Melvin Van Peebles, James Brown, Frank Yerby, and Some Observations about the Black 1968

This chapter is an examination of a single work by three seminal Black American artists released in 1968. American expatriate filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles's The Story of a Three-Day Pass was a dramedy, shot in 1967 but premiered in France in 1968, about a Black American soldier on leave in Paris having a weekend affair with a white Frenchwoman and how his white commanding officer punishes him for it. R & B singer James Brown's hit song, “Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud),” was recorded in the late summer of 1968 that was both an expression of Black pride and a protest song, meant as a “correction” for his earlier song of that year, “America Is My Home.” And expatriate novelist Frank Yerby's novel, Speak Now, tells the story of a Black jazz musician and ex–Vietnam War vet, now an expatriate in Paris, who has a love affair with a white southern woman, set against the backdrop of the student riots. Yerby and Brown, both from Augusta, Georgia, were successful commercial artists in different ways: Yerby's many historical romances, which featured white characters, had a large white audience; Brown, on the other hand, despite having some crossover appeal, made highly ethnicized dance music that appealed mostly to Blacks. “Say It Loud” and Speak Now each addressed a Black audience in a racially and politically explicit manner that was a direct response of the turmoil of 1968. Van Peebles, who would go on to make one of the most important Black films of the 20th century with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971, broke new ground, not only in presenting on-screen interracial sex but also in both dramatizing and lampooning the tyranny of institutional racism. The works, taken together, were meant to be a signal that the late 1960s required Black art that was a clear break from the past.