10,000 Black Men Named George

This is the type of movie that does exactly what movies are suppose to do and that's keep you watching. Again Robert Townsend pulled off another dramatic work of motion picture art. The cast is splendid and the dialogue geniune. This is a good looking movie that keeps you on pins till the end. Watching Charles Dutton act in this movie is just wonderful. It's real drama.

This film is an excellent way to illustrate to the current generations that the historic struggle for civil rights started long before the 1960's. It is also interwoven with the labor movement of other workers and the treatment by big business. While historic, it may be wise for some to pay attention to the current standing of unions and to the fact that unions really made the middle class of today. The dirty tricks of the Pullman company including the "communist threat" are illustrated as they have been in past movies. The actors in this movie do a great job. Duton and Braugher offer stellar performances as usual. Director Ronert Townsend solidly directs the events .

The concept/subject of this movie is great. We need more films about movements for social justice. The costumes are excellent, and the score is enjoyable. That being said, the acting, script, and directing were terrible. In the lead role, Andre Braugher attempts to deliver a performance of understated dignity but instead comes across as flat and unemotional. On the opposite end of bad acting, Charles Dutton shouts every line to try to convey a "larger than life" character. Some of the lines were laughably bad, and i felt sympathy that the actors had to work with that material. I *really* wanted to like this movie, and i guess it's something that I stuck with it to the bitter end. Perhaps worth enduring for its subject matter, but good luck.

This movie is a little choppy, but you try fitting 20 years of turbulent history into a two hour movie. If you don't know about other things happenning during the same period (the Great Depression, for example) the allusions to its effects on the primary storyline are hard to follow. I'd like to see this done as a mini-series, with about ten hours or so to tell the story in full.

Still, if you think that the civil rights movement began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, you will find this movie fascinating. The drive to organize the African-American porters combines civil rights and workers' rights with historical perspectives on the late 1920's and 1930's.

One thing that struck me about this movie is the presence of benevolent White characters. In many African-American rights movies, all Whites are either evil or ineffectual morons. (Think the White assistant principal in Lean on Me). There are many White racists in the role of antagonists in this movie, but there is also the White rep for the AFL, who works to support the growing union.

I only knew the name A. Philip Randolph consequentially. As I've read books about Black historical figures and Black history I've come across Randolph's name, but he's always been a tangential figure, almost a footnote. So, to see a movie dedicated to his work is very refreshing.

In the movie "10,000 Black Men Named George," Randolph is played by Andre Braugher who also helped produce the movie. It begins in 1925 with him being forced to step away from trying to unionize Black hotel workers. You have to understand how bitterly businesses hated unions back then. If forming a union was hard for whites, then it was life threatening for Blacks.

Still, as the movie tells it, A. Philip Randolph was approached by a Pullman Porter named Ashley Totten (Mario Van Peebles) about unionizing. The Pullman Sleeping Car workers were almost all Black men disrespectfully and eponymously named George after George Pullman. They were porters on various passenger train routes throughout the country that used sleeping cars made by George Pullman. They dressed sharply and were respected in their communities, yet at work they were no more than butlers on trains who were subjected to all kinds of degradation. Unionizing the Pullman Porters was going to be a gargantuan task.

"10,000 Men" took us through that fight. We didn't get to see every detail of the battle, but we got a high-level understanding of what the Pullman Porters were up against. As expected, "10,000 Men" will make you angry, but this is a story of triumph and a small tribute to Randolph as well as the many other men who banded together against a tyrannical big business.