ABSTRACT
Blaxploitation films, action-adventure stories of urban black men in the throes of a personal and communal quest for black liberation, were a staple of urban movie theatres in the 1970s. In them, white audiences witnessed the reality of anti-black police brutality in their own time, making it much more difficult to relegate that kind of white supremacist brutality to a supposedly dead system of enslavement or, at the very least, to “Southern fanatics.” Both Blaxploitation films in the 1970s and New Black Realist films in the 1990s then were not only powerful in their own times but provide contemporary audiences with primary evidence of the continuities and changes of the power the State exerts to oppress black Americans through law enforcement. The early black-directed Blaxploitation films presented proud and unapologetic black men who resisted white supremacy and integration in ways that echoed the politics of black radical movements in this era of Blaxploitation.
