The movie Dead Presidents sits pretty high on my Top Ten favorite movie list. This movie touched on some very important subjects like….
Blacks being drafted to fight in Vietnam
The Black experience in Vietnam
Blacks coming home from Vietnam mentally scarred and addicted to drugs
Blacks struggling to make a living after serving in Vietnam
The deterioration of the Black Community (Gentrification)
Dysfunctional Black Families
The Black Panther Movement
Shady Pastors
Toxic relationships
The impact drugs had in the Black Community
Black on Black Crime
Friendships
Trust
All of this (and more) plus a kick ass soundtrack! Remember when Anthony (Larenz Tate) was in the pool hall after coming home from serving in Vietnam and Cowboy (Terrence Howard) was talkin’ that shit….then all of a sudden The Big Payback by James Brown came on….man!
Dead Presidents was released in 1995, the same year that Youngstown had 68 homicides (a record high for the city), and the year I was going through and dealing with more than half of the stuff in the script.
After watching the movie fifty-leven times, I came to the conclusion that I needed to get thee fuck up out of Youngstown if I wanted to continue breathing. It’s like I saw my life playing out through the main character, so I bounced in 96’.
The biggest takeaway that I have from this movie is how one’s mental health can deteriorate ever so quickly in the Black Community, especially when there’s a lack of family understanding and support.
One would think that after all Blacks have been through, there would be all kinds of mental health resources within the Black Community. Nope. We ain’t even got Black mental health therapists and counselors in the hood.
In the hood, there are two prescriptions for everything: Prayer and Ginger Ale. If neither of these two remedies don’t make you feel better, you’re screwed.
This is where I’d love to go into a rant about other injustices within the Black Community, but I shan't. I’ll stay focused on the movie and close this out by saying that life and movies have one key thing in common; they don’t always have a happy ending.
Dead Presidents doesn’t have a happy ending, but it does give a lot of insight as to the extremes that our Black brothers and sisters will go through just to be happy and take care of our families. We all can learn a lot from this movie, I know I did.
The End.
This has been a #TeamWoods moment in Black History.
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