Class Lives

 “One Night in Miami,” 2020 film by Regina King

This film is based on the stage play by Kemp Powers written in 2013.  It fictionally depicts what happened mostly inside a motel room in Miami on the historic night when Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title.  The date is February 25, 1964.  In the audience was Malcolm X, taking pictures and cheering Clay on and Jim Brown, working as a boxing analyst of all things.  Coming from the Fontainebleau Hotel nearby was Sam Cooke, who had worked on a new song and was watching too.  The four of them all actually met later at a low-end motel, the Hampton House, in the Brownsville area of Miami where Malcolm X was staying. 

Victory Party?

This film/play is sort of the “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf” of black leadership, as its centerpiece is a raw hard argument between Sam Cooke and Malcolm.  All we needed was James Baldwin and MLK in the room too. As imagined, the text is based on what each ‘might’ have said given their public personas – a political, religious and cultural clash of ideas, not actual people.

PARTY DOWNER

As you might expect in the film, Malcolm comes off the worst.  He’s a bad ‘party’ host who invited no one else, has no booze, no women, not even any music on the stereo – just some vanilla ice cream and two Fruit of Islam (FOI) guards outside.  He starts a long, ferocious argument with Cooke for being a pampered sell-out.  This in front of Clay, who is thinking of joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), and Brown, who is starting a career in acting.  Quite a bummer of a victory party for Clay, whose ferocious energy is taken up jumping on beds. 

Hiding behind all this for Malcolm emotionally are the FBI tails outside, his distant children, fearful wife and the imminent split with Elijah Muhammad.  

Cooke defends himself by saying how his music company is promoting black musicians, getting writers royalties and owning the masters.  He says that black people too have a right to success.  This is the classic black entrepreneurial claim.  Malcolm accuses him of writing pap (Cooke wrote all of his own hits, including Chain Gang).  Malcolm plays Dylan’s Times They Are a Changin’ as a great example instead, though Malcolm being a Dylan fan is hard to buy. (The song was actually played to Cooke earlier by his partner.) Cooke himself had already written A Change is Gonna Come before this argument, so he could have easily deflected Malcolm.  Brown tries to hide his role in a movie from Malcolm, which he was paid well for, while not being as physically damaging as football.  At the end Malcolm improbably tells the group, in whispers, that he will be leaving the Nation.  Malcolm hopes Clay will leave with him in the new organization.  Clay explodes and they have to hold him back, as he feels he’s been used by Malcolm.

THE CLASS BONES

That is the bare bones.  What is really at issue here is a line Clay has in a car while he and Cooke escape the dismal room to buy booze.  Clay says that the 4 of them have to stick together because no one else will understand:  They are - “You know:  young, black, righteous, famous, unapologetic.”  This is the nut of the issue here.  Every single politically-aware middle and upper-class African American has wrestled with the class question, which is what this is.  As did the playwright and the director probably.  Malcolm always styled himself a ‘field Negro” and he was the brokest of this bunch.  At one point in the text, Malcolm makes a comment about ‘boushie Negroes.”  Brown points out Malcolm might be feeling guilty about being a ‘high yellow’ – an identity politics observation that might reflect a more modern sensibility.  The opening scenes show that even these stars have problems with white people.  While still subject to bigotry, they nevertheless have risen above the majority of African Americans and they know it, and so does Malcolm.

What Cooke might have said to defend himself is that the NOI is also based on creating black businesses and self-reliance - but he doesn’t.  The NOI owned bakeries, printing plants, farms, retail stores, groceries, etc. - all propping up the lifestyles of the top leadership in Chicago.  Cooke hints at this.  Malcolm knew the rot in the NOI on the ideological and personal side, but ignores the economic side.  (Now under Farrakhan, they have joined with the Church of Scientology cult.)

You can see here that some of the writing is intended to exaggerate their differences or hide certain issues

Nice 'black' neighborhood in Atlanta

This is another version of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual posed by Harold Cruse in 1967 or the arguments W.E.B. Dubois had with Booker T. Washington much earlier. It is apparent that there is now a layer of middle-class ‘black’ people who have political, intellectual and economic power, mostly due to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  This is Dubois' 'talented tenth.'  The majority of their political representatives are a shabby lot that have thrown in with the (white) ruling class.  They run cities full of poverty.  They run police departments that are killing people.  They oversee businesses that are just another capitalist concern. They fill the pathetic 'Black Caucus" in the Congress.  They buttress systemic racism while nibbling around the edges.  Black Agenda Report calls them ‘the black mis-leadership class.’  Others hawk liberal or crappy culture or join the Republican Party and become even more reactionary.  They are, in a word, pretty comfortable in the system as it is.

This is what Malcolm was getting at, though none of those here could change their circumstances.  Malcolm was dead more than a year later from an assassination plot hatched by the FOI in the Newark Temple – aided by the NY police and the FBI.  Cooke died about a year later, shot in a shabby motel in Los Angeles, though there were a number of people who wanted him dead – his soon-to-be ex-wife, his manager and various racists.  At his wake it was observed by Etta James that his head was nearly severed from his neck, his nose smashed and his hands crushed – due to a single gunshot?  Clay declared himself a Black Muslim and changed his name the next day, but his fighting career led to severe brain damage at 29.  Only Brown survived relatively unscathed, getting out of football in time and becoming a full-time actor.  Brown is portrayed as the most level-headed of the bunch in that room.  He's not being separated from his mother's pork and sex for the rigidity of the Nation. And he knew something was troubling Malcolm X, so his emotional intel was better than the rest. 

Like the Good Lord Bird, this film reflects the conflicted feelings of black artists and professionals when confronted by hostility to the whole system they are succeeding in.  No amount of films or books can fix that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Who Killed Malcolm X?; Malcolm X – A Life of Reinvention (Marable); I am Not Your Negro (Baldwin); Da 5 Bloods (Lee); The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois); The Good Lord Bird; The Plot to Kill King and Orders to Kill (Pepper); Selma. 

The Cultural Marxist

January 19, 2021