Counter-Currents
1,457 words
1970’s Halls of Anger is low-budget, tense, sensational, but real. Calvin Lockhart plays Quincy Davis, an ex-basketball star who’s happy teaching in a suburban high school until integration comes and he’s reassigned to a ghetto school, as are several white students. The principal, Boyd Wilkerson (John McLiam), couldn’t care less about his students; he wants more federal money (from integration) and a chance to get elected to the school board. The bussed white students are harassed and disliked by blacks. Although the black kids have recently flooded the city, it is now “their school,” and whitey isn’t welcome. The whites segregate themselves at one table in the cafeteria that the blacks call “Rhodesia.”
Quincy is conflicted. He misses white schools, where there is an appreciation for literature and order, and he doesn’t have to keep disciplining kids or ignoring remarks that he’s a Tom or an Oreo. With white people, he is safe, and has a kind of power over them as a magic Negro. He doesn’t particularly like it; he just wants to be accepted as an equal. The black kids cut him no slack. They’re confrontational, rowdy, and talk back to him.
In the literature class, Quincy assigns Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables. The black kids can barely read and have no interest in it. One white kid, Doug (Jeff Bridges in his screen debut), easily reads a whole paragraph, a revealing moment over the stupidity of the blacks (although I can sympathize; Seven Gables, like much of Hawthorne, is like reading concrete). Bridges is later cornered and beaten by a gang for this. The official reason was that he was “looking at our sisters.”
Leaky, another white student — played by a young Bob Reiner before he went on to All in the Family — gets the stare from the bruddahs when he looks at a black girl.
Quincy also has an involvement with Lorraine Nash (Janet MacLachlan), one of the black teachers who keeps trying to get him to identify more with “his people.” Quincy finally gets a few black kids interested in high literature by reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover — soft porn thus packs the already-crowded remedial reading section.
Interesting, too, is a mural the kids make of black heroes. It’s noteworthy one of their main “heroes” is John Brown for trying to organize a slave revolt. Being white, he is of course not on the list anymore, although Brown seemed more effective than most black rebels at the time (See my review of Santa Fe Trail).
You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.
When the black kids riot and trash the school, the mural is destroyed. When the school is wrecked, Wilkerson is less inclined to call the police because he wants to get something out of this for his rise to power. He’s a good study of what the education bureaucracy was doing to schools then.
Quincy sees the white kids surrounded by a mob, and Doug takes another savage beating. Funny how Quincy, for all his even-handedness, won’t protect Doug, nor will Lorraine. It’s a subtle, probably unintended part of the script that white students are simply at the mercy of blacks. Quincy’s conflicts and moral concern never translate to regulating his own “people.” The cops come to the rescue, and Quincy finally takes sides. . . with the black students against the principal, calming cries of black power as he urges the kids to go back in and “beat the man by getting an education.” It’s not very convincing, but Quincy casts his lot with the black kids. He is now their reluctant leader.
But the brutalization of white kids is an itch that can’t be scratched. The movie’s depiction of white kids bullied and harassed showed a reality many of us knew all too well. The white kids with their good grades and manners are just not acceptable. Black violence against whites wasn’t confronted by filmmakers then or now, and Halls of Anger deserves marks for this, even though the film shows things from Quincy’s point of view.
Halls also touches on a problem not often mentioned: black students who try to excel are harassed and bullied by their fellows for acting too white. There is, deep down, a dislike and incomprehension of higher education by a large percentage of blacks. Things have to be dumbed down to them. In 1970, this was simply not spoken of by the system. Halls of Anger showing hints of this was liberal heresy.
I remember reading a LIFE magazine story at the time the film was being made, and it mentioned a lot of on-set tension. The film crew was white, and they called Lockhart “Super-nigger” because of his attitude and continual tardiness on the set, never a likable thing in the theater world. There were also concerns when they shot a scene of a white actress being attacked by black girls. Everyone was worried about its shock value, especially since the black actresses claimed they had to “control” their presumably justifiable anger. Not a word about any opinions of the white actress. It was black, black, black.
The actual scene is very brief, and was probably cut so as not to gain too much sympathy for whites. Again, for all the realistic depiction of black attitudes, the film won’t come out and side with the whites.
Of course, there are unmentionables in the film. No black guy ever looks or comes on to white girls, and the movie’s depiction of the white kids being brutalized isn’t really interested in their suffering. It’s all about Quincy and saving the black kids.
When I went to high school at this time (one black student out of 500), I heard what was happening, and a student transferring from Saint Louis city schools gave a lot of gory details, but back then, it was all Room 222, where everyone was pleasantly integrated and every black teacher a Sidney Poitier.
Watching Halls of Anger, I’m reminded of when, in 1970, all our racial problems were solely black and white. No other muds were on the scene, and the movie, shot in LA, would now be overrun with Hispanics and a brace of other minorities, now usually squeezing out the blacks. A hint of the future was in the film Up the Down Staircase, where a New York City high school had an equal mix of whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans, and probably shortly after 1967, when it was filmed, the school went all black or PR.
But for all the sensationalism, Halls of Anger at least realistically depicts being white in a minority world. Such views were and still are prohibited in the media. For once, you get a real view of race.
A big change between then and now is that in Halls of Anger there is an agreement that black kids should get an education, and the school is there to provide one. Nowadays, schools are little more than holding cells. Teacher’s unions seem dedicated to stifling any sort of real learning, and almost encourage the opposite. I recall one Chicago teachers’ strike many years ago, where one angry black female teacher defiantly held up a placard reading “I teaches English.”
Halls of Anger was criticized for being too “sensational.” I think this means it gave away the game of black behavior when America still assumed it was Martin Luther King time, and little black children going to integrated schools with the stern but kindly US Marshals or federal troops protecting them was the rosy future of racial integration. In effect, this movie was a gaffe. As Boston reporter Howie Carr put it, a gaffe is inadvertently telling the truth. Halls of Anger is a gaffe, all right. The truth of the death of public schools is now all around us, and much of the cause was integration, which the system will defend to the death.
Nowadays, with open hatred of whites more or less government policy, a film like this is an example of how when “we” whites had all the power, we simply gave it away in hopes of being “fair.” But fairness then, as now, only leads to anger against us — anger not only confined to the halls, but everywhere.
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8 comments
Never saw the movie, and was fortunate not to attend a majority black school. However, my transition from an all White elementary school to a racially mixed middle school was still an education. Not enough to make a race realist of me, unfortunately, but I still learned some important lessons.
I’d like to see a modern version of this movie, perhaps one where the Whites end up being a tiny minority in a high school of Han and Pajeets. There would be no sports teams, the orchestra and AP classes would have a token minority of White students, and all the volunteer parents would be White suburban mothers. Not only would such a movie not be made, but its intended audience would utterly miss its point. Come diversity of any sort, wee have good skooow! Just not good or suitable for civilized White people.
I have seen the way blacks and mexicans treat brand new high schools in LA. Within weeks of opening the graffiti is flourishing and the fences have covers so it looks more like a prison than a school. We were shown Up the Down Staircase in jr high school. There were several buses of black kids in that school and my high school. I had decent relationships with them because I was a star basketball player and they needed me. The school today is nearly all mexican with few blacks or whites. One thing the genius politicians never seem to understand is that local pride in the local school disappears through busing. The same with not owning your home. There is no care for maintenance or appearances since it’s someone elses property. From the sounds of the description of the movie it really was a good prediction of what we see today on steroids.
Every time I read about “integration” in public schools and diversity in high institutions, I just wonder about it all. Don’t they notice that whites have not been moving en masse into Mexico, sub-Sahara Africa, Israel, India, or China and crowding out their institutions over there?
I saw a meme once–I forgot where–and it was a cartoon image of a group of whites huddled in a circle, backs against each other and horror on their faces, looking at all the nonwhites surrounding them, kneeling at their (whites’) feet and screaming “We hate you white people! Love us, white people!” It was so pathetic. I wish that could be a mural hung over freeway passes across the country just so nonwhites could see how some of us see them and their demands.
I don’t know where I am going with this comment. Nonwhites generally hate whites, but beg, plead, demand to be near us–always. And to have what we have. And I am talking about the highly functioning ones, too (Jews, East Asians, etc.), not just the blacks roaming our streets and schools.
I have not seen this movie, Halls of Anger. I don’t think I want to!
It’s interesting to compare Halls of Anger to a strange film made 15 years before, Blackboard Jungle. Mostly only remembered as the movie that brought rock and roll to the movies (Bill Haley, 1955) it can also be seen as a warning. Deracinated and atomized kids might not need the alien to go bad.
Apart from being Sidney Poitier’s debut, Blackboard Jungle shows a world where urban schools are dysfunctional already. WWII left some sort of void. Watching the wiggers in this old flick is painful but it’s surprising that race blackmail was already going on. Puerto Ricans and blacks are still minorities in this world.
Seeing Blackboard Jungle now means having to approach it as an archaeologic document. It’s the only way to overlook the fact the movie is as archaic as Homer. An odd memento of the Postwar period for once not candy coated.
Blackboard Jungle 1955: https://ok.ru/video/800597346818
I saw the movie and read the Life Magazine article. The movie itself was an exercise in Jewish liberal piety running smack into race realism. The actors and actresses were at each other’s throats over race and the script. Lockhart thought he was a big star and deserved to be treated like Frank Sinatra. Ta-Tanisha, one of the younger black actresses, was agitating all the time.
If I remember correctly this production owed a lot to Budd Schulberg, script-writer for On the Waterfront, the great Marlon Brando film from the 1950s. Schulberg was so distressed by the Watts Riots that he set up a film workshop in LA to train and mentor black talent. This movie was the first big professional effort arising from the workshop.
Naturally, that magnanimity to blacks just made them demand more. The riotous conditions on the set which helped undermine the film — it was a flop — was the all-too- foreseeable result. The director, TV veteran Paul Bogart, almost walked off and the script required numerous re-writes.
If “Paved With Good Intentions” wasn’t already taken, that would have made an excellent title for the Life Magazine article about this fiasco.
My parents were part of the generation forced bussed to negro schools. My mother was picked on by blacks daily. She was intimidated to give up her lunch money and they wanted her to fight them. My grandparents smartened up and moved across the river from this state back over to their home state. The neighborhood they once lived in is now of course a crime infested ghetto. My father was forced bussed to a black school also. The first day there he climbed out the classroom window, shimmied down to sidewalk and never went back. That’s a true story.
The thing I remember the most about The Blackboard Jungle was the scene where the teacher, wanting to share his love of jazz, brought his records to class, played them, and the toughs grabbed the records and broke them. The man almost broke down in tears. It was a defiance to the old order; rock n roll, baby. Rock around the clock, indeed.
Also, jazz is kind of the official music of the liberal establishment, to show how COOL and how TOLERANT they are. This was an early example of in your face rebellion. Yet, didn’t the Jews build up rock n roll?
Reminds me when I was in the army in Germany, official NATO events liked to use big band music, because it recalled the 1940’s and American supremacy. It was also the go-to music of U.S. military bands, still wanting to relive D-Day and Ike.
Back then, the rebellion was called juvenile delinquency. It almost sounds quaint, now.
You know, Freesmith, I note how the Jews always manage to be on both sides. They make pious movies, but also promote militant behavior. They want ‘responsible’ leaders in civil rights, but also publicize the radicals and make sure they call the shots, like the head of the NAACP was always a Jew until very recently. The blacks simply copycat what the Jews do.
“The blacks simply copycat what the Jews do.”
Within their considerable limits, Mr. Clark. However, they do finally seem to have gotten the old “Eternal Victim” schtick down pretty well now.
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