Black Presidents Not New to Hollywood

"The Man"
When the President and Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse, and the Vice-President declines the office due to age and ill-health, Senate President pro tempore Douglas Dilman (James Earl Jones) suddenly becomes the first brother in the Oval Office. The events from that day to the next election when he must decide if he will actually run challenge his skills as a politician and leader.

"24" (Seasons 2 and 3)
President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) had his work cut out for him, working with Jack Bauer to save Los Angeles from the threat of terrorist thugs, dealing with traitors, knocking heads with his shady ex-wife Sherry Palmer (played brilliantly by Penny Johnson Jerald) and dodging attempts on his life.

"24" (Season 6)
David Palmer's death paves the way for his younger brother Wayne (D.B. Woodside) to move into the Oval office. He helps free Jack Bauer from the Chinese government, fakes a nuclear bombing, is severly injured by an explosion at a press conference, and ends up in a coma by the season's end.

"The Fifth Element"
250 years in the future, ex-soldier, cab driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) works to save the planet from extinction with the help of Ruby Rhod (a whacky role played by Chris Tucker). Dallas saves the world, but only because President Lindberg (Tommy 'Tiny' Lister) said so.

"Deep Impact"
A comet is set to collide with planet Earth, and President Beck (Morgan Freeman) has devised a plan to save a million lucky people to keep the human race going.

"Head of State"
Mays Gilliam (Chris Rock) gets his party’s nomination for presidency. But after speaking his mind about society’s ills (as well as hiring a Klan member to endorse his White opponent).

"2012"
Coming in July 2009, Danny Glover will play preisdent Glover in a fight to counteract the apocalyptic events that were predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar.

Idiocracy”
Terry Crews plays President Camacho. Imagine President Obama with that hair.


Hollywood, despite all its stereotypical crap, has often been ahead of the national curve and was ready for a Black president long before America was. On television and in movies, Black actors such as acclaimed as James Earl Jones to the other end of the spectrum as Tommy Lister have played commanders-in-chief. Sammy Davis Jr. was only 9 when he assumed the POTUS in 1933’s "Rufus Jones for President."

A Black man in the Oval Office has provided ample joke routines for comics such as Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. On one episode of "The Richard Pryor Show," he played a president hosting a press conference. During the sketch, he tells reporters that he'd seriously consider Black Panther Huey Newton for the job of FBI director -- and nearly decks one journalist who inadvertently insults his momma. And when he's asked about his fetish for white women, he jokes, "They don't call it the White House for nothing."

In the 2003 film "Head of State," Chris Rock's president, Mays Gilliam, is an even more exaggerated character. His language is filled with slang and he is partial to baggy jeans and Kangol caps and looks less like the leader of the free world than the latest star of Def Jam Records. His running mate, played by Bernie Mac, thinks NATO is a person. Gilliam is catapulted onto the public stage after the sitting president dies in a plane crash.

It is not the first time a Black man on screen has risen to power through calamity. In "The Man," James Earl Jones becomes the POTUS after the entire cabinet perishes in a series of freak accidents. It's not on DVD, but if you can find it on VHS it is well worth the search. In "Deep Impact," Morgan Freeman has to calm the nation as he contends with wayward comets threatening to destroy the planet. Morgan Freeman looks and sounds conventionally presidential in the way that only a Visa pitchman can. And in "The Fifth Element," set in 2263, Tommy “Tiny” Lister's President Lindberg has to battle asteroids and an enemy named The Great Evil. Lister—a 300-pounder best known for playing a larcenous thug in Friday—Lindberg is not a suitable role model. Too "angry." Too "hostile." Too much "bestial grunting." That said, his menacing glare somehow suggests he'd stand firm against lobbyists.

It's not until the hit series "24" that things start looking up for the Black president. Dennis Haysbert's character, David Palmer -- in the first season a senator running for the presidency -- is handsome, composed and ready to lead on Day One. We were in good hands with David Palmer who radiated dependability. His race is a non-issue as he struggles with modern-day threats such as terrorism, bomb scares and a social-climbing wife. Yes, he's eventually assassinated, but only after he leaves office. And Palmer's equally self-confident younger brother, Wayne, takes the reins shortly thereafter. Another “24” alumni Roger Cross, who played Agent Curtis Manning from 2005-2007, was the President in a Sci-fi Channel made for TV movie, “Polar Storm”, this past weekend which started me thinking about this post.

Emory Douglas: Artist for The Black Panthers

In January 1967, the organizers of San Francisco's first annual Malcolm X Grassroots Memorial tapped Emory Douglas, a 22-year-old graphic arts student, to create the poster and flyers for the Hunter's Point event. There was a group coming over from Oakland to provide security for Betty Shabazz (Malcolm X's widow). When the group arrived, it included Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

Douglas was a member of City College's Black Student Union who was designing props and sets for playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). He had heard rumors about Seale and Newton. The two friends from Merritt College had, just three months before, co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. They liked Emory’s work and invited him to be a part of what they were doing. He was soon named the party's minister of culture, a position he filled until the Black Panther newspaper ceased publication in 1979. Art directing every issue, he created a visual history of the party's ideology and agenda, designing hundreds of provocative original illustrations, photo collages and political posters, more than 200 of which are reproduced in the recently released Rizzoli book "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas."

The Black Panther Party was a controversial offshoot of the civil rights and Black nationalist movements. Douglas' involvement with the party began one April evening 40 years ago, when he paid his first visit to Eldridge Cleaver's apartment, the so-called Black House. Douglas found Seale working on the inaugural, typewritten and mimeographed issue of the Black Panther. Douglas offered his commercial typography and illustration skills (first acquired in a Chino prison print shop as a teen sentenced to juvenile detention for burglary) to make the weekly paper look as potent and persuasive as its message.

Douglas says that "since the Black community at that time weren't by and large readers," he "created an 'everyperson' look everyone could connect with." In effect, he branded the militant-chic Panther image decades before the concept became commonplace. He used the newspaper's popularity (circulation neared 400,000 at its peak in 1970) to incite the disenfranchised to action, portraying the poor with genuine empathy, not as victims but as outraged, unapologetic and ready for a fight.

Douglas' art echoes expressionist elements of the Black artists he admires, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. His style -- drawing with thick black outlines and creating woodcut textures -- is similar to the Chicano poster art of the '60s and '70s. The images are full of anger and biting humor. Quiet and with an easy sense of humor, Douglas exudes a surprising calm.

"Emory's pictures are actually a lot less terrifying than the news photos of the day," says Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge Cleaver's ex-wife) formerly the Panthers' communications secretary and now a senior lecturer at Emory University Law School. "It's amazing that he was able to maintain his gentle artistic being through those risky, extreme times. Cities were on fire, people were being arrested by the droves and police brutality was the order of the day."

As the Panthers' agenda broadened to include social programs, Douglas' posters illustrated the impact of the party's community outreach: free breakfast programs for children, grocery giveaways, health clinics and sickle-cell anemia testing. "A lot of people would say they could look at the artwork in the paper and see in which direction the party was headed," Douglas says. He modestly admits that "some people did start buying the paper specifically for the art."

Emory Douglas lives in San Francisco's Excelsior district with his blind mother, and has continued to work as a graphic artist since the Black Panther Party's collapse in 1980. After a brief stint designing ads for Safeway ("That was definitely not my thing," he says), Douglas has been an illustrator and prepress manager for the Bayview/Hunter's Point Sun-Reporter newspaper since 1984. He is currently working on a "children's artwork series called 'Health is Wealth,' a dialogue between two kids about HIV/AIDS."