The riot isn't seen in the movie, but it is alluded to. He has this one speech that gives a great sense of texture and paints a picture of what was happening in Harlem then.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Michael Ralph brilliantly plays the street prophet, a West Indian who foreshadows the Harlem riot.
My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.
Harlem is a stage. It's like its own planet, from the way we dress to the swag in the way we walk and talk.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.
It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.
Being in Harlem on the night of Barack Obama's election was extraordinary. It was the best street party I have ever gone to, and it felt like the period of American history which began with slavery had ended that evening.
Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.
I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.