Blaxploitation put Black heroes at the centre of the screen, then split its audience
In the early 1970s a wave of cheap, bold action films finally made Black characters the heroes rather than the sidekicks or victims. Their funk soundtracks and fearless heroines still echo through Tarantino, yet civil rights groups formed a coalition to kill the genre, arguing that pimps and pushers were no kind of liberation.
The genre grew out of the civil rights and Black Power movements in the late 1960s and peaked in the first half of the 1970s. Earlier race films had pushed Black people into the background or into stock roles; now Black neighbourhoods were the setting and Black protagonists drove the story, usually beating The Man, the stand-in for white authority. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was among the first to carry Black Power ideas and let Black actors star in their own narratives, and Shaft took Black political and social concerns to a wider public.
The films were made for urban Black audiences, but they were cheap and profitable, so big studios soon produced them for mainstream viewers too. Subgenres multiplied: crime in Foxy Brown, horror in Blacula, comedy in Uptown Saturday Night, coming of age in Cooley High. Following Sweetback, many scores leaned on heavy bass, wah-wah guitar, flutes and violins, far more intricate than the funk on 1970s radio.
Women mattered too. Pam Grier, starring in Coffy, and Gloria Hendry, in Black Belt Jones, were early female action leads, paving the way for films such as Kill Bill and Set It Off. Yet critics saw Super Fly and The Mack as treating pimps as typical Black men and whole communities as drug dens, and the NAACP complained that studios profited from neighbourhoods that never saw the money. Together with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Urban League it formed the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, which helped end the cycle by the late 1970s.
The style never quite left. Spike Lee, John Singleton and the Hughes brothers borrowed its elements around 1990 while criticising its glamour, and Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Django Unchained pay open homage.
Source: Blaxploitation
