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‘Promised Land’

The Newark Black Film Festival presents a chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.

By Elise Nakhnikian
   LAST month I saw Muhammad Ali at his prime. Shining brighter than Elvis and landing more body blows to American racism than to George Foreman, he kept flashing that trickster wit, a mirror playing with the sun. The occasion was a rare theatrical screening of When We Were Kings, an excellent documentary I had only seen once before on TV, which could hardly do justice to its larger-than-life subject.
   When We Were Kings chronicles the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” that restored the championship title that was stripped from Ali when he refused to fight in Vietnam. A tribute to a great soul and a visceral portrait of a seminal time in African-American history, it came perilously close to never being seen, hung up for years in a legal battle with fight promoter Don King. It was finally released in 1996, more than two decades after the principle footage was shot.
   Central New Jersey residents will have a similar opportunity to see black American history on the big screen when the “Promised Land” episode of Eyes on the Prize, a landmark multi-part documentary shot for PBS, is screened at the Newark Black Film Festival.
   A densely textured account of the civil rights battle of the mid to late 20th century, Eyes on the Prize interweaves the testimonies of everyday people with revealing footage of the movement’s great leaders — much of which had rarely or never been seen before. Stanford University history professor Clayborne Carson called it “the principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century.”
   The first six hours of the 14-hour series, which cover the period between 1954 and 1965, were shown on PBS in 1987. Part 2, which covers 1965-1985, was broadcast three years later. The series was “transformative and bittersweet,” says Dr. Clement Alexander Price, who will speak before and after its Newark screening. Libraries and schools snapped it up, seeing its educational and historical value.
   But Prize soon became a poster child for the prohibitive cost of licensing fees. When the rights Prize creator and executive producer Henry Hampton had bought for photos, music and archival footage began to expire in the early 1990s, it was pulled from circulation and barred from DVD distribution. “This is a piece of landmark TV history that has vanished,” said series producer and cinematographer Jon Else in “Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers.”
   Thanks to lobbying by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates and others, Prize is back in circulation, though it was in limbo for nearly as long as When We Were Kings. The Ford Foundation and philanthropist Richard Gilder donated $850,000, the rights were cleared for showing on public TV and for educational purposes, and PBS rebroadcast Part 1 in October 2006. Part 2 aired in February of this year.
   Now the NBFF, the longest-running black film festival in the United States, will show the “Promised Land” episode. “We select films that portray the history and culture and life of African-Americans in the diaspora,” says Gloria Buck, the chair of the NBFF and one of the founding members of its selection committee. “We’re very sensitive to the needs of the community and what needs to be commemorated, and this year is the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
   ”Promised Land” spans 1967 and 1968, touching on the rising unrest in black America, including the protests that erupted across the nation in the summer of 1967. Its focus is the success of Dr. King’s nonviolent resistance, including his then-controversial opposition to the war, his “poor people’s campaign,” and his support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis. It also covers both Dr. King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968, which Marian Wright, one of the leaders interviewed in the movie, calls “an extraordinarily difficult year.”
   ”This is a film that probably can’t be shown enough,” says Ms. Buck. “And we’re showing it within a certain context: You’re seeing it in public, together with other people, and there’s commentary before the screening by Dr. Price, who had a very close relationship with Henry Hampton. We also have Dr. Price and other panelists after the screening.”
   Dr. Price will be joined after the screening by former New Jersey Assemblyman William Payne, who was with Dr. King shortly before his death, and Winthrop McGriff, who invited Dr. King to speak in Newark when he was a student there. The panelists, says Ms. Buck, will discuss “the film, Dr. King, and their personal relationships with Dr. King” before taking questions from the audience.
   In one of the talking-heads interviews that stud When We Were Kings, director Spike Lee laments the fact that so many American kids born after Muhammad Ali’s heyday know nothing about the champ. We need to know our history, he says. We need to hear the stories of our real-life heroes.
   And so we can, next week in Newark, Trenton and Asbury Park.
The Newark Black Film Festival will show The Promised Land at The Newark Museum June 25, 7 p.m., at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton June 26, 6 p.m., at Asbury Park High School June 27, 7 p.m., and at the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts — Rutgers University in September. All screenings are free and will be followed by a question and answer session. In Newark, call (973) 596-6550; in Trenton, (609) 292-6464; Asbury Park, (732) 212-1890/Ext 3.