Review and Commentary from
Frederick B. Hudson

AGBM is proud to present distinguished author, poet, screenwriter and educator Frederick B. Hudson. Mr. Hudson shares his film and book reviews as well as political commentary in his regular AGBM feature, The World In Review. Click the links below to see the complete submissions.

Irene Nassambra had given up. Although she came to the United States in 1999 looking for opportunity her health had steadily failed. She was born with the sickle cell disease but had no symptomatic problems with it in her native Uganda. [more]

The young man was stuck. Stuck in time. Stuck behind bars. Stuck behind promise and punishment. Stone and steel surrounded him. He had tested at the genius level on IQ tests in the third grade. But he was in prison-scrounging cigarette butts from the floor to make a feeble attempt to have something to smoke. [more]

Harlem Little Leaguers Take the World's Center Field
The Little League player smacked a home run that placed his team ahead. As he rounded the bases he waved his hands in celebration, as he passed third he did a little dance. As he got closer to home plate, he straddled the baseline in as he approached the bag. One columnist in the player's home town of New York City questioned: "Was this a baseball game or "Soul Train?"[more]

A Cornerback Throws Jim Crow Out of Bounds
In professional football, a cornerback is one of two defensive halfbacks placed behind the linebackers and near the sidelines. His role is to stop the opposing team's ball carriers by any legal means necessary.[more]

The Healer Comes -- Let Us Summon Each Other
A junior high school boy poured over the copies of National Geographic. Not fixed just on the bare-breasted women in native climes, he reflected on the relationship with their environment that marked their lifestyle-they grew and harvested their food, they built their homes, and most importantly, they cured their sick.[more]

A Healing Jury: Paul Butler Courts Olympus
In the midst of panic and death, the businessman strode through a ten foot wide tunnel. Twenty-one persons had already died from the natural gas fumes that choked bystanders. But the businessman had a defense-a safety helmet of his own invention. He handed out models of his helmet to his brother and several firemen. The helmeted crew was able to save six unconscious people.[more]

Fresh Air In The Tunnel: Garrett Morgan's Path
In the midst of panic and death, the businessman strode through a ten foot wide tunnel. Twenty-one persons had already died from the natural gas fumes that choked bystanders. But the businessman had a defense-a safety helmet of his own invention. He handed out models of his helmet to his brother and several firemen. The helmeted crew was able to save six unconscious people.[more]

A Long Dignity Runner
The headstrong, athletically gifted junior high school student in Harlem didn't care much for reading. But when he looked up at the movie screen one day he found a role model. A man wearing green tights. Not Green Lantern. Robin Hood. [more]

Nonviolent Africa-One Man's Quest
A white Columbia University graduate student, Matt Mayer, announces his plans to resist President Jimmy Carter's new Selective Service registration program in 1980. After significant media attention including an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, he finds himself at a War Resisters International convocation in 1982, hoping to meet resisters from every spot on the globe. [more]

He Colored the Shapes of Struggle
The small boy crawled around the floor of his new apartment in Harlem. Newly arrived from Philadelphia he felt alienated in a neighborhood with few lots to pay in. His sensitive eyes caught and captured the designs of the rugs, curtains, and dollies that furnished their small home. [more]

He Is Our Malcolm
Some three years ago, when I was selling cultural artifacts on the streets of Harlem, a Puerto Rican tattoo artist who had purchased items from me in the past saw my display of photos of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey, Nelson Mandala, Betty Shabazz, and other black heroes and sheroes, the man told me, “If you get a picture of Albizu Campos, I’ll buy it.” [more]

Huey P. Newton Story: A Movie for Our Times
The poignancy of the story is more telling since the man telling the story is himself in a cage and is surrounded by a live audience being filmed for a made for television movie, "A Huey P. Newton Story." The actor, Roger Guenveur Smith, has challenged himself by portraying the former Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party in the tumultuous 60's and 70's. [more]

All Our Sons
A small boy in New York goes out to play. His mother tells him not to leave the park. But he is disobedient—he constantly visits his neighborhood firehouse. Despite constant punishment, he returns over and over to stare at the shiny red fire trucks and coils of hose. He announces to his mother that he is going to be a fireman when he grows up. [more]

An Architect Plans For Peaceful Plains
The poet Kahlil Gibran hoped that the sons and daughters of the universe not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living. The native of Lebanon encouraged them to hope that the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments. [more]

Father and Son Challenge Each Other
To Provide Homes and Heart
The poet Kahlil Gibran hoped that the sons and daughters of the universe not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living. The native of Lebanon encouraged them to hope that the valleys were your streets, and the green paths your alleys, that you might seek one another through vineyards, and come with the fragrance of the earth in your garments. [more]

Ronald Chisom's North Star-- An Organizer Creates Other Organizers
He was told when he finished high school in 1959 that he was not college material but he has trained over 90,000 people all over the world to train others for their transformation. What is his secret? Ronald Chisom says it's accountability. [more]

Harry Sings Homes of Song
"Daylight come and me wan' go home. "   These words were sung all over America in 1957 by people who imitated the calypso-tinged intonations of the singer. But most of the imitators of the Caribbean-inspired crooner did not know what daylight was for the Harlem-born singer whose parents hailed from the islands of Jamaica and Martinique. [more]

An African Tree Branches: Kwame Ture Shares His Roots
The die was cast in 1960. A skilled Trinidadian carpenter, forced by economics to ship out on a freighter, returned to his Bronx home with tales of having seen Africa.He told his young son about seeing the newly elected president of Ghana come forward to introduce his cabinet to the Parliament. The president and all the cabinet members were not wearing the formal clothes of the British colonial rulers, or the regal African robes of their village status. They wore the misshapen prison garb of the imprisonment they had endured for their nation's liberation. [more]

Let's Have Lunch-In the Rain
A few months, a potential client for my video production services drastically disappointed me-no, let's correct that-he left me holding the bag. Literally. The bag contained the props for a fashion advertisement "shoot" scheduled in Central Park. My production partner and I had gone out of our way to give the fashion designer a reduced rate for an advertisement; we were told the designer would have his models, both children and adults, appropriately attired, sitting at a bench by a bend near the rowing pond. [more]

Spinning the Records of History:
The Magnificent Montague Ignites
On a hot August night in 1965, a disc jockey turned on his television set in his luxury apartment in Brentwood, a California suburb made famous during the O.J. Simpson trial. He saw flames leaping from buildings. Oh, a big fire. Then he heard it. A phrase he had uttered in small radio stations from Texas to Louisiana to Chicago and finally to Los Angeles. A phase that he threw into the mix of music and words as he tried to build his audiences' emotion to a crescendo. [more]

Huey P. Newton Story: A Movie for Our Times
The poignancy of the story is more telling since the man telling the story is himself in a cage and is surrounded by a live audience being filmed for a made for television movie, "A Huey P. Newton Story." The actor, Roger Guenveur Smith, has challenged himself by portraying the former Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party in the tumultuous 60's and 70's. Newton and his associates donned black berets and leather jackets, put rifles and shotguns in their hands and shook a nation with a virile posture and program that threatened the docile image of other civil rights organizations. [more]

Send a Stamp for Mankind; Paul Robeson's New Passport
It's too bad we don't have to lick stamps anymore. If our tongues had to be applied to the glue of the back of a U.S. postage stamp which was issued this January 20th, we might be reminded of the attempts of an ungrateful country to silence one of the most profound and dignified voices America has ever produced-Paul Robeson. [more]

A Sharecropper's Son Excavates Africa's Glory
A new exhibit has recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City entitled "Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. From the Mediterranean to the Indus." This exhibit heralds the present Middle East, in the words of a reviewer for The Wall Street Journal as the source of "fragile remnants, many of them more than 4,000 years old,(that)…speak directly to us about what it means to be human." [more]

Moses Stewart Heard A Noble Calling
The Nigerian Nobel-prize winning author Wole Soyinka's play, Death and the King's Horseman, delivers a poignant statement about the elusive bond between fathers and sons. A king's chief assistant is told by a spiritual being that: "it is those who stand at the gateway of the great change to whose cry we must pay heed…as if the timelessness of the ancestor world and the unborn have joined spirits to wring an issue of the elusive being of passage." [more]

Emmett Till's Legacy: A Weighted Body Lifts A People
"I saw a hole-which I presumed was a bullet hole and I could look through that hole and see daylight in the other side and I wondered-"was it necessary to shoot him?" These words begin the courageous and horrific testimony of Mrs. Mamie Till Mosely, the mother of Emmett Till, as she describes the terrible mass of unrecognizable waterlogged, smashed flesh that she viewed in a coffin sent back from the Mississippi Delta in August, 1955. [more]

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