I Am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, 1970) + two others

A truly stunning document, Madeline Anderson's I Am Somebody is a complicated film to watch right now, but also absolutely necessary. A close-up record of a 1969 strike by workers at Charleston, South Carolina's Medical College Hospital, the film makes it achingly apparent that, fifty years later, we are still fighting many of the same battles, and the cops are still the same SOBs they ever were. (As a matter of fact, most of these Southern cops show much more restraint in rounding up and arresting the Black strikers than what we are seeing the police doing to Black folks today. There is some violence early on in Anderson's film, but mostly the protest-arrest-release cycle is shown to be rather orderly and professional.)

The hospital workers of Local 1198 were 400-strong, all Black, and all but seven were women. They were doing the same work as their white colleagues but getting paid less than half, and as these women explain, they were subject to all manner of racist abuse on the job. Jowly white administrators and a good ol' boy governor all dismiss these women, but after 100+ days of striking, and assistance from civil rights leaders such as Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Coretta Scott King, their every demand was finally met.

Anderson combines cinéma vérité techniques with personal, essayistic reflections about her own role as a protester and documenter. This is an interesting approach for a filmmaker who studied with Richard Leacock and worked at one time with Albert Maysles. I Am Somebody seems to suggest that the tools of Direct Cinema can only get you so far, and that eventually a filmmaker or artist will have to take stock of her own position vis-a-vis the events in question.

We can see Anderson's earlier, less reflexive style in two of her previous works, both of which are just as political as I Am Somebody, if less obviously feminist. Her 1960 film Integration Report 1 has the feel of a somber newsreel, moving across the nation to various hotspots in the struggle for civil rights. We see lunchcounter protests in Alabama, a battle over school integration / bussing in Brooklyn, and eventually a protest gathering in Washington, DC, addressed by Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and others. Its editing is concise but drives hope the point that Black people's struggle for basic human recognition is not merely a Southern problem. 

Later, in 1967, Anderson made a short film marking the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Malcom X. Made for William Greaves' Black Journal TV program, A Tribute to Malcolm X is primarily noteworthy for its inclusion of a rare interview with Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow. But the collection of vintage Malcolm footage is remarkable in itself. Anderson's selection of clips in no way blunts the righteous anger of Malcolm's rhetoric, but seeing the man himself, one is struck by just how professorial he was. By abjuring the cadences of traditional African-American Christian rhetoric, so familiar from the pulpit, Malcolm seems to have been perceived by many (especially whites, of course) as "scary" when he was just debating as a learned man. We still have so far to go.