

Michael Jai White remembers the first time he saw people onscreen who looked like they came from his 'hood. This was in an otherwise forgettable 1976 blaxploitation flick called "The Monkey Hustle" starring Yaphet Kotto and Rudy Ray Moore as street-smart con men trying to stop the Man from demolishing their neighborhood for a freeway project. It may not have been high art, but in its own sneaky way, "The Monkey Hustle" was truly glorious.

"It was just brash, unlike anything I'd ever seen," says White, the co-screenwriter and star of "Black Dynamite," a spoof of '70s-era black action pictures that opens Friday. "I remember these bigger-than-life characters, who reminded me of my uncles, and it was the first time I saw anything familiar in my life on the big screen."

Say what you will about the roughly 150 black action, horror and comedy films that came out between 1971 and 1976, the height of the blaxploitation era: that they were cheaply made, poorly acted, hyper-violent and glorified pimps, prostitutes, criminals and con men -- all those things are true, to a certain extent. But they were also utterly empowering, gobbled up by African American audiences desperate for strong, and recognizable, working-class heroes.

"These films made me feel proud in a way Sidney Poitier didn't; he was detached from the inner-city experience," says Josiah Howard, author of "Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide."

"These people spoke to me because they spoke like me, they looked like me, they had simple dreams like me," Howard says. "I came to these films as a young teen, and I could not believe I was seeing people like me, with big Afros, living in the ghetto. I thought, 'That's my life,' so it was uplifting for me."

"We needed heroes" at the time, agrees Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, who starred in "Black Caesar," "Hell Up in Harlem" and many other black action pictures. "Sidney Poitier was a great actor, but he did not fulfill the void of how some blacks interpreted their impact on society. We needed something to propel the masculinity of the black male, and black women were tired of the Aunt Jemima character. They had the same needs we did."

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Beyond Poitier