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Monday, March 1, 2010

Paved the Path: ...Mars Blackmon style

“I ain't Martin Luther King. I don't need a dream. I have a plan.” - Spike Lee

From sneaker culture to racism, self hatred to the black experience in America, Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee has done it all and captured it all on film. He made influential movies such as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, the former in which the American Film Institute heralded as one of the 100 greatest movies of all time. The man has been nominated for numerous Academy Awards, and has even won an Emmy. But, regardless of his accomplishments Spike’s true gift is how he displays and portrays the African-American plight through a camera lens. He taught us what it truly means to be black in this country, and that even though we might have a “strike” against us from birth. And that the only real excuse for us not making it in this world is the one manifest as a result of our own fear and incompetence. Not having a steady father figure in my life has left a void, but watching Lee’s films helped at least filling a part of that emptiness, in raising this Africa- American young man.

“Our greatness, our talent has never been the question. It's been a matter of grappling for control over what we do.” - Spike Lee







-Hudini The Magic Man aka Teen Gohan

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