Tuesday, June 15, 2010

James Baldwin in San Francisco-[-Take This Hammer


At the end of April last year, SF State posted James Baldwin's Take
This Hammer online ( https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041 ).

> KQED's film unit follows poet and activist James Baldwin in the spring of 1963, as he's driven around San Francisco to meet with members of the local African-American community. He is escorted by Youth For Service's Executive Director Orville Luster and intent on discovering: "The real situation of negroes in the city, as opposed to the image San Francisco would like to present." He declares: "There is no moral distance ... between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham. Someone's got to tell it like it is. And that's where it's at." Includes frank exchanges with local people on the street, meetings with community leaders and extended point-of-view sequences shot from a moving vehicle, featuring the Bayview and Western Addition neighborhoods. Baldwin reflects on the racial inequality that African-Americans are forced to confront and at one point tries to lift the morale of a young man by expressing his conviction that: "There will be a negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now." The TV Archive would like to thank Darryl Cox for championing the merits of this film and for his determination that it be preserved and remastered for posterity.

A number of people immediately asked for a copy, but there were
copyright issues so downloads were not allowed.

Two weeks ago Alex Cherian, the film archivist, posted the following
note on the page:

"Please contact me directly with requests to access 'Take This Hammer'
on DVD, at acherian@sfsu.edu"

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